ShadowKill
A personal experiment.
Knock twice on your desk and every browser closes and a spreadsheet opens.
Shadow Kill is a panic button you trigger by knocking twice on your desk. It listens through the microphone, and when it hears a quick double knock it closes every web browser and opens an ordinary-looking spreadsheet, so the screen is back to “work” within a second.
It started as a joke about the boss walking in, and it is a small, honest demonstration of reacting to sound in real time.
- 01
Listen for loud sounds
The script keeps the microphone open and measures the loudest point of every short slice of audio.
- 02
Recognise a double knock
A sound over the volume threshold counts as a knock. A second knock between a fraction of a second and one second later counts as the signal. Single bumps are ignored.
- 03
Hide everything
It force-closes Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Brave and Opera, then opens a plain “Work Report” spreadsheet. A ten-second pause stops it from firing again straight away.
- 04
Tune it to your desk
The knock volume, the time window and the list of browsers are settings at the top of the script, so it can be made more or less sensitive.
Closing a browser this way discards anything unsaved in it. The trial build is on GitHub.