I made our office play personalized entrance theme music | Hacker News Reader

I made our office play personalized entrance theme music

dev.to

144 pointsandy_panzer57 comments

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/

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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)

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

More like an employee shaming service if you're late.

My first thought too.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

Celine Dion or Nickelback for everyone!

I 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.

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.

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 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

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

Yup, his nickname was Darth Vader because of :-

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

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.

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)

Don'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. :)

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.

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.

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

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?

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?

there will be always inconsiderate people, even if it's only one out of 20 it's more than enough in big open space and you can't really do anything about it, it's just human nature and it's foolish to expect there won't be person like that in big team

it was same in every open space i worked in those many years, luckily in my last job we had internal messenger and personal communication (at least with our team) was discouraged so i had no problem with headphones to live in my own environment

My last job at a startup was good craic. I am generally one of the more chatty + whimsical people in an office. But, though goofing around with my colleagues was alright its not my ideal way of spending my time.

I just thought that work was sucking away my life! I will try and explain it using numbers in a very ad-hoc manner...

Lets say the desirability of spending time working really hard and focusing on interesting (but not your own work) is 50%. Working less efficiently on interesting (but not your own work) in an atmosphere of bonhomie and craic with your colleagues is 60%. Doing exactly what you want(hobbies, working on your own ideas ,time with friends etc) is 100% Also just for reference the desirability of spending time cleaning the house and paying bills and crap is 0%.

In my last job I was spending 8 hours per day (out of 16 waking hours) at work at 60%, another few hours at 0% (lets say 4) and only a few at 100% (lets say the remaining 4) That leads to an average of about 55% for the day.

Contrast this to working intensely and without distraction for 4 hours, the same 4 hours of chores, and then the remaining 8 hours of doing whatever you want. This leads to a daily average of 62.5%

This is all made up and incredibly rough but the 2nd scenario will yield a higher average unless you greatly desire work with craic over intense focused work, or you desire work with craic almost as much as doing whatever you want.

I 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.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

I've owned two devices where bluetooth audio and wifi interfered with each other. This is not even remotely unusual.

Every time I drive past that retail store with the saved wifi it tries really, really hard to connect to the store causing pause/stuttering on the bluetooth audio for about 3 seconds about 90% of the time.

People are good at pattern matching, after a couple hundred events on a couple hundred commutes you pick up on the exact telephone pole I drive by where I expect my audio playback to stutter.

For something like a podcast or audio book its just a word or two hardly noticeable, but for music its very annoying and I'll shut off the wifi to avoid the interference.

If you try hard you can find just the wrong spot in the gym or office or restaurant where the phone goes nuts trying to connect to a very weak wifi over and over and failing and causing chaos in which case you have to shut off the wifi to get any work done over the more reliable data plan.

There are many many companies that will track MAC addresses, you don't just expose them then connected to a network you expose them constantly (along with a lot of other potentially identifiable data [hotspots previously connected to]). [1]

While a mac address isn't personally identifiable it can be used as a tracking mechanism. MAC X was seen at place Y and place Z etc... Combine with some fun data exploration of hotspots you've connected to (and other phones that have also connected to the same hotspots) and you can get some interesting results like MACs 1, 2, 3 have all been at the best western while 1 and 3 have also both been on network Y which is located in the general vicinity of this address. (I can't for the life of me find the Defcon video of this, was maybe Defcon 20 or 21).

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mg-9ygi-pMk

Its an old story, can also do it with bluetooth, there's also a Hak5 video episode from a couple years ago about sniffing the serial numbers of individual tire pressure monitoring transmitters in your car tires.

Sooner or later someone will be selling the police a service of these MAC addrs or BT addresses or tire pressure sensors have been sighted near the XYZ protest and you just pulled one of those listed devices over so someone in that car is a protestor or was sniffed nearby a shooting crime scene or ...

To avoid the law enforcement entanglements, look how expensive underaged alcohol serving tickets are, now here is a low sensitivity device that sniffs very nearby wireless traffic and a subscription list of serial numbers seen entering and leaving the mostly underage college dorms and/or high school, now if the LED over the door of the bar turns red it doesn't prove your ID is fake but maybe it has a nice bright yellow warning LED to indicate the bouncer or guard should triple check your ID because its on a suspicious list.

Legally most anything is fair with house arrest and parole, register your smartphone and expect severe response if your MAC address shows up anywhere near a bar (assuming your parole forbids drinking establishments etc)

Think of the profiling legacy retail stores will start doing. Hmm this MAC address is recorded to be mostly sniffed around jail, the homeless shelter, and the low income walmart, what is it doing in the electronics department ten miles away from home? Better have someone watch them on camera or in person.

Imagine at a personal level subscribing to a service where you upload every tracking serial number you sniff continuously and in response get a threat indicator. Are there any threat smartphones in this dark alley? Is the clientele of this bar generally safe or dangerous? Based on the MAC addresses currently present, is this a safe neighborhood or should I drive on to the next gas station?

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.

"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.

Always made use of SSL, VPNs, and SSH proxies on the off-chance, but didn't realize how simple wifi attacks might be[1]. Feel like I should have known this already - thanks for the illumination!

[1]: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/137104/is-hacki...

I switch off wifi on my phone and laptops to conserve power.

Does 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?

yes 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

I keep both WiFi and cellular data off unless I need them. Don't like the idea of my phone churning through background processes and network activity from my pocket.

Running the wifi radio at all when you know there is no network to connect to is pointless, and does waste some small amount of power.

You turn off wifi when you know that you won't be using it, eg, when you go outside of work/home.

Some people will not want their phone connecting to WiFi because they don't want tracking, eg around the supermarket.

The constant polling for new networks if you arent currently connected to one is a HUGE effect on battery life (for a phone). I tend to find about a 50% increase with wifi off. Now for a laptop, the wifi takes up less of the power draw but presumably still has an effect.

I have a number of public hotspots that sometimes decide to connect over one of my private networks (like xfinitywifi). It's annoying when you're driving too, really.

I keep the wifi on my phone turned off when I'm not using it, but I assume this is NOT typical of most people.

Cool. A bit of robotization would be awesome.

This is awesome.

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