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Limiting Kids' Computer Time?
Bibu asks: "As a parent of three, I have to spend a lot of effort to keep my kids away from the computer. Until now, we had a Linux box in which a little cron script would just shutdown the machine after half an hour, when the kids were using it. Does someone on Slashdot have a fancier solution? One that keeps track, controls the total time per user per day, and would warn the user of the upcoming deadline (e.g. in five minutes their time is up)? Since we just moved to Mac OS X, solutions for that platform are preferred."
Come on. Let the little bastards run free. None of this, I don't want the to turn out like me BS.
Set some rules and enforce them. If the kids don't follow the limits you set now for computer use, what makes you think they're going to follow limits you set in a few years when the consequences are a bit more serious? In 10 years will you be writing Ask Slashdot looking for advice on how to limit their car usage based on miles driven, time of day and past usage?
Why limit their time?
Concentrate on making sure they do other things too - encorage them to do their homework, or some kind of exercise, etc. If they're doing that, they're not on the computer. If they don't need to be doing other things, why not let them decide what to do?
My parents got me a Commodore 64 when I was 12. They didn't even know what a computer was, and they couldn't fathom that it was little more than a toy.
Yet, they left me the $#*!@) alone, and I played with it and played with it, and I'm a computer programmer today.
Let the kids have some #$)#@ing joy in their life. If they're on too long, then take them off yourself.
Perhaps, OMFG, they're actually DOING SOMETHING USEFUL, like filing emancipation papers!
What exactly do the kids do? If they play games all day or chat, then I can understand your concern. But if they are doing something worthwhile, like trying to figure out how the machine works, maybe drawing a picture, or even programming something simple, then I think limiting their time would be more harmful than beneficial. Imagine if you were working, just realized the solution to a problem, and suddenly the machine shuts down on you.
...I would personally reserve it for punishment situations. A long time ago when my time spent playing games and IMing was seriously out of line, my parents used this to slap me and my grades back into shape. After about a month I got the picture and was back on track (I had the grades to prove it,) buy my parents decided to keep the policy going for another six months. I obviously wasn't happy with it at the time, but in retrospect, it was a really unneccessary move on their part that only made me feel spiteful rather than teach me to manage my time.
Arbitrary time limitations should be a short-term thing rather than a permanent policy, because you're doing your kids a disservice by managing their time for them, which is a life skill they need to acquire on their own. Making sure your kids' work is done and that they're being social with you on a day-by-day basis is much more effective, and they won't hate you for it.
Nobody wants to hear your opinion about parenting based on your experiences as a child. If you're a parent, you're qualified to offer an opinion (not impose one). If you're not, don't tell this guy how to parent his children. Regardless of whether you are or you aren't, the fact is that this guy has already made a decision to limit his kids' computer time, and you aren't going to convince him otherwise. He's looking for a technical solution - one that may also help other people who need to automate computer timing controls, perhaps for someone not their kids.
Now, back on topic: cron's a good start, but AppleScript can help you. Schedule the command osascript -e "display dialog \"You have five minutes left on the computer\"" & sleep 300 && osascript -e "tell app \"Finder\" to log out" - it's probably a little cleaner of an interface that way. Ampersands sic: the single ampersand causes the first command to run in the background, so the timer starts ticking as soon as the dialog appears. The double ampersand waits for the five minutes to finish. (This isn't the idea behind the different syntaxes, but it's close enough for our purposes.)
Be a responsible parent. Your kids don't listen to you? Beat them.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
What you need is a device like a Basic Stamp which you can connect to the Mac (possibly using a USB->Serial adapter). You can then connect that to a relay board that can switch high voltages such as this. Now you install a pair of flat metal plates on the seat your kids sit on when using the computer and hook them up to a relay on the relay board. Now you can write a simple app that gives your kids a 110V shock after a designated time. My kids complained at first because they said it didn't give them much warning. So later I added a pair of step down transformers to give them shocks at 30V and 60V before going for the big one. Let me tell you: I've had no problem with computer overuse.
Seriously, have you ever tried to get anything done in half an hour?
That said, your kids already know how to boot up knoppix, temporarily shut off your cron script, reboot, play games, turn the script back on, and shut down the computer before you get home. And if they don't know it yet, they'l figure it out. Nothing motivates kids like excessive and arbitrary restrictions.
When I was a kid, my parents did similar things. It only served to make me angry. The time I spent using the computer was a lot more useful than, say, the time I spent running around outside or reading school books for no reason. I figured out pretty quickly how to defeat their various computer-time-limiting methods.
Good luck.
P.S. I have to know... is this Ask Slashdot a troll? Did the editors approve it because they knew people would get riled up?
