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BeerW0lf | 2022-10-14
Whow! I haven't updated the capsule in ages. I guess I forgot Gemini for a while, but I think I'll get back to exploring it again. Winter is approaching and as the days grow darker, its so nice to have a big cup of coffee and cozy up on the sofa to explore new gem capsules.
I did some reading during the summer. One of the books was Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism. The book actually just confirmed my affirmations, that most digital notifications, and mobile media are bad for you and mostly unnecessary. The book touches on several areas of your mind's focus, or the lack of it. Most of it is explaining how our attention seems to be sucked to the shiny light box available constantly in your pocket. Most of the media we're consuming from a mobile device is irrelevant and forgettable, hence useless. The book gives suggestions how to manage your time more usefully and how to feel more content about your life.
Few quotes that sticked.
Digital Minimalism - A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.
Slow media - Cannot be consumed casually, but provoke the full concentration of their users... Slow Media measure themselves in production, appearance and content against high standard of quality and stand out from their fast-paced and short-lived counterparts.
Try it: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.
Solitude Deprivation - A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.
Phones have become woven into a fraught sense of obligation in friendship... Being a friend means being "on call"-tethered to your phone, ready to be attentive, online.
Let's face it, checking your "Likes" is the new smoking.
Try it: Delete social media from your phone.
Try it: Leave you phone at home.
Try it: Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions.
Try it: Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world.
Try it: Fix or build something every week.
Digital Minimalism (ISBN: 978-0525536512)
I read the book just after I had migrated from using an Android phone to a Sailfish OS one. Sailfish runs on top of Android hardware, but is not a custom Android rom. Its actually a full fledged Linux OS that just uses a compatibility layer to speak to Android drivers. Naturally there are fewer native apps available than Android. You can run Android apps in a sandbox if you really need them, but that's not the point of this ramble.
I've been using Android for a decade now. Its hard to change from what has become second nature to you, but I've also grown tired of Google's constant hunger for your personal data. I've also wanted to explore how Linux phones could fare as a daily driver. During the switch over I realized that most of the apps I had on my Android phone were mostly not needed. On top of that they just seemed to spam constant pleads for my attention. **DING!!** Your friend just did x on platform y. **DING!!** There's a new shiny thing over there, looook at it!! **DING!!** Some random internet stranger just favorited your comment from 2 years a go, THIS IS IMPORTANT!! One could argue that you can always tweak the notification settings, so you won't be bothered with such things constantly. But maybe, just maybe.. You shouldn't need to have such apps constantly available on your mobile device?
Lets evaluate what are the core features you would _need_ in a modern phone on the go. There is no need to go full feature phone mode. Just trim the fat from your smartphone habits and you're set.
That's it.
Maybe some other utilities also, which are important and have real impact on your life, like a bus ticket app or something like that.
Email and a web browser is a must these days. But just to check some relevant info you need to have. Not to browse aimlessly through reddit. And you don't need to have audible notifications for all the email spams either.
A camera is a great thing to have available constantly. Its a good tool for many things and also great to capture situations you'd like to remember for years to come. Having a camera on you, does not mean you should spam Instagram with it, now does it?
Group messaging can be real useful to get a group together for something. It's more of an annoyance, when the chat deteriorates to posting funny memes seven times a day or cursing at some 1st world problem no one cares about. I still use a few messaging apps, but when the groups have nothing important to discuss, I just tend to mute them for days at a time. And when I'm not available on some messaging platform (Whatsapp for example, or any Facebook service for that matter...) my real friends do get a hold of me via other channels when needed.
We should really start to think our phones as tools to the world. Not as entertainment when we're bored. Its good for your brain to be bored! That's when you notice the world around and start to think for yourself. Maybe do a small exercise: next time you're leaving home, turn your phone's internet connection off. See what you can accomplish with it, when its not tethered to myriad of cloud services. One step further would be to leave the phone completely home. I know, sounds scary. You may conjure many excuses why you ablsolutely can't leave your home without the phone. You know what? Back in the 90's there were no mobile phones, and still most of us managed to survice the entire day without "connecting". Just try it once for shits and giggles and see if it induces an anxiety attack. If it does, you'll need to think about why.
