reclaiming control of my home computer

General Forums Off-topic Chat
1

ok here’s the deal:
-i know there are many talented computer users on these forums
-my sister uses my computer because it kicks here laptop’s ass
-i don’t like my sister
-i don’t like sharing :stuck_out_tongue:

my sister likes hockey. we don’t have cable or satellite so when she can’t watch a certain game on tv, she’ll listen to it over the net on my computer. this pisses me off alot, but today the piss burst into flames (uh… not litterally of course :wink: ). she turned on the speakers with the volume all the way up so she could sit on the couch and listen. so i could use the computer but couldn’t do anything using sound. not only this, she’ll kick me or my brother off the computer whenever she wants (a few times while we were doing homework) and just reads about hockey news and downloads all the music you could possibly find on winmx. at least 1/4 of my 40 gig hard drive is taken up by her alone. she has totally taken control!

now, i’m sorry if i sound too whiny/bitchy (as i type this even i begin to think so), but what can i do? i’m thinking there must be a way to prevent her from accessing the nhl websites or something but it’d have to be real subtle so it can’t be obviously traced back to me. any ideas?

2

strike her down with the dark side of the force, luke

Whoa, where’d that come from? Here are some suggestions:

Just tell your sister that Hockey is never more important than Blending (or homework, for some reason). Also, ask your parents (I assume you live with your parents? If not, your household sucks–you’ve got your siblings living with you) about her, and if they don’t care, whine. Not to brag, but this can help (I’ve tried).

Try blocking her Internet access to “kids only.” That’ll teach her :smiley:

Introduce her to a single hockey player. Get them married, and never see either of them again in person :smiley: (Wait… just how old is your sister?)

Turn it down, lock the door (if your computer is in a lockable room–if not, barricade the door when she’s not inside), and practice your Blendering.

Lock her out of the house (preferably when she’s with that hockey player you introduced to her; then she’ll have to go home with him, and you’ll have precious computer time, at least until she calls your parents about what you did) :smiley:

Next time she turns it on, LOCK THE DOOR AND TURN IT OFF!

Probably the safer of them all: Tell your parents to introduce her to “time limits.” Preferably about half an hour :smiley: If she complains, your parents will say that she’s spending too much time obsessing over hockey, and they won’t mention you.

Unfortunately, you didn’t give enough details. For example, why does she like hockey if it’s a sport that totally sucks (then again, all sports suck, so there)? How exactly does she “kick you off?” How old is she? If she’s around 12, introduce her to me and I’ll get her a radio. If she’s older than that, check to see the marital status of all the local hockey players :smiley:

3

will do!

that doesn’t seem to work. but yeah i live with my parents (only 15) [EDIT: geez, this is why i hate birthdays! it takes me all year long to remember how old i am and then my age changes again! (i’m 16)]
. it’s like this, once my sister was on the computer for at least (NO exaggeration) 5 hours! i asked if she was going to finish any time soon and mentioned she was on for over an hour, and she’s like well seeing as you guys are on the computer every waking moment i can’t get on the computer any other time.
which isn’t true because she kicks us off any time she wants as i mentioned earlier and at least me and my brother take turns.

how do i do this?

she’s 21 or something. now, i don’t care much at all for hockey but that doesn’t mean i want those hockey players to suffer :wink:

can’t. the computer is in the family room. only entrance with a door leads to the garage.

this doesn’t work either. it’s shocking if you aren’t used to living with my sister but she’s one spoiled kid. she eats what she wants, refuses to eat what she doesn’t want. does only what she wants to do and rarely what my parents want her to do… arrghh.

gasp i’m not the only one who thinks sports suck ass? wow…

anyway, going back to the whole doing what she wants thing that has to do with how she kicks us off. it’s like, i get off the computer just to shut her up… i don’t know…

but thanks anyways

4

Have you tried cross-checking her into the boards? :smiley: I find that almost always works with older siblings.

Mazer, two minutes for roughing! he he he

5

Ok… to help, I need more info.

  1. Is it really your computer, or your family’s computer collectively?

  2. If it is your computer, why isn’t it in your bedroom?

  3. How do you connect to the net?

  4. If you connect via cable or DSL, is it straight into that PC, or through a LAN.

  5. If through a LAN, do you use some type of almost-router (Like the LinkSys Home Cable/DSL Router, or similar products), through a linux PC, etc, etc…

  6. Is the other end of the computer’s internet connection wire (phone line, if dialup, network cable if through LAN, coax or phoneline if straight to broadband, etc)… is the other end of the cable out of view in such a way that you could disconnect without being seen?

If you use one of the home almost-routers, many of them have the option of blocking certain IPs. There are more creative things you can do if you’re using a linux box, but I don’t have any expertise with the type of softwares you’d be using.

For any of that, you’d have to have the pwords for administrative access, or it wouldn’t work.

6

OH… this reminds me of a little problem I had with my little sister. I rule my family’s LAN and cable internet connection.

One time, I noticed incredibly slow connectivity… I mean VERY slow. I first checked my ISP’s network status page, nothing. I then checked the status lights on my almost-router (LinkSys Home DSL/Cable Router), finding that my sister’s line was very busy. I went into her room, and three people were DL’ing from her p2p music sharing program (Kazaa), and it was set up to allow all the bandwidth it could consume.

Simple… she was asleep in the living room, so I just changed the settings without telling her. I limited it to one upload at a time, 56k max, and no “supernode” crap that would turn her PC into the info server for the neighborhood. I slightly limited the bandwith usage for her downloads as well.

I half thought to just go into the Kazaa directory, delete some random files and break it, but I figured that if I could just cripple it without her noticing, that’d be better.

