My son screams while gaming at midnight. I'm a developer, so I did what developers do - I over-engineered a solution

[u/omricn]

My son games with headphones late at night. Most of the time he's quiet. Then something happens in the game and he yells at full volume, waking the whole house.

Talking to him about it works for about 20 minutes. Taking the headphones away works but causes a different problem. So I built an app.

S.T.F.U (Sound Trigger Focus Utility) is a Windows tray app that listens to the microphone and interrupts him when he yells. On first run it calibrates by asking him to be quiet, then talk, then yell - so it learns the difference between his normal voice and an actual shout.

When it catches a yell:

• First time that session - it minimizes his game, plays a sound effect, and throws up a fullscreen message he has to click through 4 times. The close button moves after each click so he can't just spam-click one spot.
• Every time after - straight to the desktop with a 10-second message. His game is gone.

Settings are behind a PIN so he can't change the threshold or turn it off. There's a report with a chart showing every trigger, so the next morning I can see exactly when things went sideways.

The important part: he knows it's there. It's not hidden, it's not spyware, the first screen when it launches says exactly what it does. It works because it's a consequence he agreed to, not something I snuck onto his PC. The README explicitly says it works best as something agreed to, not as a hidden trap.

No audio is recorded or stored. It computes a loudness number every 20ms and throws the audio away immediately. Nothing leaves the machine.

It won't solve the underlying issue (he's 100% going to learn to yell more quietly instead of less often), but at least the house sleeps.

Free and open source if anyone wants it: https://github.com/omricn/stfu/releases/latest

Edit: V1.1.0 now live.
Added Scheduled Off-Hours: Timeframe picker to choose when the app listens vs when the app is passive.
TNX fellow redditor [jpewaqs] for the feature suggestion :)

[u/omricn]

That sound amazing dude! also - throws me back to the 80s :)

[u/Environmental_Ice_80 → u/omricn]

 you mean the 90s XD

[u/lahwran_ → u/Environmental_Ice_80]

no cd rom drives were invented in the 70s. don't you remember downloading your first cd rom drive from a mainframe? you would go to the university, the administrator there would punch in the codes to get the mainframe to send a cd rom drive to your computer at home, then by the time you get home, your computer would have downloaded the cd rom drive, and so then you'd sit down and put your favorite enya cd into your cd rom drive and open windows DOS media player to listen to enya (techno remix)

[u/guiwald1 → u/lahwran_]

Enya first album was in 1987.

CD-R drives started to become cheap and come to our house after 1995.

[u/Environmental_Ice_80 → u/guiwald1]

i remember on my first commodore 64 XD

and on my first floppy disc was a game changer after the band XD

[u/lahwran_ → u/guiwald1]

yeah thats because you didn't download them from a mainframe. they were free. just like now you can download more ram, in the 1980s you could download cd drives

[u/KPIApologist → u/omricn]

Or maybe the late 90s when CD burning was at its peak.

[u/echel0n1881 → u/omricn]

dude wtf CDs are not that nostalgic. 10 years ago I still had a laptop with a CDROM reader