Using Home Assistant, adguard home and an $8 smart outlet to avoid brain rot
57 comments
·June 22, 2025userbinator
Distracting yourself from distractions by building an overly complex system to help you do that, and writing an article about it, is certainly a very HN-ish thing to do.
cainxinth
We want technological solutions to problems created by technology, and structured approaches to recovering from over-structuring our lives.
AdieuToLogic
There is a word for those who believe they cannot live without something, go to whatever means necessary in order to obtain it, even knowing it is harmful, only to find what was once thought an escape is now a prison.
gerdesj
It is possible that OP has made some parts of the story up or at least sexed it up a bit to jibe with the HN mindset (whatever that is).
I found the article refreshingly short and to the point whilst being jolly amusing and informative. The bloke is German so English is a second language - very good skills.
That's a skilled technical writer, that is.
Bookmarked. More please!
tmhrtly
The one thing I’ve found that works for me on my phone is the OneSec app. It hooks into shortcuts (for apps) and a Safari extension (for websites) to prompt you with a small task to do (eg a 20sec breathing exercise) before you access the softblocked content. The time delay + task is enough for me to remind myself that this isn’t what I want to be doing. And in the instances where I actually do consciously want to visit XYZ platform, I can just do the exercise and be granted access.
The only downside is that the Safari extension is granted full access to my web browsing in order to facilitate the website blocking. They say they don’t capture any data and at this point do trust them (you may feel differently). For blocking apps, no private data sharing is required.
AdieuToLogic
> The one thing I’ve found that works for me on my phone is the OneSec app.
Sometimes the simplest solution is the Luddite one; put the phone down and step away from it.
If this appears to be an insurmountable ask, or otherwise infeasible, I humbly suggest there is a greater concern to be addressed than what yet another app on the phone which cannot be distanced may remedy.
nkrisc
It’s too true. If your problem is your phone, the solution won’t be found on your phone.
johncole
Could I use a shortcut on iPhone to do something similar?
gerdesj
When I specify smart home stuff, I have several criteria. Things like controls must be mains powered or on UPS or both.
If it is important, then if wifi/ethernet out then it should still work. So my doorbell used to have a link to a mechanical chime (Doorbird), the current Reolink jobbie does not but it is PoE and all my switches have UPS. The Reolink does have a separate chime that plugs into a power socket and a way better camera.
Oh and none of my home things ever get unfettered access to the internet. I have two VLANs for IoT: things is for most devices and sewer is for those that scare me somewhat.
I treat the whole thing the same way I do corporate IT and I do point Nessus at it. I have several Home Assistants that I look after - home and work and several customer ones too.
The OP's choice of smart plug is clearly designed to be mildly inconvenient to get at but also reliable. I'll put money on there being a monitoring function too.
That's a nerd that does things "proper like".
phil21
> The Reolink does have a separate chime that plugs into a power socket and a way better camera
I started using PoE to DC power adapters for most of these use-cases. It lets me centralize my UPS to the utility closet, and offer a ton of runtime that way. My router + switching setup now powers my entire house including remote switches (PoE++ powered) and access points. Security cameras (and slowly now - security floodlights) are PoE powered as well. I have probably 12-14 hours of runtime off a large stack of UPS batteries, and could add a few days to that if I wheel my "whole home" UPS I never had the time to hardwire into the house yet into the room.
Items like the fiber NIU and cable modem are powered via PoE splitters into 9/12/24V outputs they require. I still have a few random bridges and other various devices I should convert as well, but I've been lazy lately.
I went with two lower port count "core" switches vs. one so I have redundancy there, so one going out will only take out half my network and I can still operate in a degraded mode - my AP density is such that it works fine, and I can re-patch the in-wall and PoE powered switches for workstations.
The only issue is that it kind of grows with a mind of it's own... I am up to an absurd number of devices on the network now.
gerdesj
I live in a UK sticks n bricks two storey roof and a half building. It looks like a bungalow with three bedrooms in the roof on floor one (second floor for the US and other one based countries).
I have two switches in my attic above those bedrooms and most of the rest of IT.
That means I can easily run cable drops along my attic and then under the roof to the outer walls of my house. I've run four Cat 5e to my garage and four to my sitting room.
Basically, I think we are both doing it right.
The biggest criticism of IoT is insecure and unreliable. If you buy any old tat and wire it up to Alexa well that's fine if it hangs together and it mostly does these days. If you squint hard enough, you can forget about Alexa being a bit of a security ... quandry.
There is no such thing as absurd when it comes to automation.
polivier
I love Home Assistant.
