Reject Convenience Forum

Latest Videos :: Re: I made a tool to help you read privacy policies :: Reply by rodak

2024-10-25T22:52:33+00:00

Hey everyone,

I fully support this tool and believe it’s incredibly helpful. Personally, I’ve learned a lot from using it.
However, I did experience some challenges with readability, and I noticed that the page lagged whenever I changed the category status.

To address these issues, I took the initiative to improve the design using Bootstrap 5.3. You can view the updated page hosted on GitHub Pages https://rodak123.github.io/PrivacyVisualizerRedesign/.

My code is released under the CC0 license, so please feel free to make any further improvements!

Latest Videos :: Re: I made a tool to help you read privacy policies :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-10-26T03:06:33+00:00

THIS IS SO GOOD @rodak, so much better for readability! The biggest challenge I faced is all I know is basic HTML lol I'm so happy to know people with better coding skills than me found this inspiring

I'm going to link this in the video, since I saw a couple people mention they wanted a more accessible version.

Latest Videos :: Re: I made a tool to help you read privacy policies :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-10-27T14:19:30+00:00

Someone left a comment that was a really really good idea:

Make it an extension, so when you're signing up for a service, or you're looking at a privacy policy, it'll pop up (or it could be popped up) so you can review it side by side. Then, it could store your result in the browser, which would avoid making an account, which is good for privacy.

Then, (somehow) on the back end, it could tell you if a service has updated their privacy policy since the last time you read it, which would allow people to be more informed!

I think this still nicely forces people to actually read the policies, but they could also save what they ranked it at a quick glance, and be given a chance to update it every time the policy is updated.

I don't have the coding skills for this, I have no idea how to code something like that, but if someone wants to run with that, I'd super support that.

Latest Videos :: Re: I Switched to a Dumb Phone - 2 year check-in :: Reply by mushroomchild

2024-10-26T19:05:29+00:00

angly wrote: Fri Oct 18, 2024 1:45 am Touching on what you said about YouTube addiction... I'd like to share a tip for countering social media addiction on smartphones: using social media browser websites instead of their apps.

For YT, I've found that using the website is significantly less stimulating since many functions are not available/as slick compared to the app, and I've noticed a decrease in my impulses to watch more videos (though this might be illusory correlation on my part).

An interesting side benefit to using the website is that it also seems like *no* ads play when I watch videos, the only ads are the static ones.

I've also done this with Instagram and infinite scroll on Reels isn't as accessible + the homepage jumps right back to the top once you return to it from another page, making it pretty unusuable for long scrolling sessions. Can say that my IG use has also decreased after implementing this change.

Me too! I found Instagram so annoying after a point that I ended up deactivating my account completely. Though I do recognize that some need it for work, and I don't, I was purely using it for social purposes. But then I realized I barely have conversations on Instagram, mostly just send reels to my friends. So I finally decided to go full turkey, and it actually helped! It was a little hard at first, but I think it's been a net positive. Using the message app is more than enough to chat with a friend.

Apparently, there's an extension (for PCs) to disable YouTube shorts. Many have said they really hate how YouTube keeps recommending shorts and the extension disables that, so I think it's worth trying. I've noticed that after disabling most social media on my phone, I go on YouTube on my computer a lot more than I'd like to.

Latest Videos :: Re: I Switched to a Dumb Phone - 2 year check-in :: Reply by CitricScion

2024-11-05T01:52:40+00:00

Sometimes when you're trying to kick one habit you end up compensating with another way to get a similar feeling. Sometimes that can feel like a disappointing loss, but I like to think that if there is more friction to the new thing you're switching to then it's a good step in the right direction.

Latest Videos :: Re: I Switched to a Dumb Phone - 2 year check-in :: Reply by JINSBEK

2024-11-09T23:00:09+00:00

Thanks for making this video. It’s nice to see so many other people moving away from being always-online to… actually, enjoying being present. The cost of rejecting the hitherto unheard-of amounts of convenience is worth it.

