Putting OSX Self-Control On Steroids

If you've been following the site for a while, you know I'm a huge fan of the Mac application "Self-Control." You put in websites you don't want to access, you turn it on, and they're blocked for up to a day (you choose the time length).

Well, a brilliant reader of the site out in Dubai shared with me some Terminal commands to extend the maximum length of blocking sites up to one month.

Be careful if you do this.

I actually had to take off some of the "mostly bad but occasionally necessary" sites from my blacklist, because I don't want to commit to a month of not using them. But for pure distraction, here you go.

Self-Control is only a Mac OSX application, so this works on Mac. To make it so you can block sites for a month, open "Terminal" and enter these two lines one at a time --

defaults write org.eyebeam.SelfControl BlockLengthInterval -int 1440
defaults write org.eyebeam.SelfControl MaxBlockLength -int 43200
I would strongly recommend you edit your blacklist before turning it on, and also do a trial for 4 days or a week before going for the whole month.
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Sebastian, what do the two numbers -- 1440 and 43200 -- correspond to? I'd like to try this for more than one day, but I'm not sure what numbers to enter in to get a block time that's shorter than a month.

Thank you so much for this information!

It's minutes. 1440 minutes = 24 hours. 43200 minutes = 720 hours = 30 days.

D'oh! Of course it is. Got it. One's for the interval, one's for the max.

Thanks! Just couldn't grok that one at a glance. :-)

Sebastian, have you thought about creating your own podcast? You're a verbal guy, good talker, charismatic, vibe well with interesting people. I'd imagine you could do something like London Real quite well. Be a good secondary lens for your life, and a new contact arena for meeting new cool people.

Anyone who wants Seb to create a podcast, reply with "aye!" :)

I thought of it, yeah. Too much going on right now, though. Better to just execute better at projects already going on.

I understand. I hope you keep it high on your someday/maybe list though. A podcast would not require THAT much effort (a few hours a week maybe) and the payoff would be good in marketing, networking, and lensing.

Noted. Thanks for the feedback... it is intriguing to do sooner or later.

Sebastian, are you learning any coding? If not, I'd like to know why.

A tiny little bit. Again, not enough hours in the day to do everything I'd like to do.

Mind telling a bit more?

My gf is doing Codecademy, seems to be a good choice for a beginner.

Perhaps Tynan could offer you some private tutoring?

First of all, thanks so much to Tynan for adding the reply link to the emails!

I like this measure very much; it'd be great if something more similar to HN's noprocrast could be set so infrequent, short-term uses of disgracting sites could be possible without having the opportunity to turn off that setting. 

Glad you like it! I haven't checked the stats yet to see how many people are using it, so I'm glad to at least one person besides me is doing so.

I don't know how easy this operation is to undo, but you might want to bold the last sentence of your post to reduce the chance of people doing something that they will regret.

Sebastian, do you use the command line a lot? It's Unix based so there's a treasure trove of neat stuff to learn/do.

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