[ale] Making kids stop being entitled slackers with free software

Dustin Strickland dustin.h.strickland at gmail.com
Tue Mar 4 22:26:43 EST 2014


So, my (much)younger brother is doing middle school online. As kids his
age do, he has issues with motivating himself to do anything other than
play video games, think about playing video games, watch Youtube
commentators play video games, or munching on unhealthy food that he
will never be able to work off if he continues his daily routine(while
talking about video games).

I think I have a solution, but I would like ALE's opinion on the best
way to implement it. Here is a simple map of my home network(using
generic names, of course):
http://s29.postimg.org/fgrszgq4n/network_map.png

My goal is simple: Unless he does a set amount of work each weekday
when scheduled, the network will lock down to prevent him from doing
anything else. Also, the network will lock down at 9 PM(10:30 on
weekends) and unlock at 6 AM. There will be an override
method for everyone else. His X session will also be suspended at these
times on his main machine(he uses Steam), and ideally all game consoles
would refuse to boot as well. If Microsoft were nice, they would allow
you to remotely change the parental controls PIN and settings for the
Xbox 360 remotely so that I could automate this job, but they have an
extensive history of making gimmicky products that are barely usable if
you need flexibility, so it is to be expected that they don't.

After getting my feet wet in the field with a quick Google search, I'm
thinking that I want to use Squid. I'm probably going to
install Xen on his main machine, workstation-0, and have a PV domU take
care of everything. Do you guys approaching this the right way(from a
technical standpoint I mean, I really don't care what you think about
the ethics of it), and is there any other software you would recommend
for this purpose?


More information about the Ale mailing list