Internet addicted, need software to control my usage and block access [closed]

Solution 1:

If you're using Firefox, you can use LeechBlock to restrict internet access. You can set rules for specific sites (or all sites) with the extension and block sites after a certain time or at a certain time of the day.

More info: http://www.proginosko.com/leechblock.html

Solution 2:

I have the same problem!

I also have multiple browsers so a firefox only solution would not work.

I found I was browsing a select few sites repeatedly - youtube/bbc news etc. There is a text file called "hosts" (without any extension) which you can edit with a text editor (run as admin) to block specific sites. So for example to block youtube and facebook you can add

127.0.0.1       www.youtube.com
127.0.0.1       www.facebook.com

to the file. To re-allow access you can comment out the lines with '#' like so:

#127.0.0.1       www.youtube.com
#127.0.0.1       www.facebook.com

Now you can manually edit-in or edit-out all the '#' characters to block-unblock your wasteful browsing. I actually I wrote a small program to remove the # characters so that I could block everything with a single icon click. But I deliberately didn't write a program to do the reverse. So I can block everything in half a second and its a clumsy manual editing job (removing all the #'s) to start browsing again.