I was born in 1995, I came of age when people were just starting to use cell phones. It’s unimaginable to people now, but the tactile QWERTY keyboards were a big part of what prevented people from having their faces glued to their phones. With the muscle memory built up, you could reliably text someone something without ever having to look down on your phone to see if you’d actually typed something correctly. That’s impossible to do with a touchscreen keyboard, and even if you use a swipe keyboard you can’t be sure it tracked your finger movements accurately. Nowadays “texts” (notifications) come from everywhere and the depression rectangle commands your full attention if you want to respond to anything coherently. I see so many younger distracted drivers these days. They think they’ll read just one message but I’m sure the notifications from all the other apps they have are blaring and sucking away their attention. It’s hard to hire young people these days, too. A lot of them outright even fail the interview because they’re on their phones, or if they manage to pass that, fail the orientation for the same reason. Yes we send a letter explaining exactly why they haven’t been hired. Can’t imagine those people making it in life.

My fiancée and I have removed or blocked most of the apps on our smartphones, and we’re in the process of obtaining modern Japanese Android keitai/flip phones. I have to keep my depression rectangle because of the heavy amount of GPS bike navigation I use, and also because I need a convenient way to Bluetooth control the LED gear I use for raves and such. But I think I’ll be taking all my calls on my keitai. We’re getting models that also use US telecom bands, and worst case scenario, if out-of-range we can always get on the now-ubiquitous Wi-Fi networks and take calls through the Skype app.

Latest Videos :: Re: I Switched to a Dumb Phone - 2 year check-in :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-11-10T02:07:39+00:00

Thanks for sharing, and welcome to the forum, @JINSBEK! I grew up in the same era of the physical QWERTY keyboard, and it's so interesting to see how things have evolved. The distracted driving thing has blown my mind constantly, and I don't know what we do about it..

Latest Videos :: Re: I Switched to a Dumb Phone - 2 year check-in :: Reply by CitricScion

2024-11-12T01:34:02+00:00

What keeps my from using my phone while driving is the knowledge that doing so makes death by car accident the most likely way I will die outside of disease. And even then I cheat

Latest Videos :: Re: I Switched to a Dumb Phone - 2 year check-in :: Reply by bierangtamen

2024-11-15T09:04:12+00:00

This is going to be a long, long post so I apologize for that. I wanted to share my thoughts on this video as someone who is probably a lot younger than you and was born in the generation where we grew up with these smart phones so I had NO idea that phones ever had a battery life past two days. Also I wanted to flag that you needed this non-smartphone lifestyle and that it completely fine. It's not your fault (like how some of the YouTube commenters blame people for their own self control and anxiety instead of corporations seeking to exploit it) and we all have different needs and preferences - there is absolutely nothing wrong with it

Firstly, I don't think I have the same experience as you with smartphones. I do have trouble sleeping because I am often on my phone but I do think I will be able to control this (I have grown up as a night owl in general so if it wasn't my phone, it would be something else - I once spent an all nighter to binge a novel). I think the other negatively addictive aspect of smartphones - or the internet more generally - is shopping. I feel like buying absolutely everything especially when various websites and corporations use my cookies to recommend me the items I want. The way that the shopping experience has become so seamless in this smartphone age has led to many others out of control. Anecdotally, I have spent a lot of money on things I didn't need but kept buying more. YouTube sponsors and advertisers often give biased reviews, making an item seem like it is something you need. Whenever you have a problem with skincare for example, people will tell you to purchase another product. It just ends up being a waste and you can't resell most of what you have purchased. A lot of this is definitely my fault with my impulsive purchases but we can't really ignore how in people's faces ecommerce is

The second thing I would like to mention is that I feel like for my generation, it is a lot harder to transition into your lifestyle. It's doable for sure but things like online banking and even keeping up with university makes it a lot more difficult. Other than the previous detriments I mentioned, I do find it helpful for things like digital art (not wasting paper and being able to share your art in HD) as well as my online singing lessons. I personally haven't had the issue of feeling overly fixated with my phone. The part in your video where you mentioned being frustrated with advertisements is quite funny to me because I think most people in my generation just zone out when those YouTube ads pop up. I feel indifferent towards it myself