Many years ago we gave our then-toddler an old digital camera to play with. Some time later, we looked at the pictures he took. We were horrified to find out that he took pictures of the outside of the house at night. As in, our toddler would unlock and open the front door, go outside (at night!), take pictures of the house, go back in, close and lock the door, and go back into his bed. I bought some wireless door sensors and created an automation where if the sensors are triggered between 10pm and 6am, the lights in our room would turn on to wake us up.
I expanded this later and today we have sensors on all doors/windows that kids can use to leave the house (we have 4 young kids). As it happens, these are the same doors/windows that burglars can use to enter the house, so this doubles as an alarm system (that we can activate when we leave the house and will notify us remotely if the sensors are triggered).
The best part is that with Home Assistant you are not locked into an app/ecosystem. Our door/window sensors are of a different brand than our lightbulbs, and we control everything from a single app.
BLKNSLVR
This, for me, is the most interesting part of your comment:
> our toddler would unlock and open the front door, go outside (at night!), take pictures of the house, go back in, close and lock the door, and go back into his bed.
Did you ever ask your toddler why they did this? The thought process, for a toddler, to do that, to want a photo of the outside of the house at night enough to do that. That's some high level curiosity, worth fostering.
One of mine at that age would have had that level of quirkiness, but probably would have been too scared of "the dark" (also, our house already had a security system installed when we bought it, which we still set off accidentally every now and then, so the kids would probably have known that as well).
mcgrath_sh
What door/window sensors did you use?
polivier
I almost went for the Ikea ones, but in the end I went with Aqara. More expensive, but very small/reliable, and the battery holds up very well.
gerdesj
I put Zwave window sensors on all windows at work (40 of them). These devices have two AAA cells. One of the gent's window sensors used to "die" far quicker than any of the others and eventually stopped working. I should explain: "gent's" := men's toilet.
The sensors are quite large and simple and the gent's windows tend to be left open more often than the other windows. One of the two gent's sit down toilets is generally preferred to the other for very minor reasons but it is preferred.
So, the battery terminals were getting slightly corroded on that window sensor because it was open more often to the outside environment.
I've rubbed a bit of silicone sealant into the crack between the two parts of the sensor and expect that it will survive better now.
stavros
Why is this using a plug rather than a Zigbee button? I don't understand the plug bit.
rcarmo
The plug has a button, and thus sends out an event when it is manually turned on.
stavros
Yes, but so does a button, no?
nomel
It's literally a button, with some extra stuff attached to it. The only requirement for a button is that if it's accessible to the person trying to press it (no pictures posted of that, feel free to assume). But, there's intentional inaccessibility built into this project, so that may be an intentional goal.
Thats's the great part about home assistant though...anything that can change states, with intent/meaning, is waiting to be tied to an automation.
florbo
I'm guessing they already had the plug (I myself have a small stockpile of extra Z-wave/wifi/Zigbee devices for when I inevitably need/want to hook something up), so there wasn't a need to buy something else.
taude
I think this button is powered by the outlet.
ricardobeat
Unfortunately there is no way to block websites at the network level (that I know of) as browsers and mobile phones have started using hardcoded DNS resolvers, so the utility of this is limited.
varenc
I do something similar but with a global keyboard shortcut on my Mac managed with Alfred. When I hit the shortcut it just changes my system's DNS resolver to 1.1.1.1 and reset the macOS DNS cache. And then automatically switches back in 1 minute or 10 minutes depending on the shortcut.
Quite easy, but doesn't help anyone but me. Though I like that it only disables blocking on my device and not my entire network.
remuskaos
Neil Chen just posted this genius idea to disable internet filters for social media addicts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44346450
I've used his idea and make a home assistant automation that temporarily disables adguard home to do the same thing.
NWChen
Amazing work & thanks for the shoutout Roman!
suprjami
Glad to see GL-iNet get a mention.
Their routers are OpenWrt compatible by design, the factory firmware is based on owrt or you can flash upstream for a "pure" image. I've used them for many years and they're great.
urbandw311er
Nice idea. But it needs to be harder for me to reverse. I think I would very quickly develop the reflex of disabling WiFi on my phone so it loads the site via mobile data.
magarnicle
The trouble I have with all tech-based attempts I've set up to stop myself getting distracted is that it is me versus a much-more-motivated me.
We have the same technical skills but one of us is not going to stop until he wins.
mingus88
Like any addiction, the addict needs to first _want_ to stop
FrankPetrilli
Seeing this, I had the initial idea of using AdGuard logs to trigger a power-down of your device if you try and visit brainrot content. I think I like it that way more.
Here is a gradated set of exercises to determine one's phone addiction, if any, in increasing levels of potential difficulty.