I know it's been mentioned before, but the leechblock extension for firefox is pretty good for that kind of thing:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476

It lets you specify rules for different groups of sites. I have HN in a group of sites which I can view for 15 minutes every 2 hours. You can add time windows to that, so you can set up things like "15 minutes every 2 hours between 9-5" or "blocked between 9-5, otherwise 15 minutes every 2 hours".

If you're like me notice that every now and then you change your settings to give yourself "just another 5 minutes", there's also the option to have leechblock make you type a 64 character randomly generated string before you can use the settings. That's enough to remind me that I was meant to be doing other things.

The downside is that every now and then it'll kick in while I'm typing something on a webpage and the comment will be lost (like with v1 of this comment for instance). If there's a way to stop that from happening then it's pretty much ideal for what I want.

Yeah, undop is pretty half-assed, compared to leechblock. If you don't want to be looking at a site, why not block it all together? Simply dimming the screen sounds pretty ineffective. If you want to set up some sort of aversion therapy, tell leechblock to use goatse.cx as its block page. :-)

(If you haven't seen goatse.cx, don't.)

I actually tried a similar thing but as an alarm clock. Gradually increase the display brightness to full in the morning and then sound the alarm.

Never finished it, got distracted by HN

http://embraceware.com/awaken/ can do that for mac os

That looks awesome

Interesting idea. I use WebKit nightlies, so I modified it to let you pass in the browser name as the first argument:

http://github.com/tlrobinson/Undop/commit/66fe4492b701c33a72...

How do I go about compiling stuff like this? I'm an application newbie: Anything that doesn't launch on doubleclick confuses me. This is the first thing I've seen that seems worth learning the process for.

0. Install Xcode

1. Open Terminal.app

2. Enter "cd path" where "path" is the directory undop.m is located in (you can drag the directory from the Finder onto the Terminal window and it will fill it in)

3. Enter the command mentioned in the README:

    gcc -framework IOKit -framework Cocoa -framework Carbon undop.m -o undop

4. Create the text file ".bad_sites" in your home directory ("~") containing the list of bad sites (note that the Finder will hide files who's names begin with ".")

5. Enter "./undop"

http://github.com/adlaiff6/lindop clone in python / works in ubuntu on my thinkpad / forks adding more platforms welcome

I think this is a neat idea. It would be irritating thats for sure. However, if I don't have enough self control to not read HN for example, I probably don't have enough self control to not turn off the script.

I tend to keep my display dim enough that all it could really do is turn it off. It might as well just close the tab at that point. :)

that's a great idea... i rarely need something like that, but there seem to be weeks now and then when it would be quite useful...