an opinion on the best LeechBlock equivalent for Google Chrome?
I did a quick review of options for this recently, and chose StayFocusd. It works for me—in the technical sense, at least.
I don’t have the rationale for selecting that one compared to others captured in any detail, deliberately. It seemed to me more important to get something installed than to spend any significant time at all on determining what the ‘best’ plugin was. I’d been using ‘but this one doesn’t do X, and that one doesn’t do Y, and this other one does Z that I don’t like’ as an excuse for procrastinating about installing anything. Detailed comparison shopping was turning in to a time sink in itself.
So long as it’s better than nothing, an anti-akrasia tool that you actually deploy is infinitely better than one you don’t, even if the latter has ostensibly ‘better’ features.
StayFocused has a nice (optional) feature where you’re required to type a long, complicated paragraph before being allowed to change settings. Additionally, it prevents you from making changes after you’ve run out of time for the day. Finally, it also blocks sites that are linked to from restricted sites, which works wonders for Reddit/HN browsing. However, you can have only one list of restricted sites, unlike the sets of sites that you get with LeechBlock. Additionally, you are forced to have at least one minute available for browsing per day, with an additional minute available from 23:59-00:00 (if you want to block sites for the whole day). It’s a bit to easy to disable on a whim, but in general I’ve found it works well—I haven’t yet attempted to circumvent it since I started using it ~2 weeks ago.
I did a quick review of options for this recently, and chose StayFocusd. It works for me—in the technical sense, at least.
I don’t have the rationale for selecting that one compared to others captured in any detail, deliberately. It seemed to me more important to get something installed than to spend any significant time at all on determining what the ‘best’ plugin was. I’d been using ‘but this one doesn’t do X, and that one doesn’t do Y, and this other one does Z that I don’t like’ as an excuse for procrastinating about installing anything. Detailed comparison shopping was turning in to a time sink in itself.
So long as it’s better than nothing, an anti-akrasia tool that you actually deploy is infinitely better than one you don’t, even if the latter has ostensibly ‘better’ features.
StayFocused has a nice (optional) feature where you’re required to type a long, complicated paragraph before being allowed to change settings. Additionally, it prevents you from making changes after you’ve run out of time for the day. Finally, it also blocks sites that are linked to from restricted sites, which works wonders for Reddit/HN browsing. However, you can have only one list of restricted sites, unlike the sets of sites that you get with LeechBlock. Additionally, you are forced to have at least one minute available for browsing per day, with an additional minute available from 23:59-00:00 (if you want to block sites for the whole day). It’s a bit to easy to disable on a whim, but in general I’ve found it works well—I haven’t yet attempted to circumvent it since I started using it ~2 weeks ago.