Daytripper

[kempbellt]

If you are able to slack off at work like this, is there something that you would rather be doing with your time?

I am not judging. I've worked at places where I spent 75% of my day slacking off because the management and bureaucracy was terrible. After months of doing that, I started hating the job. I can only check facebook/reddit/pick your poison, for so long before I want to throw my computer out a window out of boredom.

[derefr]

Why do nothing, when you could instead get a second (remote) job and then make 200% salary by doing your second job during your first job's working hours?

[onemoresoop]

I agree, this is basically the recipe to wither oneself. Getting lazy and doing nothing becomes a habit hard to get rid of...

[legulere]

There’s an entire book written about this phenomenon, called Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber

[darepublic]

This is like adding an event listener to door open and providing a callback. It's pretty great

[martin-adams]

This reminds me of the old boss key:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_key

[allenu]

Exactly what I was thinking.

I remember being so confused by it as a kid when I saw it in games. Like, why do you need a key that displays a fake DOS prompt?

[Touche]

Dave was fired because every time his boss walked by his desk he was staring at his desktop.

[the_watcher]

At his next job, Dave tried the custom setup and his boss now thinks he's always writing emails.

[Razengan]

What good are all those pretty wallpapers if we don't take a moment to appreciate them?

[buildzr]

This is why I built a custom tool to automatically hide all "marked" windows as soon as I switch off of them.

Could be integrated with something like this pretty easily.

[rolltiide]

> Execute a custom script

an option

[hn_throwaway_99]

Looks like it doesn't work anymore, but at one point someone styled reddit to look like you were reading a Word document: https://pcottle.github.io/MSWorddit/

[zianwar]

This reminds me of https://netflixhangouts.com/

[GuB-42]

I once did a stealth chat client. In emission mode, it logs keystrokes and sends them as messages. In reception mode, it autotypes the replies.

The idea was that you can open your usual work editor (word processor, IDE, spreadsheet, ...) and use it as a chat client.

It was more like a proof of concept, it didn't work that great and wasn't really useful. Also such a tool is likely to trigger all kinds of alerts in antivirus software, for good reasons.

[ActorNightly]

There is also https://github.com/michael-lazar/rtv which lets you browse reddit from a terminal

[remlov]

Looks like the site depends on yql which was sunset on Jan. 3rd, 2019: https://twitter.com/ydn/status/1079785891558653952?lang=en

[navane]

similar but styled as code: http://codereddit.com/

[papln]

Why is there a receiver, instead of running an app on the receiving system to listen for bluetooth/http/etc messages?

[djsumdog]

If you have a web camera and use Windows, you can use this thing I wrote forever ago:

https://rearviewmirror.cc/

[nf8nnfufuu]

Do modern notebooks still have vibration sensors? I think old ones had them in the hard drives, to protect them from damage. But SSDs wouldn't need that anymore.

In any case, I wonder if detecting vibrations and recognizing the boss via machine learning wouldn't be more elegant.

[jaifraic]

Well, gait is usable as a biometric identifier. While most approaches use video analysis, I found this a paper [1] that is about identifying people through footstep induced structural vibration using a geophone[2]. It would be quite interesting if it is possible to measure the structural vibration using a laptops or smartphones built in accelerometers. But I think acoustic sensors would be a better way. Or a combination of both options.

[imgabe]

I applaud the amount of effort that went in to being this lazy.

[the_watcher]

A version of this that's somehow aware of whether or not I'm at my desk, then puts the machine to sleep anytime anyone else touches a key would be kind of cool.

Maybe some kind of proximity sensor that you could stick to a badge or in your wallet? It would need to still allow you to login and perhaps offer a password to disable in case you forgot your sensor, but seems vaguely plausible?

EDIT: Read more of the usage guide, seems even more plausible now, although I guess it all depends on the reliability of the proximity sensor.

[hinkley]

There used to be variations on this that tied to your smart phone or watch. I don't recall if this is currently supported by iOS.

But I got a Symbian phone shortly before working at a place where you had to keep your desktop locked at all times. There was an app that would lock your desktop on loss of Bluetooth connection at that time BT range was for all practical purposes less than 30 feet.

[ComputerGuru]

Somewhat related, Windows 10 allows you to pair it to a phone with Bluetooth support. When you log into or unlock the device with that phone in proximity then walk away with the device on your person, your PC/laptop will lock immediately.