I used to commute to my high school via a long train ride and often I would spend the whole time daydreaming (although many other commuters are kinda clued to their screens). If I have to go somewhere for a long period of time, I usually bring a book or maybe my DS with Pokemon. This is partially because I get worried about my phone losing charge. I also feel like I am on the internet so often at home that I don't really feel the need to look through my phone much whenever I'm out with friends or family. Honestly, it kinda pushes me to go out sometimes since I have not as much to do at home other than scroll through websites and watch stuff, in which I do run out of content. I still have my other hobbies like writing, art, playing my instrument etc but I guess like everyone else I need that balance of going out and socializing in person. I do often join calls to talk with my friends online but meeting up is also a necessity for all of us and our phones don't really affect the quality of that (though I am sure they do for some people)

I know you have had this smartphone detox and I have had a similar one although only for Instagram and Tiktok. To be honest, the Tiktok one is more so because I found it a boring app to use since I don't really enjoy scrolling and being exposed to all this content I am probably not in the mood for at that moment. Instead, I prefer to watch longer form videos that are relevant to my specific mood (so if I want something lighthearted, I can watch a 20 minute video on that for instance). Likewise, I don't really use YouTube shorts other than for finding specific short clips that I am looking for. As for Instagram, I deleted it many years ago before Reels was a feature. For me, it just made me feel so personally paranoid that all these people I didn't know wanted to send me a follow request to my personal account (and I would feel bad for not accepting it since the Instagram account was associated with my real name and school). LinkedIn has been somewhat of a similar experience; I have had people push me to use it but I don't really want the whole world to know my full name, my entire education history and where I work to get a job. Anyways, back to Instagram, another thing is that people would take pictures of their best selves or them going out with friends and that made me more lonely and anxious. I prefer life without Instagram myself in a similar manner that you prefer life without a smartphone and that's okay

I wouldn't ever make that switch to a dumb phone because I don't feel like my smartphone impacts me other than sleep and my unhealthy consumerism. However, I think it's a great alternative for many people who do prefer it. It is sad though that more of society expects everyone to move on instead of giving them the opportunity to use different alternatives

Latest Videos :: Re: I Switched to a Dumb Phone - 2 year check-in :: Reply by JINSBEK

2024-11-15T12:11:36+00:00

bierangtamen wrote: Fri Nov 15, 2024 9:04 amI think the other negatively addictive aspect of smartphones - or the internet more generally - is shopping. I feel like buying absolutely everything especially when various websites and corporations use my cookies to recommend me the items I want. The way that the shopping experience has become so seamless in this smartphone age has led to many others out of control.

Oh, yeah, this is a leviathan in itself. I don’t know if your generation even has experience with paginated web design. It used to be, you browse through a store catalogue on your home computer (some stores didn’t even have an internal search function), click through the pages of the catalogue, find an item you like, if you were lucky there was a cart option... In any case, every time, you had to write in your address details, write in your credit card, write in your options (e.g. desired colour), and so on, every time. It really was like ordering through an online version of a catalogue.

Now every business wants as seamless an experience as possible. As soon as the hardware improved, JavaScript was pushed to do things it wasn’t originally designed to do (which was make pop-ups on your browser, really…), to make things feel like a smooth piece of software you had downloaded and installed on your computer. Make it more seamless, add buttons here, save this information like the person’s credit card details and address, pull that information, now smartphones are a thing so make things endlessly scroll, and so on. Webdev is insane now because people want websites to do more and more things.

bierangtamen wrote: Fri Nov 15, 2024 9:04 amI used to commute to my high school via a long train ride and often I would spend the whole time daydreaming (although many other commuters are kinda clued to their screens). If I have to go somewhere for a long period of time, I usually bring a book or maybe my DS with Pokemon. This is partially because I get worried about my phone losing charge. I also feel like I am on the internet so often at home that I don't really feel the need to look through my phone much whenever I'm out with friends or family. Honestly, it kinda pushes me to go out sometimes since I have not as much to do at home other than scroll through websites and watch stuff, in which I do run out of content. I still have my other hobbies like writing, art, playing my instrument etc but I guess like everyone else I need that balance of going out and socializing in person. I do often join calls to talk with my friends online but meeting up is also a necessity for all of us and our phones don't really affect the quality of that (though I am sure they do for some people)

