9 ms·
I made our office play personalized entrance theme music
- securingsincity 10y agoVery fun. A colleague and I did a similar thing a few years back using ADP and a raspberry pi. We created a dummy account on our ADP account which had a web portal. We reverse engineered the polling calls the portal made. We would run a small server on the raspberry pi that called the most recent people who had entered. When someone entered it was pretty close to instantaneous that it would kick off theme music and a display welcoming them to the office. https://www.instagram.com/p/oWDJdUwP4Q/ https://www.instagram.com/p/oWDJdUwP4Q/
- applecrazy 10y agoNice! But is that IE I see running on the screen? (gasp)
- everyone 10y agoVery cool! That would annoy the hell out of me personally though. Further, I hate this sort of startup office mentality, where employees are encouraged to goof around and spend more time in the office. If there is a good reason for some work to be done in an office, then the office should be optimised for one to be able to complete that work as fast as possible and then get the hell out of there to go and live ones life. (Above is not a criticism of you or your cool thing, just an ancilliary rant it triggered)
- andy_panzer 10y agoDon't sweat it - you are, of course, totally right. This is something that's been on the back of my mind as a clever joke for a few years. The music is definitely not something I'm going to install long-term. I've turned the volume up really loud for my demonstration in the video. And in reality I haven't got a song for every staff member. It also only plays once per day before 9am. It's smart enough to last at least a couple of weeks before we all decide it was a clever hack but is annoying as f*ck! Thanks for the nice comments otherwise, though. :)
- throwaway9475 10y agoI used to work at a bank service center (with cubicals) and it was night and day compared to the startup I'm at now. I don't miss the work, but I definitely miss he silence. There were the occasional loud conversations, but otherwise there was just the lowest din of office noise (phones ringing here and there, keyboards clicking, etc.) I think part of it is cultural: these were mostly women in their 30s to 50s processing IRAs and direct deposits, and not people right out of university doing trendy software development. Anyway, I agree with you. I think it's partially because Google did it, and partially because if you make an office "fun" and "cool", people spend more time there for the same amount of money. (Note: your startup CAN have exposed conduit in a downtown office building AND be quiet.)
- bhldr 10y agoWell to each his own right? I personally would hate to work in a place where there's little socializing and quiet all day. I love the open office. I always get a little annoyed when people make the assumption all programmers want peace and quiet. My day concists of a lot of banter and wouldn't want it any other way. I worked at a major financial services firm for a while too where there there were private offices and lots of silence and I felt isolated and miserable. How about we all just look for jobs where the work ethic fits our personalities instead of judging if someone else's doesn't fit yours.
- cauterized 10y agoThe problem is that if just two or three people like the lively, chatty open office, it ruins it for everyone else whose productivity suffers by an order of magnitude in a noisy environment. It's basically impossible these days to find an office where someone who needs quiet to concentrate can get work done effectively. Whereas in an office where quiet is the norm, you can always go to the kitchen if you really want to chat.
- Markoff 10y agowell you can always buy noise cancellation headphones, though i personally hate open office space too, i would rather work for less money in normal office than for more in open office
- throwaway9475 10y agoThere are several problems with this, namely: they don't work as well for loud conversation (they're more for things like the drone of an airplane engine). They're also not necessarily comfortable to wear for long periods of time. But most importantly, why is it so hard for people to just, respectfully, shut the hell up? I work (and worked) with people who practically yell during Google Hangouts and don't go to conference rooms, or who joke around all day. I've worked in theee separate open environments and a handful of people have always had volume issues which ruin it for everyone else. Luckily I can work remote now, but why is it so hard to be considerate of others?
- noir_lord 10y agoI did this years ago at an office I worked at, The rfid door entry system had an API notification system so I tied it into the buildings PA system (which was just an old server running Linux in a utility closet) so that whenever the boss key'd in it'd play https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bzWSJG93P8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bzWSJG93P8 in specific rooms (dev team room and my office). He was not amused. Given how generally useless he was he should have been glad it wasn't this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk2ASy1svvU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk2ASy1svvU
- skocznymroczny 10y agoI knew what theme it'd play before clicking the link :)
- noir_lord 10y agoYup, his nickname was Darth Vader because of :- "I am altering the timeline, pray I don't alter it any further"
- mgv11 10y agoVery neat hack! Although I thought most people turn off the WIFI when not using it.
- duggan 10y agoIt's never occurred to me to turn off WiFi for any reason short of debugging; can you explain why someone would regularly disable it?
- zeamaize 10y agoI switch off wifi on my phone and laptops to conserve power.
- throwanem 10y agoDoes it actually help on your phone? I should think that falling back to cellular data would potentially consume more power, since the chipset will increase tx/rx power to compensate for weak signal. Or do you turn that radio off, too?
- amnah 10y agoYou turn off wifi when you know that you won't be using it, eg, when you go outside of work/home.