[smacktoward]

USBKill (https://github.com/hephaest0s/usbkill) lists one approach to solving that problem in its README:

- Set USBKill to watch the status of a particular USB port

- Attach a lanyard to a USB key

- Wear the lanyard on your wrist

- Plug the USB key you're wearing into the port USBKill is watching

Then anytime you step away from the machine, USBKill would notice the removal of the key and shut it down.

[solotronics]

Probably an RFID would be better. There are some articles about doing pub/priv key auth using an RFID device, this would be good because nobody could snoop your RFID signal and replay it.

[gibolt]

The YouTube channel being watched in the GIF is Technology Connections. Excellent quirky technical content about old hardware.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy0tKL1T7wFoYcxCe0xjN6Q

[mises]

He's watching Technology Connections on you tube, which is an excellent choice. Highly recommended.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy0tKL1T7wFoYcxCe0xjN6Q

[jperry]

He's also playing Broken Reality, a silly game parodying the internet. It's pretty good.

[crimsonalucard]

I remember some guy at Verizon outsourcing his entire job to china. He was consistently getting top marks and promotions while all he was doing was looking at cat pictures all day.

Daytripper is level 1. Outsourcing your job to China is level 2.

Something just clicked in my head. Start up idea!

[quickthrower2]

Level 3 = Level 2 + WFH.

Level 4 = Level 3 + outsource the status reporting to a local, and simply H instead of WFH.

You have now achieved the goal set by Tim F, and you can replace those cat pics with a real physical cat.

[tripzilch]

Is this really a ubiquitous thing in the US? Office jobs were you are paid for having your body present, regardless of whether you slack off most of the time?

Who pays for this? Isn't it terribly inefficient?

I mean, if there's just not a lot of work to do, you could also have shorter work weeks. And you would, if your boss could trust you to not slack off every time they turn their backs?

Wouldn't it be more logical to do your work and then have actual time off, instead of pretending the work takes much longer than it actually does?

[javajosh]

Okay, that's neat. Now someone needs to figure out how to detect someone walking by using fluctuations in the wifi signal strength.

[oarabbus_]

It's been done, at least something tangentially close. http://news.mit.edu/2018/artificial-intelligence-senses-peop...

[gricardo99]

Or use the monitor camera and opencv to detect faces/eyeballs in the background lurking or peering at your monitor.

[nategri]

Oh hey. I just used some SPI-based Nixie tube drivers that this same tindie user made. I've been super impressed!

[retSava]

Came to say something similar - in the spirit of his/hers exixe tube thing, I made a similar one but with msp430 (since I'm very familiar with it) and cleaner layout of the transistors. Looks good and have baked a couple, but I'm not getting good results on flashing the msp430. For some reason it's flaky as hell, and I don't have the time to investigate more.

[fencepost]

I could see real uses for these, but I'd want questions answered first such as whether they're specifically paired, where the programming is stored, what data passes wirelessly, whether there could be any way the receiver could act as an open HID receiver device, what the number of triggers is, etc.

[retSava]

From a quick glance, it's a custom radio packet using a common 2.4 GHz proprietary radio (clone of nrf 24L01), and it doesn't really need more than that. Adding complex pairing and so on would likely kill this fun passion project way long before finishing.

[adrianmonk]

I wonder how far you could get at doing this with no additional hardware. Could a smart enough AI detect the boss's voice with the microphone? Some other mannerism like the way they clear their throat? Face detection with the camera? Maybe something with Bluetooth or WiFi and the boss's smart phone?

[andai]

Last one sounds the most promising, if clients (rather than base stations) can be uniquely identified, and often enough to be practical. I know that base stations send a beacon out x times per second, but phones probably don't.

[WrtCdEvrydy]

Reminds me of Uplink's Motion Sensor.

[voldacar]

Such a great game. I still listen to the soundtrack every once in a while, it just nails that y2k atmosphere so well

[hinkley]

I could use this going the other way:

Put one of these near an information radiator to kick it out of doze mode.

[bonestamp2]

I didn't dig through the code too much but it looks like the receiver just acts like a USB keyboard. So, you could probably modify the script to send some innocuous keyboard "input" that would knock off the screensaver (to show your radiator) instead of sending the close window and lock commands.

[fragmede]

USB jiggler is designed for this use case.

[keithwhor]

This is amazing, and I also would like to make a meta comment about how creative "dekuNukem" is as a screen name.

Re: custom script, can I plug the receiver into, say, a RP0 and fire off an arbitrary webhook?

[joenot443]

Adding to your metacomment, "Daytripper" is an excellent name, and a great nod to the Beatles track.