For “fun” I am going to catalog the stupid technology I use right now or whatever. Okay:
phone
I tried switching to a flip phone a couple of years ago, but I just don’t think the technology is there, really. Or at least it’s not there for me. I became even harder to reach, which is a huge problem for me personally, as I am already very bad and weird about communication with people I love who do not live in the same region as I do. Additionally, there are very few, if any, gadgets I have found less pleasurable to try to do stuff with than the flip phone. The interface is breathtakingly irritating. The feeling of being literally just unable to scroll down to a numerical code you need to log in to something is uniquely maddening.
So I started thinking about ways I could keep my smartphone without using it as much. I’d fucked around with like “minimalist themes” or keeping it in greyscale or whatever for a while, but none of these things ameliorated the central fact that I experienced it as essentially an eldritch portal to Hell that made everything I like and am interested in dissolve into a kind of mental grey goo sloppily colonizing my pathetically unshielded mind.
After quite a while of noodling around, this is basically the “workflow” (ugh) I came up with. For context, I still have my Samsung Galaxy; it’s plugged in by my bathroom sink and I look at it maybe once a day. I’ve organized it by function:
Talking on the phone while I’m out of the house. I purchased a $30 TCL flip phone preloaded with 1000 minutes or something from what is apparently the cheapest source for such things, the Home Shopping Network website. Unfortunately I fucked this all up some by forwarding texts to it using Tasker until I ran out of texts, and I can’t buy more. Still, it’s very straightforward to forward calls to another phone, at least with Verizon. A few more spam calls slip through than I’d like but that’s okay. Unfortunately I can’t forward calls backwards through my old number, meaning that when I call people from the flip phone, it shows up as a different number, and I can’t text them to warn that I’m about to call from a different number—this is all a genuine problem. But telling the people I’m likely to call about my new number gets me part of the way there.
Talking on the phone when I’m at my house. This is one of my favorite things about this whole setup. I got a landline-style cordless phone from AT&T and connected it via Bluetooth to my cell phone. When I receive calls now, the “home phone” rings like a landline, and I talk on the phone like I’m on a landline. The main complaint I have about this is that the phone is oddly quiet, and it would be nice to be able to connect a headset to the phone receiver so I could putter around while talking. But it’s also kind of nice not to be able to multitask. (More on that later.)
Texting. I’ve tried a bunch of different software for this but the only really reliable way I’ve found to forward and send texts even when I’m out of the house is Google Messages. (The Windows Link to Phone feature worked very well, too, but I use Linux for all my day-to-day computer stuff now, so it’s a moot point.) KDE Connect works well enough when I’m on a local network, and with Tailscale all my stuff functions like it’s connected to the local network, so that could potentially work. But it’s the tiniest bit spottier, the interface is clunkier—and, most fatally, it only works with SMS. I think people have been able to work MMS support in there, too, but I’d really like to be using at least RCS for texting where possible, if not Signal eventually, or whatever. Privacy is not my main concern with this whole setup but I think probably SMS as a protocol sucks so much that it really is basic best practices to steer clear where possible. I’m tentatively optimistic about this new software “fwd” that replaces Pushbullet, which I used before it became abandonware.
Likewise, I use the web client for Messenger and the Whatsapp client ZapZap for those chats. I think ZapZap is basically just a wrapper around a PWA but it works very smoothly.
Email. Nothing interesting here, except that I don’t check it on my phone. I do use Thunderbird, but I find its lack of cross-computer sync and a few other little things a bit frustrating. I’d like to set up a self-hosted email client at some point here so I could get it all kind of standardized and simple but I haven’t gotten around to figuring that all out yet.
A couple of general setup notes
Hardware note. The most important single piece of hardware I’ve found for replacing my smartphone in general has been the Boox Palma ereader. It’s (a) phone-sized, (b) runs Android, (c) lacks cell service, and (d) has an e-ink screen. It’s the e-ink screen that’s the most important thing here: I can look something up on the internet, but the screen provides just enough friction that I can resist getting sucked down a rabbit hole; if my smartphone as a device sort of pulls me towards a kind of evil flow void, this thing sort of broadly nudges me towards less self-obliterating functions. It’s still a little too online, maybe, and Android is shitty and only going to get shittier. But for now it’s the linchpin of the whole thing for me.
Tailscale. This the other important contextual note: the mindbendingly simple and robust service Tailscale extends my local network to wherever I’m using the internet. You just download the Tailscale application and log into a web interface and then you’re securely connected to all your other machines via VPN, which constantly allows me, an idiot, to do things that basically feel like magic tricks. It also means I don’t have to open anything on my home network up to the internet, which is good because that seems scary.
Home server. Long story short I use the laptop I used to take around with me as a server. It’s got normal old Ubuntu Desktop on it and it’s plugged into a 7 TB hard drive. It doesn’t have enough RAM for daily use, really, and also it’s ugly and I don’t like it, and when my backpack broke I dropped it and it’s dented. I use an ancient ThinkPad T450 with ElementaryOS on it when I leave the house now. When my loans come through next year I will get a slightly less ancient ThinkPad hopefully.
Back to other stuff
Music. I’ve been looking for a way to get off streaming basically since a few months after I first got Spotify back in 2013, and nothing has really stuck until now. I tried a couple of dedicated mp3 players, and would love to go back to one eventually for various reasons, but the “workflow” I have set up with the Boox Palma is undeniably extremely chill and convenient. Here’s how I download and listen to music right now:
(1) Use the self-hosted Soulseek client slskd to log on from any web browser, look up the music I want to listen to, and download it to my server.[1]
(2) I use SSH to log into my home server (through Tailscale), then run a single beets command to organize the files and import them into my library folder.
