Over the past few years, I’ve been moving this direction more and more. How are you bringing back control of your life?
I’ve always had a distaste for big tech, and that distaste has only gotten stronger as I’ve noticed an emphasis on engagement-optimized design. To that end I’ve been trying to use Reddit less and Lemmy more to promote healthier, user-run forums. I’m also here of course, and on Mastodon rather than Twitter.
I also spend quite a bit of time reading physical manga volumes rather than just reading online, and I just ordered an e-paper tablet for when I do read online stuff.
I’ve been wanting to set up an e-ink tablet for reading and just can’t beat the friction on it yet. Real books it is, for now.
That’s why I went with a model that runs Android. It’s a little less “dumb” than its alternatives, but being able to just install the Manga Plus app or whatever and immediately start reading is a huge convenience win.
Good Videos 
. Honestly, the biggest help was fixing my sleep schedule. I scroll a lot when I’m tired. A Bedtime Routine Isn’t The Answer ~ Dr. K 
Install Brave browser because it replaces the garbage default Android WebView, making all the apps that use it better (besides Facebook/Meta, they somehow maintain their own in-app browser and removed the setting to use regular browser a while back) and you… are… asking about typewriters, not Android subsystems. Right.
I had a typewriter as a kid, I remember writing fake news on it with my cousin.
- Did you know, back then David Beckham got an implant for a golden beard?
The typewriter’s still out there in the attic. I find its hammers too unforgiving with typos. Using it for random drafts feels like a misuse of that iconic look on paper. Come to think of it, I never saw it used for serious stuff; by the time I got my hands on it, those whippersnappers had moved on to their color-printer Windows '98 picturemajigs. That’s when our Marker-colored gazette showed up under the orange glow of incandescent bulbs, where the end-of-the-line bell took the lead over any real facts.
(How does one recharge that ink ribbon? It lasts for years, am I supposed to just get another one?)
A paper pocket notepad didn’t stick with me, I write a word or two, a hook to remember-by later; then I don’t remember what did he mean by that, lol. I used it to plan out the big phonebook(new part coming soon 
), but not much else, I prefer FUTO’s voice-to-text, 30 seconds of yapping can contain the whole idea, and saying it out loud is a quick check if it sounds stupid.
As for typos, I’ll mention those new gel pens with rubber erasers on the end; I saw notebooks with plastic pages for those advertising wet-wiping entire pages. No lines, just a grid of dots, it was a big leather-cover agenda 
with daily dates and tables, maybe if it was a smaller pocket notebook…
Journaling on paper feels good 
, with the freedom to switch up colours, stickers, write upside down sideways and whatnot.
Shout-out to Joplin/QOwnNotes for storing notes in normal .md text files, and OneTab for being a one-button way to turn my forest of browser TreeTabs into one text file I think it flattens the structure actually, but they’re still next to each other.
Music 
Idk, for me local back-ups feel like “I am done” with those songs, move them to the archive, no need to open them again lol. I’ve been getting back to those, AIMP bookmarks, keybindings for instant ratings/deletion, community Winamp projects and themes etc.
I bought my first album discog on Bandcamp today, Risk of Rain’s Chris Christodoulou: Full Digital Discography. FOMO fumo (ᗜˬᗜ)
There’s a pile of CDs from the 2000s sitting around that wants new jewel cases.
The discovery is massive on Spotify.
I like Wrapped goddammit!
It’s a cool holiday where people post their top most whatevers of the year, it’s nothing but discovering new stuff for a week straight! It got better in the last two years and even if you delete your Spotify account, you benefit from other people publishing playlists during that time.
As for dumbifying, on PC SpotX to keep the old interface and shoo away their DRM’d podcasts, and Spicetify · GitHub for everything. They only seem to care about banning custom clients on mobile, that’s where the bulk of their users are.
oh no I'm getting bitter again(expand)
It took it years to start making good recommends for me. I really didn’t see what the fuss was about, for the longest time I kept asking people what do they see that I don’t, what is here that isn’t on Youtube. Then the yt app got worse and worse, and they started taking songs off yt. The little heart button to recall found songs instantly made sense with the focus on discovering new stuff (and Mobile). It keeps coming back to mobile. On mobile, Discover Weekly and Recent Releases don’t have the limitations of “regular listening”. You know: 6 skips an hour, forced on shuffle play and recommendations shoved in your playlists and all that; then they go ahead and claim they don’t put their finger on who gets more plays… I just got an email “Personalized playlist recommendations, curated just for your taste.” It’s the official Cod: Modern Warfare 3 playlist by Spotify).
iPod?