Imp

7

I’ve got a similar case with my brother. He’s a big fan of “Dragon Balls” and “Akira” and a bunch of other pornographic animes. (I will admit, some are good --“Princess Mononoke” is really good and “Grave Of The Fireflies” sounds great–but let’s make that some and not a lot.) Sometimes, I’ll be online, and he doesn’t bother to check to see if anyone else is on. He’ll just log on and kick us off. We use AOL, quite unfortunately, but it has “time limits,” which limits everyone’s (excluding our parents) online time. Unfortunately, he’s got the same time limits as the rest of us, giving me 4 hours (8 hours, if you include an extra screen name I have), and him 4 hours in whihc to kick us off. To make matters worse, I’ve got school, and he’s basically a drop-out. Sometimes I’ll come home and he’ll be online! He hasn’t been on long, and he’s had about 6 hours to do what he wants! Also, when I’m online (or Blending, half the time), he’ll come into the room I’m in without knocking, and talk my ear off about stuff like “Dragon Balls,” “Akira,” etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc… Or some non-anime-but-it-still-sucks stuff like “Planet Of The Makeup,” “Wallet Raider,” “Blah Wars,” “Star Blech,” etc., etc., etc… He never listens when I tell him to go away, or to shut up. I’ve tried to do the same thing to him (usually Blender, or “Waking Life,” or mathematical films), but he sometimes threatens.

I can occasionally get revenge (usually, I trick him into thinking a Blender picture is real–or once, that it was made by Square Pictures), but he… well, I can’t think of what he does, but once I tried him into thinking that head made by Svo for the head tutorial was by Square, and he didnt like that at all. He threw pens at me. It’s not fun.

The moral: Get revenge!

8

if you’re really creative, you could write a little program that starts batch rendering whenever she logs in on the comp… mwahahahaha

Martin

9

i’ve got a better plan. y’see my internet connection is weird… well, it might be like this for other people but… meh. anyway, whenever she’s doing something that really uses the internet (ie, downloading stupid songs or listening to the hockey game on internet radio), i START VACUUMING! this is pretty strange but it works. as soon someone starts vacuuming near the dsl modem or the router the connection gets interupted… BWAHAHAHAHAAA!

10

I still say
that you should strike her down with dark side of the force
that you should introduce her to a young, single hockey player.

Still, vacuuming would work. Although she will catch on eventually and beat you up, or get your parents to do it.

11

I think you need to get one of those passworded programs that people use for 5 year olds that pretty much prevents them from going anywhere.
Or just delete all the files she downloads on a regular basis.

12

guys…you disappoint me…you’re much to subtle. what did mankind invent chainsaws for? just kidding. why dont you just create accounts for every user - you being the admin, of course - and disallow all the major hockey websites she likes going to. if that seems too obvious, and she’d notice, then you could…hmmm…let’s see…save some money and buy your own computer, or you could tell your parents that doing stuff in blender is preparation for your future job as an artist, and that its much more important than your sister’s hockey shit. I agree with you about the hockey thing, how can anybody be so interested in crap like that? :-?

13

Isn’t that what hockey players think about us computer geeks? :wink:

14

I’d ask some of them, but I like all my body parts, from teeth to my head to my hands, and don’t want anyof them chopped off by inept maniacs.

For chopping down trees, cutting things in half, and chopping off annoying sister heads. Good question!

To Mazer:

VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM! VACUUM!

15

Dude, anime rocks. It’s not freaking pornagraphic. I guess all movies are now porn because porn movies exist? Akira is viewed as one of the most phenomenal movies around. It isn’t ****ing porn. Not everthing with nudity is bad or is “porn”.
Geez.

BTW, Dragon Ball sucks though.

16

take that laptop and shove something up it’s floppy!!!

17

I know not everything with nudity is porn (“Memento” is one of the best films ever). But come on! “Akira” is so boring! Dragon Balls (hehehehehehe) sucks Dragon Balls! If I was going to watch anything Japanese, it’d probably be “Ran!”

18

guys this is getting off topic here (good thing it started out in the off topic forum anyways), so i might as well join in. i think i’ve seen a tiny bit of akira (it’s with those super kick ass motorcycyles right?). did you hear that wb might be making it into a live action movie?

19

I know not everything with nudity is porn (“Memento” is one of the best films ever). But come on! “Akira” is so boring! Dragon Balls (hehehehehehe) sucks Dragon Balls! If I was going to watch anything Japanese, it’d probably be “Ran!”[/quote]
Um. Is that a racial slur?
Dragon Ball (IT IS DRAGON BALL NOT DRAGON BALLS) does suck quite bad but the manga of DBZ (actually called Dragon Ball too) is pretty good. Calling Dragon Ball porn is like calling Barney porn. They’re both kids shows. The latter’s just infinitly more annoying. “Akira is so boring!” <— Coming from a mathematicla thriller lover? ? ?
Check out Cowboy Bebop, Any Gundam series except for Gundam Wing and G Gundam (which is S H I T), Princess Mononoke, etc. REAL anime. Don’t base your opinion on that Japanimation shit like Pokemon, Digimon, and (god forbid) Yu-Gi-Oh!.

guys this is getting off topic here (good thing it started out in the off topic forum anyways), so i might as well join in. i think i’ve seen a tiny bit of akira (it’s with those super kick ass motorcycyles right?). did you hear that wb might be making it into a live action movie?

SWEEEET. I’d love to see that.

20

also, you say she kicks you off? common, man, use force! using 10 GB of ****ing mp3s is simply spoiled. where talking doesnt work, pushing solves. also, i REALLY think you should just delete all of here mp3s. hahaha.