
I made our office play personalized entrance theme music - andy_panzer
https://dev.to/buntine/hulkamania-or-how-i-made-our-office-play-personalized-entrance-theme-music
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securingsincity
Very 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/)

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applecrazy
Nice! But is that IE I see running on the screen? (gasp)

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padobson
Timely 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.

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strgrd
Only comes at the cost of permanently logging each employee's personal
device's WiFi activity!

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i_live_there
From 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.

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banku_brougham
I 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.

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freehunter
I 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.

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VLM
I'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)

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freehunter
That's actually pretty cool, I didn't know that existed!

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brudgers
I 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.

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StavrosK
> 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.

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liveoneggs
I'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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StavrosK
And janitors get no music, because we all know janitors aren't actually
useful!

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retSava
Nice! 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.

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noir_lord
I 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)

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skocznymroczny
I knew what theme it'd play before clicking the link :)

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noir_lord
Yup, his nickname was Darth Vader because of :-

    
    
        "I am altering the timeline, pray I don't alter it any further"

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chanux
I 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.

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everyone
Very 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)

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bhldr
Well 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.

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cauterized
The 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.

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Markoff
well 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

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throwaway9475
There 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?

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brokenmachine
I agree. Unfortunately, loud people want to be loud, and _you_ have a problem
if you want quiet.

Also I hate loud music in every cafe/store.

Why are people so scared of a bit of quiet reflection/concentration?

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coldcode
I'm the first one in the office, so I get no benefit, but all the noise :-)

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cube00
You can have an exit theme for when you leave before everyone else.

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amelius
Nice, as long as it doesn't keep logs, as in an office time clock.

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i_live_there
Seems really cool, but I think this can grow old really fast.

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0xdeadbeefbabe
I want to do this, but with faces instead of wifi. Maybe fall back to wifi
when it can't remember a face.

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mgv11
Very neat hack! Although I thought most people turn off the WIFI when not
using it.

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duggan
It's never occurred to me to turn off WiFi for any reason short of debugging;
can you explain why someone would regularly disable it?

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001spartan
If you leave your wifi on when you're not connected to a network, your device
will automatically start sending probes for known networks. For instance, if
your home wifi network is called "duggan's network", and you're at an airport
across the world, your phone will advertise to all devices in the vicinity
that you're looking for "duggan's network".

Then, a malicious person can advertise an SSID of "duggan's network", and in
certain cases, could get your device to connect to that network without you
interacting with your device, or even realizing that something has changed.

Ask most infosec people, and they'll tell you that they _always_ turn off
their wifi when they leave a trusted location.

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VLM
"and in certain cases"

Specifically having a completely open and unsecured wifi. If you put much of
any security on it, that protects your users. Which is where the seemingly
weird advice comes from for guest wifi to not use completely unsecured
connections and at least try some kind of password.

So if you connect to completely unsecured wide open "Car Dealer Last Name
Service Guest" network while you're getting your oil changed or whatever,
someone can set up "Car Dealer Last Name Service Guest" at starbux and MITM
you a bit, or at least mess with you. On the other hand if your car dealer has
a wifi named "Guest Network" with a WEP key of the car dealers last name then
its hard for a guy hours later at starbux to set up a WEP secured "Guest
Network" that you can connect to and get MITM'd.

For a real good time ask yourself what stops someone from MITM you at the car
dealer by setting up a WEP secured wifi with the same name as the dealership
and the password thats the same as the sign on the wall. Well, basically
nothing. This can make life entertaining.

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4684499
Cool. A bit of robotization would be awesome.

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Asparagirl
This is awesome.

