Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: I built a "Do not disturb" Device for my home office

apoorv.page

31–40 of 53 posts

Re: Show HN: I built a "Do not disturb" Device for my home office

#31
post #25

Would love a way to disable the Do Not Disturb button on my macbook without flipping the f keys. Any ideas? Tap it accidentally and you miss all calls and texts for the day on your iphone…

There is (was?) a utility that would flip individual F keys on the Mac, although it’s been years since I used it and who knows if it still works post Apple Silicon transition. TBH, I kind of miss the touch bar. Once they restored the esc key, it was often kind of useful while I tend not to use any of the keys in the F row (even those mapped by IntelliJ since the whole fn+F key thing is a kind of a pain and I seldom h…

The Touch Bar was so useless* it's now selling like hotcakes as an accessory:

“Trigger actions, launch apps, and control your entire setup—all from a hyper-customizable deck of vibrant LCD keys.”

https://www.elgato.com/us/en/p/stream-deck

* Narrator: Not actually useless. Mine is setup for multi-screen chat/video/notes windows placement and app window sharing for video conferencing.

Re: Show HN: I built a "Do not disturb" Device for my home office

#32
why does the site keep upvoting trivial projects especially derivative projects of what people seem to reinvent every few months. No offence to OP. I don't really get the site. Like, you have posts where someone runs doom or an OS in a PDF file that get 1000 upvotes which I think is valid. Then we get something like "I made an echo server" which is like someone copypasted code from an asyncio documentation page and put it on Github and that will make it to the front page. Again, just feels like it doesn't belong on the front page. It's not news worthy or interesting in any way.

Re: Show HN: I built a "Do not disturb" Device for my home office

#37
post #13

> My router assigns dynamic IP addresses, meaning my server location kept changing. I've had a similar problem in the past. It turns out that most routers have a way to assign an IP address statically based on the MAC address of the requesting device without affecting the other DHCP devices on the network. I do this for my pi-hole, my NAS and my gaming PC.

Most home routers also have some addresses that are outside the range managed by DHCP, or if DHCP is set to manage the entire range of LAN address have a setting where you can reduce that range. This gives you a third way to manage static assignments.

Let's assume the LAN is 10.0.0/24, so addresses of devices on the LAN are 10.0.0.1-10.0.0.254. In the following I'll omit the 10.0.0. part of an address, so will just refer to addresses 1-254.

Find the range DHCP manages, which should be somewhere in the router settings. If it is 1-254 reduce it. Let's say it is 1-200 (either by default or after you have reduced it).

Then you can simply go the settings on your server or other device that you want to have a static address and configure it to use a hard coded address outside that range, such as 201.

A possible downside of that is that on some devices if you want to give it a hard coded address you also have to hard code the gateway address and the name servers.

Some devices though have an option to use a hard coded address but still get the gateway and name servers from DHCP.

In summary, there are three ways to manage address for a given device on most home routers.

1. DHCP assigns the address. It can choose any address in its pool. Each time the device needs an IP address, such as after a boot or when its lease expires, it could get a different IP address.

2. DHCP assigns the address, but you can tell it to give a specific address from the pool to a given device identified by the device's MAC address.

3. Tell the device to use an address outside the router's DHCP pool. It's up to you to decide how to assign these address and how to make sure no conflicts arise.

For #2 if you want some device to have a fixed IP address but you don't actually care what that address is, many routers have an easy way to do that. Connect the device under #1, so DHCP picks the address.

Then go find the table in the router's web interface that shows all currently connected devices and find your device. Many routers will have a toggle in there to tell it to switch to #2 for that device. From then on the device's current address will be reserved for it.

That's a little easier than going through their "assign an IP" dialog, because that usually makes you enter the MAC address. If you go through the connection table details it doesn't have to ask you for the MAC address.

Re: Show HN: I built a "Do not disturb" Device for my home office

#38
post #8

Like all the other commenters here, I also devised my own solution—but AFAICT, it's the only other solution that's automated! Requirements: * macOS * Zoom * Home Assistant * A signal light/sign on a smart switch (like [0]) The Procedure: First, create a script that checks whether you're currently on a Zoom call, and then turns your signal light on or off accordingly. Remember to chmod +x! #!/bin/sh if [ $(lsof -i 4UD…

I have something similar that I built a long while ago. It's a large Do Not Disturb sign. There is a raspberry pi mini that controls power going to it. There is a corresponding daemon running on a PC that checks Discord call status. In call? Power to sign. Not in call? No power to sign. The client/server daemons are in Golang and communicate over RPC.
Post reply on HN