- pbhjpbhj 10y agoSome people will not want their phone connecting to WiFi because they don't want tracking, eg around the supermarket.
- Markoff 10y agoyes it helps and i have pretty much always disabled mobile data unless i am expecting something important, so there is no fallback, though always enabled mobile data would be battery wise much more serious issue than WiFi which is pretty efficient nowadays
- chanux 10y agoI did something similar at my previous workplace with wifi (and wired connection) to keep track of attendance. The one person HR department still loves (/me thinks) me for some automation I did back then.
- retSava 10y agoNice! I started on something similar (project's resting atm). The approach I took was to look for the phone Wi-Fi MAC addresses on the LAN, as in the article. In my case I couldn't get logs from the router, so I pinged the IP space 192.168.0.x, which would update the ARP table and then I could check that one. If a host is unreachable, it is removed from the ARP table. I was hoping for something like `ping` but lower, on Wi-fi MAC level, but alas.
- amelius 10y agoNice, as long as it doesn't keep logs, as in an office time clock.
- padobson 10y agoTimely and useful. Something like this could really help morale, especially if used on special occasions (e.g. Wrestlemania weekend). Anytime I've entered a room to selected theme music (weddings, recreational sports, a roommate watching me through the window and hitting play), it's always given me a nice pop. I think it's a good idea for businesses to spend time on little things to make their employees feel special, in addition to doing the important things well too.
- strgrd 10y agoOnly comes at the cost of permanently logging each employee's personal device's WiFi activity!
- i_live_there 10y agoFrom what the author explained, the router only sends an event to the server when it detects a user entering/exiting the network range and ignores everything else. There's nowhere on the article where he says he's permanently logging their WiFi activity.
- coldcode 10y agoI'm the first one in the office, so I get no benefit, but all the noise :-)
- cube00 10y agoYou can have an exit theme for when you leave before everyone else.
- i_live_there 10y agoSeems really cool, but I think this can grow old really fast.
- banku_brougham 10y agoI like it, i would enjoy this but 8am is not really the time of day i want to be pumped up. Anyway, it looks more like an employee time-tracking service to me.
- cube00 10y agoMore like an employee shaming service if you're late.
- ruminasean 10y agoMy first thought too.
- freehunter 10y agoI did a similar thing a while back forwarding logs from my router to a PiHole server I hacked to receive my router's syslog in addition to the normal DNS logs. I work from home in the basement with no windows and it's constantly a challenge to figure out who is walking through the front door upstairs at any moment (in my house, not an office). Getting a notification that says the hostname of the recently-connected device lets me know if it's my wife, my sister-in-law, or my roommate so I know if I need to come greet them or if I need to put on some pants first. There's all kinds of use for this kind of tracking.
- VLM 10y agoI've been slowly moving from misterhouse to openhab for home automation and there's a "network" binding that toggles a virtual switch depending on who's pingable. Also I have an insteon controllable thermostat. So its only a couple lines of code to toggle the thermostat settings based on who's home (or not home) plus a couple other rules and sensors of course (like if my wifi ap broke or both phones were dead and need charging, I also look at various other internal status measurements etc)
- freehunter 10y agoThat's actually pretty cool, I didn't know that existed!
- 4684499 10y agoCool. A bit of robotization would be awesome.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y agoI want to do this, but with faces instead of wifi. Maybe fall back to wifi when it can't remember a face.
- brudgers 10y agoI like the hack from a technical perspective. It's fun. It's clever. It's creative. In terms of a business I wonder what sort of company culture this helps create and how that culture might scale. Is it ok to pick country music or classical music or gospel? Can someone pick a misogynist tune for themselves? How about something with references to sexual acts? Will the janitor get entrance music? Yea, it's kind of a downer to think about these things. The important thing here is the core abstraction: the company celebrating each individual every day (and probably several times a day) is valuable. The mechanism not so much because it allows massive opportunity for poor decisions. Anyone who feels harmed by it (or who sees potential harms in it) to be cast as against fun...e.g. me, right now.
- StavrosK 10y ago> Is it ok to pick country music or classical music or gospel? Yes > Can someone pick a misogynist tune for themselves? Yes, if they're a misogynist. Why are you hiring misogynists? > How about something with references to sexual acts? Same as above. > Will the janitor get entrance music? Why the fuck not? > The mechanism not so much because it allows massive opportunity for poor decisions It allows for poor decisions because people might set their own music? If your employees are going to be assholes, that's not a problem that's going to be solved by not having entrance music. The company's culture will have a big problem with or without the entrance music, try to get people who aren't assholes.
- prophesi 10y agoI have to agree with this. If you're going to be celebrating your company's culture, this is a great way to find out what that culture actually is.
- liveoneggs 10y agoI'm sorry but choosing theme music is reserved for senior managers and above. Anyone below this rank will be assigned music based on their last performance report.
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- Asparagirl 10y agoThis is awesome.