P.P.S. Yes, this answer is offtopic. Saying this is worth burning some mod points.
A quick read of the post reveals that he's already doing that. Here's the relevant quote:
"Until now, we had a Linux box in which a little cron script would just shutdown the machine after half an hour, when the kids were using it. Does someone on Slashdot have a fancier solution?"
...unless your child is not named Johnny.
And how much time do *you* spend in front of your computer?
They'll notice that you're allowed to play on the computer more than they are, and for longer stints, and they're going to get resentful.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
I may be mistaken but since macos X is a BSD you should be able to just add
/etc/login.conf
D _Basics.html
accounted true
daytime time
to
where accounted turns accounting on and where time is the time in seconds but can prefixed in the unix way i.e. 2h is 2 hours.
daytime limits the total wall clock time allowed per day. You can also set per session limits (sessiontime) and total times per week (weektime) as well, if you would like as well.
use the command warntime to set the end of time warning, but it may send this to the login tty rather than to X (or whatever the mac graphics are).
For the exact format take a look at:
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2001/01/17/FreeBS
The program you're looking for is called Mac Minder. I've used it to monitor the amount of time my young sisters spend on their computer at home and it works flawlessly. If you're also looking for a filtering solution try Dan's Guardian which has been turned into a package for MacOS users called DG Complete.
Michael.
Linux : Mac
She'll just have to learn to live with that moniker.
My parents were never rich. But they did want me to have a good education. In the 1980's, everybody and their brother just knew that the secret of a good education was to get your kid(s) a computer. Now, of course, the leader of this charge was mainly Apple, with their IIe and IIc lines (the Mac had just barely come out, and it was expensive and not targetted toward kids), Radio Shack had their Color Computer line, Atari had the 600 and 800, and Commodore had the Vic-20 and 64. Hardly any of the schools had computers - I remember when my elementary school got its first Apple IIe, they wheeled it around on a cart, and each class got it for a week. Our school was small enough that we managed to get it twice a year (!). It was popular enough, though, that in a couple of years they openned up an Apple "lab" next to the school library, with about 20 Apple IIe's for the kids and teachers.
Play your games, learn typing, learn spelling, play with LOGO, and if you really knew what you were doing, you could play with BASIC.
Those were the days - me and a few of my friends all had computers. One of us had a Timex Sinclair (ugh), a couple of us had C64's, I personally had a TRS-80 Color Computer. None of us cared about incompatibility - we played with BASIC, traded code written down on paper or printouts - I remember the effort we put in to get a maze drawing program working that a friend of my friend who lived nearby, who had a TRS-80 Model 4 (power!), had given him. We were in the 5th grade. Our computers were hooked up to TVs in our bedrooms, and we were hooked.
A couple of years passed, most of us had floppy drives by then, and a few of us got lucky: we begged, we pleaded, and we got modems. Not anything fancy, most of us got 300 baud manual dial/pickup things - one of the lucky guys got a 1200 baud screamer. This was in the 7th grade. We BBS'ed and had a blast dialing locally when we could. I had a friend who was a little more daring (and in high school) at the time, who had a phone junction box outside his bedroom. He managed to get it open, jack into someone's line, and would dial long-distance to LA, and bring back rare downloads from places like the the MetalShop BBS (I still have a printout of those files I traded with him, somewhere)...
We surfed the beginning - I later discovered things like TymeNet and such, but never managed to get internet access (not possible unless you were really lucky and went to one of the local universities or colleges) - that had to wait. But BBS'ing was where it was. I was a kid, and still I managed to get that dreaded evil of parents: Porn. Yeah, it was black and white or 4 color at best, blocky, and not the greatest stuff - but yeah, I delved into teh 3v1L. We all did. We all had fun. We went to school, we came home, we hacked our machines. I still have a lightgun I fashioned for mine out of junk parts, a toilet paper tube, some cardboard, and a magnifying lens - grafted onto a joystick. We coded. We learned. For all of it, we got an education, learned to program, improved our grades, and stuck with it through school...
Today, I am proud to say I am a professional software developer. I am proud of my skills, in software, and in hardware. I continue to increase my knowledge of these magical boxes daily. I don't know where I would be today had my parents never bought me one so long ago.
My parents never limited my time - unless my grades got low (yeah, I had problems just like every other kid). That would happen, my computer would be taken away for a while - that forced me to be a better student, to study more, and to keep my grades up. I learned how to use my machine to allow me to make my grades better, to learn how to learn. My computer was always in my room, and eventually, I got others (just before leaving high school in 1991, I had three computers in my room, two of them "networked" via the serial ports - the third was a laptop).
All I am trying to get at here is how my life would have, could have,
Reason is the Path to God - Anon