I'm using Cold Turkey for blocking distracting websites, but I unfortunately put it to 20 days and it now gets really annoying.
Many "solutions" on the internet I have stumbled upon are for Cold Turkey versions which store their values (what to block and when it's over and so on) in a text-file. But it seems like Cold Turkey has improved and stores it's values in a SQL-Lite-Database.
Just going into the task manager and killing the process doesn't do much as the Cold Turkey - process pops up around 2 seconds later.
Also one "solution" suggested to go into the "host"-file system32/windows/drivers/etc/hosts and delete the entries Cold Turkey has written in there. Unfortunately - there are no entries.
Is there another way then restoring the computer to an old point (or even setting up the computer completely knew) to still get rid of Cold Turkey or bypass it?
02 Answers
Just leaving this answer out there if someone happens to chance upon this thread, given that this was my first result in Google Search.
I believe there is an easier workaround. I have not tested it for blocks set for multiple days. I happened to have sites blocked for an hour when I rebooted my system (did not notice that the time had taken effect). I did not want to wait. Here is what I did:
- First, set your computer's time to any time past the current block. At least the current block will be visible under active blocks.
- This will allow you to delete all other blocks on your schedule, but not the one currently active. Do that and restart CTB. You should see that all your blocks have disappeared except the current active one.
- Because this block is already active, the change in date/time will not affect it. Just to be on the safer side, I restarted CTB in the previous step. Now reboot your system. When CTB starts up again, it should now see that the time is past its current active block and will not be actively blocking anything. Just remove your current active block and voila, you should be all set.
- You can now go ahead and uninstall CTB if you want to.
I have tested this on Windows 10 with CTB 3.10. Did not have to do anything messy with Startup Items or hosts files or anything else. Hope this helps someone, even though it is an old thread.
What came to my mind is to just create a virtual Ubuntu-Computer with VirtualBox. (It only takes around 10-30 minutes, but only 10 minutes for you, as the rest is installing and downloading)
Here's a tutorial:
That's not how you can get around the block or deinstall cold turkey, but you can access (blocked) webpages on the same physical computer.
