A Pluckeye Forum

carl

Member

From: Guatemala

Registered: 2017-01-12

Posts: 26

Handy Blackouts

"Hooray for inconvenience" is a motto of the Pluckeye software. It means this.

However, it's not always easy to choose to limit oneself. To make that choice to pluck as convenient as possible, I placed a toolbar containing certain "block" commands on the taskbar of my Windows 10 laptop. If you would like to try it, here are the steps to take:

1. Create a folder somewhere and call it "BLACKOUTS" or something.

2. Create some command files in that folder to run certain pluckeye commands that you want to be able to run at a moment's notice. For example, I have a file called "blackout_45m.cmd" that contains the following commands.

   @echo off
   echo WAIT - EMERGENCY BLACKOUT ACTIVATION
   title Pluckeye Blackout - 45 Minutes
   color 4F
   pluck + when now+45m block everything
   pluck export | findstr "everything"
   echo *************************************************
   echo  YOU ARE COMPLETELY DISCONNECTED FOR 45 MINUTES.
   echo *************************************************
   pause

3. Right click on the Windows taskbar and click Toolbars > New toolbar.

4. Select the folder containing your pluckeye commands.

5. The new toolbar will display the name of the folder you selected, and will contain links to each of the command files (.cmd) that you placed in the folder.

I have 4 commands on my BLACKOUTS list:

• 1-blackout_15m.cmd

• 2-blackout_45m.cmd

• 3-blackout_2h.cmd

• 4-blackoutThunderbird_1h.cmd

This setup has been very helpful to me. Since I keep my taskbar always visible (in other words, not Hidden), I can always see the BLACKOUTS toolbar in front of me.

I use Windows 10 Pro with Pluckeye 1.0.31.

sonicsid

Member

Registered: 2021-05-11

Posts: 43

Re: Handy Blackouts

I tend to procrastinate, and keeping blackouts like these handy has proven very helpful. Thanks a lot.

Instead of using "block everything", I'd recommend using "block chrome.exe" (or whatever your browser or source of distraction may be) since "everything" might render other Internet-dependent applications useless for that period as well.

For people inexperienced with command prompts: the echo parts are not necessary. You can simply make a notepad file with, say, "pluck + when now+1h block chrome.exe", save it as a .cmd file (instead of .txt) and that would work just fine too.