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Reading this makes me realise I have a healthy relationship with my phone. I don't have any "social" apps installed, or "scroller" apps (Insta, TikTok, and thin

Reading this makes me realise I have a healthy relationship with my phone. I don't have any "social" apps installed, or "scroller" apps (Insta, TikTok, and things like that). I don't pick up my phone during the day while working, and in the evening it sits next to my keys by the door. Being present is easy. On my tablet, I have my RSS reader which produces about 30 entries per day, of which I read 2 or 3 articles, and then I'm done for the day. If I put down the tablet to do something else, I have zero experience of "FOMO" because blog articles are experienced at a glacial time scale. But also on my work laptop, we have Slack and Email and such on my laptop (only, no hand-held devices), and none of them have notifications enabled. Also, once I've read my mail to inbox zero, I close that tab. Then I'll open Slack (not both at once), and once I've caught up I close it. Then I do some productive work. I'll open them later when it's convenient for me. I think that's an attitude I developed at some point in the past few years. All modern Internet-based tech wants your engagement, full of dark patterns (like making things disappear if you see it once or lift your finger), and you have to protect yourself from that. Choose devices, apps, services that keep you in control. Discard the ones that don't.

notyourwork 3y ago
These are all great tips. Especially closing slack/email and disabling notifications. I struggled with these for awhile, growing up during the IRC, ICQ, AIM era, messaging always felt like a requirement of using a computer. Putting them away for focus time is critical.
sieabahlpark 3y ago
[dead]
JKCalhoun 3y ago
I'm similar to you where my phone is bare bones, often not within reach. I do take it with me wherever I go — often it is my wallet. Maps, Camera, Notes and Messages are about the only four apps I use on it (yeah, Health and Weather and the aforementioned Wallet — Apple Pay, actually - from time to time). When I find myself out and about, standing in line or otherwise bored, I don't pull out my phone as I see so many others do — there is nothing interesting to me on the phone. But I also turn 60 this year so, for me, my laptop is my "phone". It stays at home of course (except on trips) but it is where I do all my browsing, coding, image editing, etc. And to divorce myself from my laptop would be a hard task. A remote friend of mine checks email/messages only in the morning when he gets up. Sometimes I have been up when he texts me and I reply within seconds — only to get his reply to mine the following morning — like playing chess by mail. (Sometimes he never responds at all ... I think he finds connectivity to be bad for his mental health and I respect that.) I would like to be more like him — limit my browsing to the morning; essentially turn off the WiFi by 9:00 AM so to speak. Unfortunately when I am finishing a task (perhaps an hour out in the garage building a virtual pinball machine) I use the break time (perhaps a cup of tea) to open the laptop and see what insanity the US politicians are up to this hour of the day....
bigie35 3y ago
Bob Iger?
_chu1 3y ago
The only social app I have is Discord, I'm 15 and it's like the MS Teams of my generation. Nobody likes it, it's designed like crap and we hate the developers but everyone uses it so we just kind of have to. There's really nothing better I can think of, and my friends aren't as much of a nerd as I am (They still think the nerdy stuff is cool though, they love my Pentium III + Voodoo3 retro PC) to use anything like Matrix clients or Revolt.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
  Is there a blog post or somesuch about this P3 of yours? I'm twice your age, P3 was my first CPU so I'd love to hear more about it!
  - _chu1 3y ago
    You know, I actually should start a blog. I hope you don't mind if I just talk about the PC here. Wanted a retro build for mid to late 90s games, did almost an entire year of research and after a failed attempt involving Socket 939 I finally found some guy on Facebook Marketplace of all places who was selling a "Retro Pentium 3 PC". I was shocked because I live in central Alabama and cool stuff is never sold here, me and my brother went to meet him and paid for it. I already knew the specs from messaging him but it had a 733MHz Coppermine P3, an odd 320MB of PC100 RAM, a Netgear GA311 (which I already had like 3 of) and a Voodoo3 3000 AGP. I cleaned it out, put it in a brand new ATX Cooler Master case, gave it a SATA hard drive with a SATA to IDE adapter, repasted the CPU, put in a new PSU, installed a Creative SB Audigy 2 ZS, got Windows 98 SE set up with Photoshop 7, Office XP and a crap load of games and it's been one of my favorite pieces of technology I've ever owned. Beat Deus Ex for my first time on there and my life was changed, my vision is now augmented. YouTube (mostly PhilsComputerLab) and VOGONS taught me how to work on all this retro stuff, and when I was a kid I would make XP and 98 virtual machines for fun so I got really used to both of them. (I still like 2000 the most)
- ParetoOptimal 3y ago
  I'm wishing for a serious UX-driven attempt to create a discord replacement built on top of Matrix.
sumtechguy 3y ago
>All modern Internet-based tech wants your engagement, full of dark patterns I cant prove it... but I have noticed that my phone when I leave it alone does not do much if any notifications. But if I pick it up for a few mins and fiddle with it. Suddenly there are 2-3 notifications from applications that havent made a peep since yesterday but only after I turn the screen back off. Usually to tell me something very trivial. I suspect there is a background timeout that waits 1-2 mins after I set the phone down. Trying to get me to re-engage with the thing.
- fifteen1506 3y ago
  All apps on Android have Sensor Access permission, permanently [I think] and by default. GrapheneOS also allows that by default but has a toggle to change the default to deny. LinkedIn app is one of the apps which tries to access Sensors.