I have a nugget Shufflé-bootleg mp3 player. Mushy buttons feel like trash and no playlists, but I do have an extra sd card so it’ll get some use.
I kept an older phone around (3.5 jack my beloved) for listening to music. Smartphones used to have the best bits of the iPod integrated, even going above and beyond with simple drag & drop file transfers, microSD cards, media buttons of the headphone wire; LG, the mad lads, had Bang & Olufsen (B&O) audio tuning for their fancy quad-DAC on the LG V20-30-40 series and the LG G5. Recent phones dropped all of those, but the demand didn’t go away, and phone brands* keep refusing to accommodate music, iOS recently made it even worse , so people want iPods again. 
The Dankpodalypse seems to be over, there are some cheapo iPods out there… I’ll stick with my bucket of old phones for now, Murena’s custom ROM lets me use the 3 physical keys on my phone as media keys and I like how podcast apps bind “seek back” to going back 30 seconds instead of jumping to another file. If there was one of those Xiaomi fitness bands with physical keys I’d be set.
Still, can’t deny the power-statement of going for a device with no antennae at all for your music.
No Radio, No Servers, Only Personal Computer.
I ain’t going back to flip-phones, (imagine trying to sell off VGA 0.3MP sensors in #currentyear). I’d like Institutions to believe I have a flip-phone, I never ever want to have to read another 50-page bank-contract on a phone, as a queue lines up behind me k thx.
I can handle the inconvenience of tinkering with incomplete community software, I can handle the life changes of finding my own music files outside of Spotify, techies are supposed to do that, leave it as an option. I cannot handle the expectation of multiple integrated security measures for the sake of mandatory Laundry apps. You know, “Google Maps is nice, but don’t take down the street signs” kind of thing.
I don’t even mind smartphones that much, it’s like game streaming, it’s nice as an option, it probably solves something for somebody’s use case, but exclusives is where we’re starting to have problems. Smartphone exclusives and mandatory apps. I should probably say something about Romania having the largest gap in the 
EU between tech literacy and social media usage. Eh, no kind words from me about life before the internet, but I am an isolated weirdo, there was no grass to touch. Reading books stopped being fun too when school wanted summaries for each one.
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I didn’t get much out of Filterworld, but I am a techie so it was probably because I was familiar with the topics before reading it.
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I’ve actually bought a couple of newspapers out of curiosity last
weekoh I wrote this on here already. I’m not paying by the word like they do! I ended up with the very thick “weekend editions”. I was expecting some sort of “long take”, 6-ish pages dedicated to the cover story like magazines used to do. They’re just filled with ads like everything else. And a TV guide!
The last video talks about smoking. I’ve seen a trend mention people not looking their age, and a few back&forths later the conclusion was that younger millennials avoided smoking. Then vapes and juuls made tobacco cool with the youngsters again.
I had to make a new instagram account to get the algo to behave and show interesting stuff (and to be able to use a client that blocks ads, my regular account didn’t take). I’d rather scroll on PC, opening inspiring posts on new tabs to handle later, but Insta on the Web has arbitrary limits. I should just uninstall it outright… eventually. It’s the last website with activity from colleagues and people that I met in real life. Weddings season will be over soon. That “Only Following” filter feels a bit like embrace-extinguish, it doesn’t take much to see that nice “you saw everything from the past 3 days!” finish line. Will you keep scrolling past that? Probably, it never stays on Following and you only need to forget to set it once to get back into the slop.
Hmm, MMORPGs used to be heavily reliant on players helping other players, you couldn’t even level-up without an elder mage or whatevs to “teach”/unlock your spells. And then a game released that was solo-friendly and World of Warcraft became part of history. Social media is fine when you’re in school and you can add 30 people on the day you make your account, but outside of that you’re playing an MMO alone. So they have to find stuff to show you. The feed definitely decays, if I scroll over 15 minutes it starts showing random stuff, if I come back a couple days later it’s focused again.
