Ang Peregrino Recommends 87: Freedom

Free­dom
URL: http://​macfree​dom​.com/

Freedom is an appli­ca­tion that dis­ables net­work­ing on an Apple com­puter for up to eight hours at a time. Free­dom will free you from the dis­trac­tions of the inter­net, allow­ing you time to code, write, or cre­ate. At the end of your selected offline period, Free­dom re-enables your net­work, restor­ing every­thing as normal.

Free­dom enforces free­dom; a reboot is the only cir­cum­ven­tion of the Free­dom time limit you spec­ify. The has­sle of reboot­ing means you’re less likely to cheat, and you’ll enjoy enhanced productivity.

Copy­right Fred Stutz­man, fred@fredstutzman.com

To install free­dom:
1) Down­load freedom.dmg
2) Mount the disk, and drag the Free­dom appli­ca­tion to your Appli­ca­tion Folder
3) Unmount the Free­dom disk image

To run free­dom:
1) Double-click on the Free­dom appli­ca­tion icon
2) Choose the amount of time you would like to run Free­dom
3) Choose if you’d like to run Free­dom with local net­work access, or with­out local net­work access (Nor­mal Mode)
4) You will be prompted to enter your pass­word. If you do not have admin­is­tra­tor access on your machine, Free­dom will not work for you.

What Free­dom does:
Free­dom dis­ables net­work­ing on your Apple com­puter for up to 8 hours at a time. After the time is up, Free­dom will re-enable your net­work adapters and dis­play a con­fir­ma­tion. Sim­ply restart the pro­gram to get another period of freedom.

Local access/Normal mode:
Enabling Free­dom with local access allows access to stan­dard inter­nal IP ranges, while block­ing exter­nal IP ranges. Nor­mal Mode of oper­a­tion blocks access to all IP ranges.

NOTE:
Stop­ping or quit­ting Free­dom will not re-enable your net­work adapters. This is pur­pose­ful. To re-enable your net­work before the time period elapses, you must restart your com­puter. UNIX admin­is­tra­tors will be able to cir­cum­vent Freedom.

The­ory:
This pro­gram is designed to help you get things done, away from the dis­trac­tions of net­work connectivity.

I love it. Because it helps me do what I have to do with­out being dis­tracted. And it keeps me from Face­book and Twit­ter and all those stuff which are great in them­selves but are real dis­trac­tions when I’m doing some­thing really important.

It is anti-procrastination: