headshed.dev/filter-lt but what is it ?
Jon Brookes
2025-02-07
A friend and former work colleague came to me with a problem. Their home network, without parental controls was open for young ones to access the internet at all hours, in any way, and to be always pre-occupied. Despite the responsible adults having set the table for a meal, put out a feast of goodness for their little ones to feed upon, getting everyone downstairs from their rooms for food is always a problem.
The problem was not the lack of tools to restrict internet access at certain times, rather, the plethora of tools and an apparent lack of any meaningful co-ordination between any of them. This makes it a burdensome task to control little ones, and oft not so little ones, internet access of one kind or another, when it is time for dinner or tea or just for the family to simply gather.
headshed.dev/filter-lt is a joint effort of two main parties in partnership to rectify these discrepancies and to provide a single device based solution to act as a home or small office gateway to the internet. This may then be used as a one stop point of management to tackle this thorny problem.
Put simply, it’s a box that you plug into your network that will then act as a ‘managed internet gateway’ to which you may add little, littler and perhaps not so little users, in order to limit times and nature of access to the Internet. It may also serve so as to protect from unwanted content being visible on your network at any time of the day or night.
Even more simply, it can in it’s initial form be perceived as a ‘big red button’ to ‘switch off the Internet’, when it is time for us to gather and spend time with each other, or to get important homework done, or it is just time for bed and school the next day. We now have an off switch for what has become the firehose of data called the Internet.
As another project we are working on called share-lt is taking back control of our content, then we could in contrast see that filter-lt is at least, in part, an attempt to take back control of our time.
In our planning and design phase we realized that not only young families could be folks that may really need something like this. We like to call this the ‘2nd life of filter-lt’. When good habits are formed with life online, filter-lt could also become ‘self managed’ by its users so as to act as an on-going reminder for living online. It can help ring fence time for personal pursuits of mindfulness, productivity, reflection or anything else we want to protect from distraction and attention-seeking social media or its like.
The exact nature and composition of this as a solution so far is as a single device - a WiFi router and switch. In effect, it is a network device that would be purchased and added to an existing home network afront of an ISPs already provided ‘router’, by which means the responsible adults would continue to access the internet and any cloud based services associated with filter-lt.
For those of you interested in the technical stack that this is based upon, so far this comprises of an OpenWRT router that is modified to filter internet traffic.
Not just in the spirit of Open Source, but also in the flexibility and adaptability that this platform offers for the above we believe that this has, as they say in the trade, ‘got legs’. It could go on to do great things for the home, small office and even small to medium size enterprise or, who knows, beyond.
As it is so far based upon filtering of web services using Domain Name Service
(DNS) it is in common with widely used solutions that are out there already that do much of the same. In essence, DNS acts as the ‘telephone book’ for the internet, governing access to web services and websites. Without DNS we could not access even the page you are reading this on. So by filtering traffic using this, we are able to provide a single device solution. We do not then require individual configuration of every single internet device that is to be managed by filter-lt. It’s management may become centralized allowing for
one big red button
And this big red button may be available for us to press in the case of an emergency house meeting, or just ‘time for food’ even. Or it may just be to bring the household to order for at least 20 minutes before there is a restoration to the chaos of the internet thereafter.
If you would like to know more or even to participate in the design, implementation of or just ideas for filter-lt we are still at an early ‘pre-alpha’ stage just now:
Please hit us up on social media, or email us direct using
We look forward to providing updates on this project that we believe could change our attitudes to security, staying safe online and, above all, taking control of our data and time.
Thanks for reading this article. If you found this of interest you may find others in this, a four part trilogy of :