I'm not saying all mobile entertainment is bad. Its perfectly fine to listen some music, a podcast or even catch one episode of your favorite series. Commuting is often tedious affair, which is perfect for such things. But if you need to carry a power bank around since you need to be glued to your phone screen for 10 hours a day... That's not healthy. Most people now have a knee jerk reaction when standing still for longer than 10 seconds. Quick quick! Reach for the phone! So you don't have to look at anything, interact with anyone or just think about life. Just flip through the digital timeline, its more important!
If social media is something you can't part with, then just switch to using it on your computer. Same goes for binging random Youtube videos or doom scrolling on Twitter. Just do it on your computer, that's it. Suddenly you're more present in the world.
These things really sneaked to our wrists, didn't they? Many people stopped wearing watches after they got a mobile phone. It already has a clock on it, so why would I need one on my wrist? Well, it turns out that most people really like wearing a watch. Suddently fitness bands and smartwatches made horology cool again. But there's a big caveat. Smartwatches now compete in tandem with your mobile phone for your attention. Its a perfect focus killer. If you've managed to leave the phone beyond arms reach, wrist buzzing is there to make extra sure that you got the umpteenth irrelevant notification or message right **now**! If you've got an expensive watch you can even poke the screen and try to reply to the message. This is what you _need_!
The fitness aspect I like. Anything that motivates your ass off the couch is a good thing. However, it got weirder as the technology got more advanced. I too was blinded by the cool new tech, that promised to measure every known biometric on your body for... what? Science? Well-being? Better performance? If you're not an athlete or have some medical condition, chances are, that you really don't _need_ to know your constant heart rate. The sleep monitoring sounded cool at first, but really... Most sensors can't actually monitor sleep stages accurately. Most accurate thing usually is the time you went to bed and woke up. That I can deduct fairly accurately in my head. If you go walk the dog, do you really need to have your walks position recorded with military precision, using satellite technology? Do you even look at the track info more than once afterwards?
If you're motivated to collect all these metrics a smartwatch or fitness band gives you, you're in for a hard time when you decide to try some other brand. Remember that most of these things rely on the proprietary cloud service of the manufacturer. Usually its not possible to export your collected data in any usable format. GPX is the most versatile export, and it too might have trouble with your HR data. I've tried to export data from various cloud services in the past, but it all summed up to a few spreadsheets full of datapoints and countless files full of json excrement. I really don't have anything to put the different datasets together.
The smart wrist straps in conjunction of a mobile phone are more than capable for storing and analyzing the metrics locally. Yet almost all rely on the cloud. Why? Well... Your personal data and your digital profile is the new oil. Its more valuable than you might think.
I've used a fitness / smartish devices for around seven years. It took me this long to finally realize, that most of the features are irrelevant to me. A simple digital watch with a pedometer is really all that I need. Maybe it would even look somewhat stylish on top of that?
Past years I've used the following devices:
Before these I used a BT chest strap with Sports Tracker app on my phone. It was nice to look at the map tracks and see where my heart rate spiked. Was it useful for anything? No. Not really. Having all that data didn't serve any purpose, other than being cool to look at. Well, maybe that was the motivation I needed to get out and exercise, who knows. Amazfit was actually pretty good with a 3rd party app. It stored all the data locally on the phone. Yet, I still don't have any real use for all that data.
So, after this realization, I really was left with the only option. I purchased a Casio watch.
Congratulations! You've made it to the end of this rambling rant. It seems to sum up to the fact that I'm getting older. And looks like I've had it with smart things, cloud this, block chain that and AI around the corner. I don't know how many denizens of gemini even visit my pod, nor do I even care. I have no statistics on the site. I write because I feel like it. Now hit the bell and subscribe! ...Just kidding!
Have a pleasant state of just being!
🧘
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