More web stuff
I generally agree with move to meaty long-form content and substacks and anything-but-shorts because context is important, it’s less about the picture and more about the trusted network of people checking the facts behind posting it. But my God does it get tedious getting 3 new 10-tabs’s worth of research projects every time I open youtube.
- https://unhook.app/ can force yt homepage to always redirect to the subscriptions box and remove other recommends.
I add websites to my RSS feed and they immediately fall in the memory hole.
Brainrot Explained: Why You Can’t Stop Watching and how to fix it ~ HealthyGamerGG yt
Notifications
The biggest use case for “apps” and webapps is notifications. Android’s been pretty good about implementing all the settings possible and the users have gotten better at ignoring them. Separating Messenger from Facebook was a smart decision—no one wants to sift through their feed just to check direct message notifications. We had a university class WhatsApp group that was a permanent flood of memes and random chat, but I couldn’t mute that because that’s where the random " 
20:30 Hey guys get on Zoom right now, the teacher found more homework for us due tomorrow" was announced. Another time I was waiting for an important message on Skype, so I kept it open on PC. Skype silently crashed, while still looking fine, and it didn’t send any notifications anywhere. Also, why do notifs. disappear when clicked? If it doesn’t immediately take you where it’s supposed to it’s just… lost.
With users neglecting to disable notifications, important ones failing to come through, and the barrage of spam, it’s no wonder people are throwing in the towel and returning to phone calls. It’s also a clearer way to sort out details.
I have a couple friends from the old web that straight-up do not open messages received while offline, only the emails. In a way, this is the change I want to see in the world, to push back against the “people are available 24/7, so we can display one notification on a Saturday night and that’s enough to change contracts” kind of… (if I wasn’t so afraid of getting blocked/ ignored).
- WhatsApp used to work like that because it didn’t store any user data, it was all peer-to-peer, so if the other person wasn’t online it simply couldn’t transfer the files.
It turns out his discord bugged-out on the phone and it never receives the messages. And on PC it starts minimized so it shows nothing, but it starts blinking orange at new incoming DMs/@pings
Wishful thinking
Now that the EU will make Apple let you remove Apple online services from devices, I hope iOS gets its own Blloc event: design elements from Ratio (a minimalist Android launcher) made its way into base Android.
Point-of-sale systems evolved into microphone-less phones tied to receipt printers even here in rural Romania, so I’d like to see those at home, to handle authentication and secure payments and whatnot, separated from the ad-delivering mediabox. You know, so phones can go back to being teens’ customizable toys instead of the dreadful mandatory work-brick.
Getting rid of my smartwatch and going back to a “classic” one was one of the best things for me this year. Sure, it was handy but I feel less distracted and a bit more “free” in a way. I’m also currently trying to break my dependence on Android Auto and just streaming my music via bluetooth.
The more things I think about listing out, the more ridiculous they sound - but I like the changes anyway. It seems for me it’s more about avoiding the ecosystem lockins so I can have freedom to change apps/services whenever I want without too many pain points. I am still very much a tech at heart, so it’s about the freedom to hop around.
A big one for me is also pen and paper. No matter what I try, there’s still nothing that replaces the ease and reliability of a pen on paper.
Yeah I don’t usually have memory issues w/ physical writing, but ever since grade school days, it’s just been too rough on my hands for long-form, unless I just don’t have a choice. I NEED physical notebooks/pads for to-do lists, notes, ideas, etc. but if I want to sit down a “write”, it’s usually gotta be typed.
As much as I loved the organization stuff of Notion/OneNote, I just hated the idea of losing everything and went back to Google Docs (still not as secure as local files, but convenience+likelihood of randomly being taken from me being low, tradeoff).
Couldn’t live w/o pen and paper, though.
I am obsessed with Bandcamp purchases at this point. So many neat albums distributed on cassette/CD plus the download in any format you want (FLAC > ) but I have spent an ungodly amount of money on CDs recently.