Sounds like you have a good group of friends! Also sounds like you’re a bit older than some people I see… You’re university-age, the American and Australian urban high and middle schoolers I see addicted to this stuff are different from you in lifestyle and temperament. They don’t know how to return a greeting when someone greets them initially, they don’t even follow your hand gestures when you try to explain something, like a technical problem at a self-checkout kiosk at a grocery store. They hold up the line at the cash register because they’re on their phones and the cashiers aren’t allowed to smartly get their attention and ask them to pay. It’s one of the reasons my fiancée is looking forward to quitting her job as a store manager, the customers are so much worse now. Her younger sister (in high school) has stopped hanging out with her peers because they’re on the phone all the time: a Halloween party where she was the only one dressed up and everyone just sat on their phones, numerous hang-outs where there everyone was on their phones and she got so bored, she left to go on a run and nobody noticed until two hours later, when they DMed her “We didn’t see you leave where’d you go”.

The boiler room and rave scenes have radically changed, too. The sensible clubs have a no-phone policy and make you stow them in secure lockers before going into the club. Other clubs... Man, being a DJ at those joints is depressing, it’s like your music doesn’t reach people anymore. It’s one of the reasons why I’ve moved to the DJ bike rave scene. Nobody can be on their phones if they’re actively biking, ha!

Latest Videos :: The Success Disaster of the Cookie :: Author rejectconvenience

2024-11-20T12:27:51+00:00

I decided to read public chat logs from 1995 (the research process for this video was insane)

Link to the video
https://youtu.be/EHkSJ8N3JnI

Description:
Cookies sure do be wild

The World Wide Web was made for all of us! @LuvstarKei has an amazing art-focused website collection site that you should 100% check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JINpo4ZoH7U
(here’s the link to the site: https://starsubculture.com)

▬▬ References ▬▬
CERN World Wide Web proposal from 1989: https://web.archive.org/web/20100401051 ... posal.html
Tim Jackson, “This bug in your pc is a smart cookie,” Financial Times Feb 12 1996 (Page 31): https://ia800607.us.archive.org/24/item ... 8en%29.pdf
HTTP Cookies: Standards, Privacy, and Politics by David M. Kristol: https://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0105018
HTTP State Management Mechanism (rfc2109): https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2109
Giving Web a Memory Cost Its Users Privacy by John Schwartz: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/busi ... ivacy.html
Attention Shoppers: Internet Is Open by Peter H. Lewis (Sting CD purchase): https://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/12/busi ... -open.html
BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY; A Free and Simple Computer Link by John Markoff (regarding the rise of the Mosaic browser): https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/08/busi ... -link.html
An example of online shopping before the World Wide Web protocol: https://www.deseret.com/1995/3/6/191627 ... ovel-idea/
What is a third party cookie: https://www.ketch.com/blog/posts/what-i ... rty-cookie
Internet Explorer comes out of nowhere: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3T-Nx-fwNY
AOL buys Netscape for $10,000,000,000: https://web.archive.org/web/20171107021 ... spx?id=741
Netscape to Mozilla pipeline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation
Interviews with Lou Montulli (the inventory of the cookie):
Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwvKew15o0c
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLpgX6ZEocE
Signal president article: https://www.wired.com/story/meredith-whittaker-signal/
Link if you don’t want to pay for wired for the above article: viewtopic.php?t=42

▬▬ Resources ▬▬
https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/
https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys ... /4.00.950/
https://guidebookgallery.org/index
https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-des ... ities-1994

Fingerprinting resources:
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/about
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/kcarter
https://www.amiunique.org/faq
https://www.amiunique.org/privacy-tools/

▬▬ Credit and Special Thanks ▬▬
Audio production by [lý]
– https://lyismusic.dk/
– https://www.instagram.com/ly_is_music

▬▬ Licenses and Attributions ▬▬
"90's Computer" by Cameron-Main – https://skfb.ly/6XP9r – License: Attribution 4.0