notyourwork 3y ago

These are all great tips. Especially closing slack/email and disabling notifications. I struggled with these for awhile, growing up during the IRC, ICQ, AIM era, messaging always felt like a requirement of using a computer. Putting them away for focus time is critical.

sieabahlpark 3y ago

[dead]

JKCalhoun 3y ago

I'm similar to you where my phone is bare bones, often not within reach. I do take it with me wherever I go — often it is my wallet. Maps, Camera, Notes and Messages are about the only four apps I use on it (yeah, Health and Weather and the aforementioned Wallet — Apple Pay, actually - from time to time). When I find myself out and about, standing in line or otherwise bored, I don't pull out my phone as I see so many others do — there is nothing interesting to me on the phone. But I also turn 60 this year so, for me, my laptop is my "phone". It stays at home of course (except on trips) but it is where I do all my browsing, coding, image editing, etc. And to divorce myself from my laptop would be a hard task. A remote friend of mine checks email/messages only in the morning when he gets up. Sometimes I have been up when he texts me and I reply within seconds — only to get his reply to mine the following morning — like playing chess by mail. (Sometimes he never responds at all ... I think he finds connectivity to be bad for his mental health and I respect that.) I would like to be more like him — limit my browsing to the morning; essentially turn off the WiFi by 9:00 AM so to speak. Unfortunately when I am finishing a task (perhaps an hour out in the garage building a virtual pinball machine) I use the break time (perhaps a cup of tea) to open the laptop and see what insanity the US politicians are up to this hour of the day....

bigie35 3y ago

Bob Iger?

_chu1 3y ago

The only social app I have is Discord, I'm 15 and it's like the MS Teams of my generation. Nobody likes it, it's designed like crap and we hate the developers but everyone uses it so we just kind of have to. There's really nothing better I can think of, and my friends aren't as much of a nerd as I am (They still think the nerdy stuff is cool though, they love my Pentium III + Voodoo3 retro PC) to use anything like Matrix clients or Revolt.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
Is there a blog post or somesuch about this P3 of yours? I'm twice your age, P3 was my first CPU so I'd love to hear more about it!
- _chu1 3y ago
  You know, I actually should start a blog. I hope you don't mind if I just talk about the PC here. Wanted a retro build for mid to late 90s games, did almost an entire year of research and after a failed attempt involving Socket 939 I finally found some guy on Facebook Marketplace of all places who was selling a "Retro Pentium 3 PC". I was shocked because I live in central Alabama and cool stuff is never sold here, me and my brother went to meet him and paid for it. I already knew the specs from messaging him but it had a 733MHz Coppermine P3, an odd 320MB of PC100 RAM, a Netgear GA311 (which I already had like 3 of) and a Voodoo3 3000 AGP. I cleaned it out, put it in a brand new ATX Cooler Master case, gave it a SATA hard drive with a SATA to IDE adapter, repasted the CPU, put in a new PSU, installed a Creative SB Audigy 2 ZS, got Windows 98 SE set up with Photoshop 7, Office XP and a crap load of games and it's been one of my favorite pieces of technology I've ever owned. Beat Deus Ex for my first time on there and my life was changed, my vision is now augmented. YouTube (mostly PhilsComputerLab) and VOGONS taught me how to work on all this retro stuff, and when I was a kid I would make XP and 98 virtual machines for fun so I got really used to both of them. (I still like 2000 the most)
ParetoOptimal 3y ago
I'm wishing for a serious UX-driven attempt to create a discord replacement built on top of Matrix.

sumtechguy 3y ago

>All modern Internet-based tech wants your engagement, full of dark patterns I cant prove it... but I have noticed that my phone when I leave it alone does not do much if any notifications. But if I pick it up for a few mins and fiddle with it. Suddenly there are 2-3 notifications from applications that havent made a peep since yesterday but only after I turn the screen back off. Usually to tell me something very trivial. I suspect there is a background timeout that waits 1-2 mins after I set the phone down. Trying to get me to re-engage with the thing.

fifteen1506 3y ago
All apps on Android have Sensor Access permission, permanently [I think] and by default. GrapheneOS also allows that by default but has a toggle to change the default to deny. LinkedIn app is one of the apps which tries to access Sensors.