I feel like I never learn anything from anyone’s wrapped. IDK, I’ve never liked Spotify. I’ve been using YouTube Music (previously GPM) bundled w/ my YT Premium sub, but I just cancelled that now that I’m using an iPod.
May I interest you in the current #digicam trend?
Alright, finally made a video about upgrading, and switching to, my iPod as part of this process:
Joined the forum because of this video! Had some thoughts as someone who’s been going through a really similar thing lately after a really bad day of music streaming stuff.
The first thing I wanted to potentially suggest is using ALAC (Apple Lossless) instead of FLAC; it was open-sourced a long time ago, so almost every player that supports FLAC also supports ALAC, and this lets you use iTunes/stock firmware for the car, as well. (I’ve also found that it uses a bit less battery life, at least on my iPod Video/5.5th gen, but YMMV.) You can use fre:ac to convert between FLAC and ALAC pretty seamlessly, even on Linux.
It’s awesome to see more people get into these little things. We’ve been modding them for years now and our personal Pod (5.5th + 256GB + upgraded battery) is our personal beloved little pet project; we’ve also been using Navidrome to do over-the-air streaming for desktop use.
I’d be super interested in hearing about what your library setup looks like, in terms of storage/organization. Our library is still pretty small (170GB of ALAC, give or take), but syncing it between our desktop and our MacBook has proven to be pretty frustrating. Great video, though; was a huge treat to see ^^
Thank you for the tip about using fre:ac to convert! I only just learned today that they open sourced ALAC. I was looking up conversion options and the only reliable one (aside from FFMPEG which isn’t as automated as would be desired for mixed formats) was Mac only. This works!
I think I’m going to install Strawberry the bad way (I’m on Bazzite so I’m “supposed” to only use Flatpaks) so I can manage my iPod with it, use ALAC and vanilla iPod OS for now, so I can keep using my accessories.
If that works, it will hopefully then work w/ my network shares, at which point I can just go back to having my music library on my NAS to keep between PCs.
Hell yes. Glad fre:ac works for you!
We use Bazzite as well, actually. At the moment we sync our iPod using our Mac, but we’ll be looking into syncing our iPod via either Strawberry or Rhythmbox pretty soon, too. I’m wondering if Distrobox would work with USB devices like that or not, but I guess that’d be pretty easy to figure out.
Network shares should work. That’s probably simpler than what we’re currently doing, which is probably a little too complex/hi-tech lmao. Currently we have our NAS and our personal server set to mirror the music library to each other via Syncthing (for redundancy, they’re in two separate homes), and then use Syncthing to download the entire library to our local machines. Maybe if we can get network shares figured out then we’ll look into something similar, lol.
And just an aside/warning about FFMPEG + iPod OS: for some reason, the way FFMPEG handles file conversion seems to throw iPod OS off, and sometimes tracks encoded with FFMPEG will just randomly refuse to play on the iPod for no discernible reason. With the Apple Lossless encoder this isn’t an issue, but if you use ffmpeg to convert to something like MP3 or lossy AAC/M4A, be warned. (There’s a lot of little quirks like this…we’re going through and trying to document all of them but it’s a big task.)
Looks like it’s going well for me so far. Just wish I could fix fre:ac’s weird quirks.
(When ripping CDs, I had it set to make playlist files, but often (but not always) they would save as “(albumartist) - (album)” instead of the actual names
and just now converting to ALAC it put all the music where I told it, but then made separate folders JUST for the cover art, ignoring the directed output location, etc.
Update: Strawberry copied all the music to the iPod allegedly, but the iPod does not see any music. Suspiciously, not even the original track I had copied from iTunes itself when I started this. Odd.
I’ve had better luck with Rhythmbox + iPods in the past on Linux, so I’d maybe recommend giving that a shot, but YMMV.
I’ll try it when I get back from TwitchCon! Confirmed twice that Strawberry just outright corrupts my OS when I copy files to the iPod. Restored twice, moved ALAC to iTunes and everything works fine there, even in my car.
Worst case, I run iTunes in a VM. I’ll try rhythmbox when I get back tho 
Okay, tested things a bit, and got things to work, I think.
