Sometimes when I should be doing school work and the work is too easy or I don't know how to do it I start to circle loading certain webpages to waste time.

I have read XKCD comic and it seems like a good idea.

I want to know how to implement 30 second delay before loading certain webpages preferably on OS level. Maybe delaying DNS queries.

This is awesome.

You could use traffic shaping to only allow yourself Dial-Up speeds. In this day and age, with the graphics and flash et al,. you would be sure to see only a few pages an hour.

Just disconnect from the internet.

Kind regards

Each time you catch yourself wasting time, just insert some money into a piggy bank.
You may then fail at school, but you'll become a millionaire

Seriously speaking, IMO this problem should be solved on a personality/discipline level, not an OS level.
Otherwise, you'll end up wasting time trying to bypass your own security restrictions, which might eventually
lead to schizophrenia.

Agreed. What you have is a 'people problem' and you're trying to solve it using technology. That's never going to be entirely satisfactory. E.g. spam is a people problem, because it's caused by people. The problem can be mitigated by technological means such as filters and white/black lists but it can't be solved by technology because whatever technological barrier to sending spam is created, someone will work out how to bypass it. The only way the problem of spam will go away is if people stop sending it. See also piracy of digital media. The only way you will ever properly solve your problem of wasting time on the Internet is by learning enough self discipline to stop doing it.


The xkcd comic guy's method is real easy to implement - he just turns off his computer. Much simpler than what you want to do, which sounds like an exercise in time wasting in itself.

Well, since this isn't pshycotherapyquestions.com, Im going to overlook any personality problems that this request might point to. Also, admitting to having an obsession with the internet, then asking how to delay page load time by 30s -- because of a comic they read -- isn't the mark of someone who is serious. Do you really, truly believe that someone is seriously going to slow their internet connection down?

Anyway, He asked a technical question which I find intriguing -- and while some might think it a waste of time to think about-- I also think it could be a wonderful exercise to participate in.

Personally, i'd go with limiting the bandwidth of any port 80 stuff to 28.8kb. Which can be done a number of different ways.

Fair enough, but the OP asked about specific websites, not everything that goes through port 80.

It's easy to block certain websites in firefox, but that does not solve the OP's problem either.

Whatever the solution might be, it'd have to be something that prevents the OP from easily switching it off whenever they like.
If, through any mechanism, the OP will be able to switch the delay on, it'll be equally easy for them to switch it off. So what's the point? If there's no self-discipline,
it isn't going to work at all.

Anything that he does, will be able to be undone. I consider this his choice.

Interesting though. I think i remember something in firefox to slow down/speed up the page load time,.. like paintpage time or something like that? Not sure if that still exists. If its there, that might be helpful to the issue.

The firefox add on page seems to be down at the moment. If there is such a plugin, what's stopping the OP from using another browser?

But isn't wasting/not wasting time (instead of doing school work) his choice either?

It's like trying to password-protect a file/directory from a user where the very same user sets up the password. The concept itself is flawed.

Sorry, its not a plugin. Its a setting for about:config, i found it:

nglayout.initialpaint.delay

I imagine setting that to some higher number will delay the display of pages by x number of ms or s.

And alternately, you could set up a URLlist in squid to rewrite requests with a Meta tag that delays 20s or so. Its a lot of work compared to traffic shaping, but it could be done.

@szboardstretcher: Interesting ideas. Limiting all pages wouldn't work. I use computer and internet for school (CS student) which means limiting page load for all pages means limiting productivity. Rewriting requests in Squid seems interesting. Will look more to it. Thanks.

I know that everything I do I can undo, but if I have to undo it I go to the point of "What am I doing I should be working".
Solution that works only in FF might work to because I use FF for 90% of my browsing.

Example of my problem:
I'm programming something in Visual Studio for School. It has to be in VS so I don't like to do it so much. Because I have Windows on Laptop I'm programming using VNC. But when I google for help and I don't find anything useful or some pages take a long time to open I sometimes start to open time wasting websites. If time-wasting sites take more time to open then normal sites then this would lessen my problem.

It isn't like my school work is suffering. I started school a week after my classmates because I prolonged my vacations but still had more work done and have been more prepared then my classmates.

I just have a personal rule that I can't watch Big Bang Theory if I don't work at least five hours for school at home. And I don't break it even though I could. With less time-wasting websites maybe I could get more BBT.

This sounds like a problem then. If you only want to slow down offending web pages/time wasters, then you will be relying on a whitelist/blacklist that you will have to update yourself. And as far as I can see, this will be the case with any solution that you may find, since you are seperating the internet into 2 parts (allowed/time wasting) -- and obviously at some point you are going to have to sit down and write out rules specifying which is which.

Unfortunately, I think the simplest solution here is having self control as others have mentioned.

Because I don't see a way of doing this technically. Sorry.