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."

That's not the question

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

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.)

Is it obligatory?

[dimfeld]

A quick read of the post reveals that he's already doing that. Here's the relevant quote:
"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?"

login.conf

[bloosqr]

I may be mistaken but since macos X is a BSD you should be able to just add

accounted true
daytime time

to /etc/login.conf

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/FreeBSD _Basics.html [onlamp.com]

Mac Minder and DG Complete

[Michael.Forman]

The program you're looking for is called Mac Minder [lumacode.com]. I've used it to monitor the amount of time my young sisters spend on their computer at home and it works flawlessly. If you're also looking for a filtering solution try Dan's Guardian which has been turned into a package for MacOS users called DG Complete [lopata.net].

Michael. [michael-forman.com]