(3) Syncthing automatically syncs the music with my ereader.
I was experimenting with self-hosted streaming clients but I’ve been using Poweramp for Android music listening for years now and I am very attached to it; it might be my favorite mobile application of all time.
What I like about this setup is it provides just enough friction for me not to get bogged down in the Every Song Ever In History of streaming[2], but also is relatively convenient if I’m at a computer. As with so much of this, I think it’s about (1) calibrating the balance of friction and (2) limiting the extent to which I can digress from a given task. Also, using the command line still makes me feel very cool and elite, so it’s fun to use in a coffee shop or whatever.
Podcasts and audiobooks. I have a similar, though unhappily clunkier, operation with audiobooks involving torrenting and a seedbox and a differently configured version of beetsI run in its own Docker container, which reminds me that I will also make a server-specific post about what a Docker container is on the off-chance I haven’t already bored you to the point of weeping. Both audiobooks and podcasts are routed through the excellent self-hosted Audiobookshelf application. (The Android app has worked well for me, too.) I’m trying to reduce the quantity of time I spend listening to people talking at me in my ears all day so I haven’t gotten as much play out of this as I might’ve a few months ago, but it’s nice to have it all in one place, and it’s allowed me to cancel my Pocketcasts subscription (which is a nice solution for Android users not looking to self-host but interested in keeping podcasts synced across various devices).
“News.” FreshRSS has been great. I was trying to route it through various clients using APIs but honestly the web interface is just fine. Finding a good read-it-later client took a while for some reason but Readeck turned out to be the best bet for me; I dump articles I want to spend more time on into there and check them out when I feel like it, and then I can look them up easily when I’m working on something like this.
Ebooks. The best Android ebook client I’ve found is Moon+ Reader Pro; it interfaces directly with CalibreWeb, whose upload feature is awesome. (I would use a website like Anna’s Archive to pirate ebooks if that were something I did, which it isn’t.)
Photos. This one bummed me out but I dug out an old digital camera from my parents’ house. It’s too big to be truly convenient but it’s still kind of cool. I was never a big picture-taker though so who cares.
Notes. I use Obsidian for writing at this point and the notes apps on Android are great and work just fine on my Palma. I shell out for their sync feature and it’s about as frictionless as Google Drive.
Navigation. I got a good old-fashioned Garmin. Not having traffic info is tricky, though I think I can get that configured if I get another thingy or something. But honestly what it lacks in dexterity it makes up for with its UI, which I find much more handsome and usable than the Google Maps UI. I haven’t had to navigate a strange place on foot recently and I don’t know if I’d want to or be able to do that with the Garmin but if I move to a city where I can actually fucking walk anywhere at all I’ll have to think about this some.
Stuff I can’t do
Ride-share apps. I’ve used a Lyft once since being in Raleigh, when my car broke down; I got a friend to call me the ride and Venmoed them when I got home. If I travel I just bring my smartphone so no big deal.
Venmo. This kind of thing can almost always wait a few hours until I’m home.
Ordering delivery. This shit is so fucking expensive who cares.
Parking. This one is annoying. The credit-card machines usually take a lot longer. I got a privately-administered (?!) $35 ticket in this stupid bourgeois shopping plaza the other day because I couldn’t scan the mandatory QR code and the ticket says they’ll send it to a debt collector. To which I say: try me, motherfucker!!!! That coffee shop sucks anyway, it’s all like grindset weirdos and conservative women’s Bible studies and shit.
Social media. Lmaooooooo. I did start a Mastodon profile recently because I thought it would be funny if the “socials” I linked in my bio were like, Last.fm, Mastodon, and my Steam account. Unfortunately it’s pretty much a straight-up ghost town, and also it’s still fucking social media, which I hate.
Calendars. I could figure this out but I just keep a physical calendar so whatever.
QR code menus. I’m never at a restaurant like this—well, pretty much ever these days, but certainly not without other people who certainly have their own phones.
AAA app. This kinda fucked me recently but when I came back to my broken-down car with my smartphone with the app on it the app still didn’t fucking work so I just had to call anyway.
Checking my bank account. I’m independently wealthy so this is always full of tens of thousands if not hundeds of thousands of dollars so it’s not a concern for me.
- I of course already own every album I’m trying to download, but for some strange reason I can’t rip them directly to my computer, so I have to download them again. This is true, of course, of every media file I am discussing in this post, and also ever.↩︎
- Moreover, streaming, at least as it’s currently instantiated, is fucking horrible. I really think it’s so fucking bad. Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine on Spotify is the definitive text on why Spotify is so awful. But besides that, I think the evidence as to whether music piracy hurt independent musicians specifically is ambiguous. Obviously major label profits declined, but major labels were price-gouging profiteering motherfuckers that deserved and continue to deserve absolutely no quarter. The DMCA sucked, the RIAA sucked, it all fucking sucked. This is all obviously inflected by my personal experience both as a lifelong music fan who owes many of the great aesthetic journeys of my life to piracy, and also as a touring musician during the time I felt like Spotify really started shredding everything. And now that we’re entering AI slopworld background-music nightmare fucking bullshit shit world I just hate it and it fucking sucks. This also ties into something else I think about a lot, which is the extent to which the artists I know are putting faith in copyright law to save us from our piece of shit idiot fascist art-hating human-hating AI overlords. As is hopefully obvious I think generative AI art is fucking bullshit but I also think that copyright law has broadly been a means of allowing forces like major labels and major publishers to extract surplus value from artists and limit creativity from the exact same capital-brained anti-human nightmare position as the AI losers. If you had any skepticism about this, consider the Disney/OpenAI deal announced, like, yesterday or whatever. These fuckers are all the same: they hate art, hate culture, and hate you.↩︎