Something that makes the wrong choice hard — a distraction blocker for Linux that you can't talk your way out of.
Glocker blocks distracting sites and apps on Linux. It can't truly stop me — I own the machine — so instead it makes slipping out slow and deliberate, hard to do on autopilot.
Nothing else fit: closed, commercial, Mac-first, no Firefox. And there's a moment, in a fog of distraction, where I make the wrong call without noticing. I wanted something standing in that moment.
On Linux you have root, so nothing can truly lock you out —
the usual /etc/hosts hacks and cron scripts undo in seconds. So
glocker doesn't build a cage. It just adds enough friction to outlast the fog.
Everything runs on time windows I set, and the layers overlap on purpose.
/etc/hosts, the file made immutable so a quick edit won't stick.Room for real life: unblock a domain for a set time, or grant a sometimes-needed app one hour a day — both with a logged reason, not a hidden hack.
glockpeek is a dashboard that reads it all back: violations, unblocks, and where the hours actually went. Run it locally and the data never leaves your machine, or use the hosted one.
It runs as a privileged service that holds my sudo during work
hours and makes its own files immutable, so backing out means waiting for the
window or dropping to real root. And it isn't one program but four that watch
each other:
glocker — the daemon; does the blocking and records everything locally.
glockpeek — the dashboard; reads the records back.
glockdoc — the watchdog; survives an uninstall so a silent teardown still shows.
glocklock — the screen locker; behind the violation lock and the mindful gate.
It's free and open source — agent, dashboard, all of it on GitHub. Edit one config file, then one command builds it, pulls the blocklists from curated sources, and installs the lot:
make full-install
Start with the setup guide, or browse the source.
Rather not run a server? A hosted option is coming: install just the agent and let the dashboard and accountability email live on glockerapp.com for a small subscription.
This isn't a product. It's what I built because nothing fit, and it's what keeps me at my desk. If your setup looks like mine — Linux, Firefox, root you can't help having — it might work for you too. Bend it to your own bad habits.