On a serious note, though. At the beginning of the pandemic I bought a treadmill for cheap and I planned to watch YouTube videos only when using it. Turns out I am sometimes lazier than I anticipated and keep subconsciously convincing myself with lame excuses to watch a given video that I stumble upon right at that moment at my desk or on a given mobile device.
Ideally YouTube would be blocked in my router, a Ubiquity EdgeRouter, but I doubt it’s possible.
Or maybe via DNS blocking (PiHole?), but I’m open to all solutions.
It would be best to achieve this with “off-the-shelf” components. I thought that maybe a “smart” outlet exists that allows to trigger a HomeKit action if power is drawn? The action could maybe flip a virtual switch in Homebridge? I’m new to Homebridge so part of my question to those with experience is, whether that is at all possible?
If avoidable I wouldn’t want to fiddle with Arduino and sensors, due to a lack of time to maintain it. And I don’t want to solder something to the treadmill itself, because I want to resell it at some point.
But I’m open to any creative solution
Thanks a lot!
Do you use Apple Watch activities to start and stop your workouts? If so, I think you could use those as the triggers. Then it’s the blocking that needs to be handled.
PiHole could block YouTube I think:
And there’s a Pi-hole Remote app for iOS with Shortcuts support to enable/disable blocking (it’s also a Mac app, but without the Shortcuts support there). If you would be ok just turning off Pi-hole completely during your workout, I think that would do it! I’m sure you can do the same thing with an API call, but this seems like a good way to approach it with minimal work to start with.
It’s a good idea! I thought about it as well, but sadly it burns through batteries too quickly. The one I have from Aqara. If I recall correctly that’s the one that was mentioned in the episode as well.
But thanks a lot for the suggestion