I was able to get Strawberry to sync files, if I installed Strawberry via BoxBuddy/Distrobox. Don’t use ostree or flatpak or anything, use BoxBuddy.
- Create an Ubuntu 22.04 distrobox using BoxBuddy (I selected
ubuntu - docker.io/library/ubuntu:22.04). - Open a terminal in the new distrobox. Install dependencies -
sudo apt install gstreamer1.0-libav(for AAC/ALAC support) andsudo apt install libgpod-dev(for iPod support). - Download the 22.04 binary for Strawberry from the official website, and then install that - i.e.
sudo apt install ~/Downloads/strawberry_1.1.3-jammy_amd64.deb. (It might error here at the end of this; you can safely ignore it.) - Make sure any version of Strawberry that might be open is closed.
- Mount the iPod via Plasma/Dolphin.
- Run
strawberryin the distrobox terminal to launch Strawberry. - Import your music, and then copy it to the device.
This worked for us. We’re probably going to end up moving away from Bazzite (probably to Nobara), but this is how we were able to get music from Bazzite to our (Windows-formatted) iPod. Album artwork didn’t seem to copy over, but I’m not sure if that’s an issue on my end or not.
Edit: Okay, so I can see some corruption/issues with one of my playlists, where every time I connect it to Bazzite it ends up internally duplicating the playlist, so a playlist with 144 songs now as 720 songs, but it’s the same playlist 5 times over. That sucks. I wonder how well iTunes in a VM would work…
Edit 2: Re-connecting it to iTunes on Windows and it just re-synced my entire library. Lesson learned - I can’t think of a way to reasonably sync an iPod from Bazzite, I guess. That sucks.
Yeah EVERY time I interacted w/ my iPod at all in Strawberry, the whole thing got corrupted.
I’m 100% just doing iTunes in a VM.
To be honest…I never really had to move in this direction. I was already mostly there. But I dig the idea, and think it would be great for my kids and wife.
I don’t listen to a ton of music any more, and as I’m now in my late 50s, I tend stick with what I like and bands I like. Sure…I’m missing out on a lot of new, really great stuff. But I’m not really missing it.
I’ve massively withdrawn from social media, but I never really got in that deep to begin with. I have an Instagram. I have TikTok. I use FB. I use Twitter. I use Youtube and to a very limited extent Twitch/Kick. That’s about it. I never post to Instagram…it’s mostly there for Gleam contests I enter, and the same for TikTok (the 14900k/4080 computer I won makes it worth having accounts in my opinion).
FB is kind of a must have for me because it’s the way my family keeps in contact. But I don’t pay attention to my feed, and I follow directly the people who I care to keep up with. I used to use Twitter a great deal, but it’s pretty much a cesspool now, so again, it’s mostly for Gleam contests or to check on what creators I follow might have posted.
I don’t take a lot of pictures, so the need for a separate camera isn’t really there (I swear I have more pictures of the wiring in the back of racks, or serial numbers on things I own than I do of any other single thing). I don’t pay any attention to most notifications other than those related to work, so most of this decluttering was never really there to begin with. I’ve been very aware of the whole algorithm trap for some time as I got into listening to Tristan Harris and other people who hipped me to the whole engagement profit model and I’ve gone to great lengths to make sure I curate interesting content from multiple sources and stay outside of a bubble.
To be fair, I’m 58. And while I’ve been in IT for 30 years, and did dip my toe into social media, I never got paste the wading stage, so I don’t really miss what I don’t use. 90% of my phone use, when not actually calling someone, is to be able to look things up…usually for work, or to find out who is the guy that was in that thing. I rarely even text. It’s weird, because I am massively connected due to my profession and because I’m a bit of a research nut. But Youtube is really the only thing I use regularly, and I’m pretty consistent with whose content I follow.
I also use Ground News to curate my news content, which has been a godsent for at least letting me know what the bias is, what content I’m missing as a result, and to know how factual what i’m looking at is. I find it interesting to use because it also shows how the left and right just completely ignore some stories, but are completely factual
the majority of the time…they’re just incomplete in what they choose to cover.
But this is a very interesting series and I really dig where he’s coming from. Nice find.