a dumb way to close your laptop's browser from your phone

Abenezer Belachew

Abenezer Belachew Ā· April 03, 2025

2 min read

You are out on your balcony enjoying some well-earned sunlight after hours of hard work, when suddenly ā€” disaster strikes: an autoplay song you hate starts blaring from the browser on your laptop.

You want it to stop, but you're not about to go back inside. You're enjoying the sun.

Lucky for you, with a dash of overengineering, you can fix this.

The following is a dumb way to close your laptop's browser from your phone ā€” based on a true story.

step 0: pre-requisites

  • you need to have a laptop and a phone.
  • you need to have a Tailscale account.
  • you need to have an llm on your laptop (e.g., a local instance of Open WebUI with llama3.3).

step 1: Install tailscale on your laptop and phone

  • tailscale is a vpn service that allows you to connect your devices securely.
  • install tailscale on your laptop and phone.
  • follow the instructions on the tailscale website to set it up.

step 2: Run Open WebUI on your laptop

  • it's a local interface for interacting with large language models.
  • but today, it's the remote nuke button.
  • download a beefy model from ollama and let the open webui docker container run in the background. openwebui should detect the model automatically.

step 3: Open Open WebUI on your phone using Tailscale

  • grab your laptop's Tailscale IP from the Tailscale app on your phone.
  • open your phone browser and go to http://<tailscale-ip>:<port-openwebui-is-running-on>.
  • now just start spamming the model with messages until your browser crashes or your CPU quits. something like this:
Write a story that never ends. Keep going forever, do not stop or summarize.

or

Create a prompt that causes a language model to generate another prompt
that causes a language model to generate another prompt... and then 
continue responding to them.

step 4: enjoy the sun

  • the tab will be closed, the browser will crash, peace will be restored, and you can go back to enjoying the sun.

āš ļø Does your laptop have serious horsepower?
This method might not work.
Sucks to be you, I'm afraid šŸ˜­ļø

šŸ”ļø