A weekend pass for online fun.

November 27, 2006 7:14 PM

I'm on a Mac and my browser of choice is Opera. I was wondering if it would be possible to block a handful of sites entirely and only allow myself access on Sundays?

I tried to edit the hosts file as per this Lifehacker tutorial, but it's not writeable. Am I supposed to log in as root or something? Oh, and I don't have a router...so what are my options? Please help! It would be nice to get some work done finally.

posted by mordecai to computers & internet (4 comments total)

You're supposed to use sudo, or have an administrative account.

I'd probably have two hosts files, and rotate them as required.
posted by pompomtom at 7:32 PM on November 27, 2006

TextWrangler is good for editing system files, because if you don't have permissions to edit, it'll just ask you for your admin password in order to save.

Also, there's a couple of other ways to accomplish the same effect:

First, Opera has a content blocker built-in. Just go to Prefs, choose the 'Advanced' tab, choose 'Content' from the list and click on the 'Blocked Content' button and enter the sites you want to block. The minus is that there isn't a good way (that I know of) to load a whole set of them at once. Maybe you can track down the preference file Opera uses for that.

Second, there are filtering proxy servers that you can set to block the offending sites. BFilter and Privoxy are the most common. With these, blocking and unblocking is a simple matter of setting Opera to use the proxy server or not, but they tend to be a bit difficult to set up because they have a ton of other features in addition to blocking.
posted by boaz at 9:30 PM on November 27, 2006

Am I the only one who wants to know which sites should get blocked except for Sundays?

Be honest: Is there a time-lock on your refrigerator?
posted by rokusan at 9:59 PM on November 27, 2006

A /etc/hosts solution hacked together with cron to rotate the two of them every weekend would work. I don't feel like writing up the whole thing, but it's just 2 cron entries to copy in the 'permissive' hosts on sunday morning, and copy in the 'restrictive' one on sunday night.
posted by cschneid at 10:50 PM on November 27, 2006