My Digital Detox Attempts

I got myself a yellow banana-phone from eBay. Improvements in focus levels were quite significant from the start. I started reading again, and it has been increasing ever since. I track my reading in bookwyrm (my profile), federated open source (almost) alternative to Good reads. I’m very fond of this service, but I have to leave that for another opportunity. To be honest, I had additional motivation to leave smartphone behind because I had second thoughts about privacy (which is also a topic for a future blog post).

Biggest drawback in using a dumbphone (which technically banana-phone is not) is the lack of navigation app. Supposedly I could make Open Street Map app working on the phone but so far I haven't yet been successful with that. I had a lot of issues installing Gerda0S on the banana-phone which is a de-googled version of Kai0S (the reference comes from Andersen's fairy tail Snow queen). If anyone has OSM working on banana-phone, please let me know how.

Another drawback of banana-phone is that writing messages is cumbersome. I prefer calling people back even if they text me.

Another attempt at reducing my screen time was to try to write on typewriter instead of on a computer. This was also idea behind this blog of mine but as you can see, there is not much on it. If I further develop the idea, once I'd had a text written on paper I would scan it and OCR it with Tesseract OCR, that one gave me the best results (of the open source OCR software I found). Tesseract also has additional support for Slovenian language.

I was also considering writing a script that would scan a sheet of paper and recognize email header and automatically send email. And the last thing I was planning to use the typewriter for was to write scenarios my tech-critical radio show Techno Enema and maybe do some creative writing if I'd ever found the time.

There are several drawbacks with using typewriter. It takes more time and space. You have to be more thoughtful while writing since it is harder to fix mistakes. I take handwritten notes of parts which I'd like to correct or paraphrase after OCRing and importing into Emacs Org Mode.

I miss some special characters on my typewriter's keyboard, namely backslash, asterisk and hashtag. I got the typewriter for my birthday and when I find the time to use it I quite enjoy it. It comes in very handy when I'm at the mountain hut my family owns (another digital detox attempt I'll come to shortly). What I wanted to say is that the typewriter has Slovenian keyboard, which is fine for creative writing, but I miss plain text Org Mode characters (writing Orgdown on paper). I sometimes check, Ebay for IBM Selectric, which I hold dear to heart due to its appearance in Elio Petri's movie Citizen above suspicion (I hope I got this right). Perhaps it is Costa Gavras' Z. If ever I get to the point where I won't be forced to work 8 hours per day, I might get myself to write more. Overall, typewriting needs more adjustment, typing is slower, mistakes are harder to correct, but there is no screen, no blue light that would mess with my biorhythm.

If you're interested how this blog post looks like on paper, here's the scanned PDF.

This was my biggest and most underutilized investment. I was reluctant to spend 2400 Euro on 24 inch Mira Pro screen and wanted first to try out the smaller one, which still costed me 900e. The smaller one is 13 inches and I planed to use it outside and to read e-books and PDFs. But since it is a monitor, you heave to have it connected to a computer. In order to have it in front of you, you also need another keyboard. Then there are few setbacks that are specific for me.

I am very consistent user of dark modes which are a no-go for an e-ink screen. I had to set things back to light mode but for web services it means setting back per service… anyway this was an issue for me. Secondly, I have a laptop, actually two of them, with a touch screen. I had to figure out how to disable touch screen on computer and enable it on e-ink monitor. It took me some time to figure it out, and I did not do it in a permanent way. There are few commands that I have to run every time I connect this monitor. I did not memorize them, neither have I written a bash script to automate the process. And lastly, I did not find any nice program that enables touch screen gestures. With nice I mean working out of the box with minimum configuration. Touchegg came close, but I was unpleasantly surprised when I found out that they removed scroll gestures from the latest version.

There are still plans to integrate it into a cyberdeck but not in the foreseeable future. I'm also determined to read the Prot's Emacs Lisp Elements book on this Eink monitor. I have to document usage this time.

Sidenote: Modos is developing an opensource Eink screen.

I've already mentioned the mountain hut. It is poorly maintained, so there is very little electricity and the water has to be brought from the nearby stream. Strangely, I have no urges to use electronic devices while I'm there. I get solid 2-3 weeks of vacations there every summer. I read a lot, hike, mountaineer and there is also a mountain lake nearby warm enough to swim. Even the phone signal is weak there. I was considering moving there and renting an office in the village that is an hour away, but I can't leave a cozy life in a small suburban house near Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia.

I often print out articles I'd like to read on paper. I have an old laser jet and refilled cartridge are inexpensive. I can also take notes directly on paper (in case I'm reading an article that I'll use in my radio show).

I did buy a used copy of Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism book. It is a third on my list of books to read. I could probably write another reflection on my digital detox after I read it.

Not having a smartwatch is a no-brainer if you want to digitally detox. I received an old analog soviet watch, it is probably around 50 years old, refurbished and runs good. I have to wind it every two days and after a week it is a few minutes off, but it is good to have time on your wrist without a need to check the phone whet time is it.

There was a low point in my computer addiction and I asked my partner at that time to take my computer away from me. I had a raspberry pie still at home and I used lynx to learn to program. Another non-graphical internet browser inside Emacs is w3m but I haven't yet got fluent using it. I should put this higher on my priority list.

All kind of tasks can be accomplished in terminal. It is much safer to use terminal since there are no easy ways to get distracted in it. In graphical browser, new tab has websites' icons that you use most frequently visit, and they are waiting there temptingly. Command lines tools are much faster than doing things in graphical user interface that mostly require using mouse, and there are no dark patterns and no adds. So if I can, I like to search for command line tools instead of using web UI.