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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?
...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.)
In a way I agree here, Computer time shouldn't be limmited but ONLINE and Game Playing time should.
:)
Get some programming software and such and let them play with that as much as they want, and show interest in the "cool" programs and stuff they come up with. Come up with different "challenges" for them to program a solution for.
Have a ghost image of the PC standing by when they accidentally wipe out a file. The "Play" PC should not have anything important on it and if they do accidentally wipe something out, let them explore how to fix it and let them help with restoring it.
Limiting their online time is what you really need to do, and it's easy if you have a router or a gatway, just disable the port that that PC is on except for the times you want to allow them on the net, and keep the router in a separate room, or locked up somehow. And when they are on the net, never be where you can't see the screen and when you are done supervising their internet time, disable the port again.
Computers of them selves are nothing but tools, they can be good for kids. Look how well most of us slashdotters turned out.
In all seriousness, it's not the time on the computer that needs to be limited, it's the time spent at different activities on the computer that needs to be monitored.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
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
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