the luddite way
After quite a bit of back and forth to various phone shops brought on by some oddly confusing bouts of anxiety, I finally bought myself an Android tablet. I've been wandering across half the globe carting around a Chuwi Minibook with Debian installed and it very much acted according to its ~$200 price tag. And just last night, I set this laptop underneath an aircon unit that randomly decided to purge its excess water and now the top right corner screen is permanently blinding. My snafu is annoying but not disasterous becuase I spent the weekend setting up my new tablet and adjusting to Termux. Well, um, its time to permanently switch I guess.
After removing all the bloatware and AI nonsense, the tablet is actually a significant upgrade for roughly the same price as the laptop. I have almost everything I need running on a vps in Singapore so the tablet is more or less a shell with a monitor that connects me to remote resources. Termux doesn't appear to require a lot of tweaking to make it comparable with the terminals I'm used to and the tablet's battery life is long enough that I've spent hours on my balcony with it watching the rain go by. So it kind of came with a bonus quality of life upgrade. I'm just missing a decent keyboard which I plan to pick up once I'm in an area with that kind of inventory.
My plan to only carry around cheap electronics that are easily replaceable is moving along :)
The tablet is basically a terminal and a web browser. At the moment I am running some Proton apps and the Capy Reader for remote miniflux access. Whether these apps will remain installed is unknown since I can also access those resources on the vps. And the vps is running Signal with a linked tui app. Plus, my phone number runs on jmp.chat and I wrote a little python app on the vps to email me when I get a new SMS or voicemail. So yeah, if this thing gets stolen or ripped from my weak little hands, it won't be too much effort on my part to remotely log out of any sessions, walk down to the corner store, buy a new one, and set it all up again.
The same goes for my phone which has slowly morphed into a glorfied ipod that also contains a map. Am I regressing back to the early oughts? Perhaps... although I am definitely not going to start wearing lowrise jeans again.
One interesting result of this setup is I find myself reading again. My rss feed is full of long form essays from various sources. And I recently flashed KO Reader onto the obsolete Kindle I've been dragging around and I loaded it up with ebooks aquired from definitely absolutely legitimate sources. That little thing fits in my daybag and time spent during the day waiting for things is now filled with me devouring books and not doomscrolling and not being annoyed that things generally take time to happen.
All of this has resulted in me existing in a much more calm and intentional way. I deliberately turned off all notifications. And for each service, I have mostly managed to set up scripts on the vps to send me emails if there's new activity. Plus, I physically need to access my email inbox to see those messages. As a result, I suddenly find myself with the luxury of quiet time of my own choosing. While there's definitely an awkward adjustment phase, I honestly can't imagine how anyone could live a healthy life without this level of agency and autonomy. I believe this setup is often called "setting boundaries with social media" which isn't a terribly complicated thing to make happen but it definitely is not how this technology performs out of the box. The default settings of just about anything these days are definitely designed to be addictive so its up to us to make those tweaks so we always have time to maintain our sanity