▬▬ Timestamps ▬▬
00:00 Intro
00:25 Genesis of the World Wide Web
03:16 Persistent Client State Objects
06:40 Behold, the Internet Cookie!
08:50 One Small Oversight
11:16 Consequential Compromise
15:00 Annihilation of the First Mosaic Killer
16:16 The Devil We Don’t Know
18:14 Perks to an Open Standard

Latest Videos :: Re: The Success Disaster of the Cookie :: Reply by JINSBEK

2024-11-20T15:45:08+00:00

Hey, just saw the video! I love the bump in the production and creativity! Sound design’s pretty important to me, and how you illustrated the ecommerce storefronts and transactions is great. Very fascinating history of the development of the cookie, and ecommerce in general. I’m surprised you didn’t go into evercookies (cookies respawned from the dead via JavaScript necromancy). So, even if you do delete a cookie, the most committed advertisers (and government trackers) probably will just put it on your browser again.

I am impressed by the foresight of the original Netscape team, at such young ages. The web sure was a wild and wondrous place back then! It’s hard to replicate that excitement of doing something totally new and really cool, something that could affect everybody you know and more. You just had to be there. Most people these days will never know why websites specify http:// in their address—they won’t know that back then, they had to tell their browser what kind of website they were loading. There are still a few enthusiasts making and maintaining gopher:// websites to this day. Odd, neat thing.

For anyone more interested in digital fingerprinting, here’s a good lecture on it from MozCon 2014. Obviously, it’s dated now, but it should still give a good idea of what’s possible with this information.

One more thing, your timestamps/chapters are very thoughtful. Thank you!

Latest Videos :: Re: The Success Disaster of the Cookie :: Reply by CitricScion

2024-11-20T20:51:01+00:00

Awesome video, and handy reminder to check that I have third party cookies blocked!

I gotta say, not only is your animation great, but your writing and presentation are top tier. Your videos have so much polish! You do a great job of breaking down complicated topics into layman's terms. They feel like documentaries compared to most other videos I watch.

I want other digital privacy focused YouTube channels to come across you!

Latest Videos :: Re: The Success Disaster of the Cookie :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-11-20T21:50:47+00:00

Thanks @JINSBEK and @CitricScion!! I really had a lot of fun making it, and I'm really happy most people seem to like it.

I do eventually want to do a deeper dive into fingerprinting, that feels like a topic on it's own - but if I do, I want to be able to at least offer solutions, which at this moment, I don't have yet. It'll take time, but it's worth looking into!

Also thanks for noticing the timestamps haha I spent way too long on those

Latest Videos :: Re: The Success Disaster of the Cookie :: Reply by JINSBEK

2024-11-20T22:05:27+00:00

Yeah!! Just nine hours and already 144 comments on it? That’s amazing, man. Keep up the good work!

And timestamps are hard but very important, haha. I used to subtitle/closed caption Japanese media with English captions, so. SRT files. Man.

Latest Videos :: Another Privacy Website :: Reply by TheGreatTurtlexP

2024-11-20T23:10:41+00:00

I feel like the people here would like this https://www.privacytools.io/

Latest Videos :: Re: The Success Disaster of the Cookie :: Reply by JINSBEK

2024-11-21T22:04:19+00:00

I think this is relevant...

cookies.png

cookies2.png

I find it funny that the video gives an example of “10 websites sharing cookies”, but. It’s really multiple orders of magnitude greater than that. Not a criticism of the video, and I think it’d be insane to ask you to model and animate 1,000 different e-commerce sites at once, I just don’t think people really understand what’s at stake here…

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Latest Videos :: Re: The Success Disaster of the Cookie :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-11-21T22:07:33+00:00

I had to keep it simple, but yeah, it's cursed how many of these there can be

Other Videos :: Re: Strange Parts - How I Made an Android Phone :: Reply by JINSBEK

2024-11-16T00:13:06+00:00

The fact that there are multiple cell phone construction and repair schools (not covered in the video) astounds me. You have students learning trade skills like that—and there are basic two-day soldering courses too—that sounds really cool, and I wish we had the manufacturing base to do things like that in the US.

The more serious hardware start-up guys go straight to Shenzhen to start working with consultants and building their prototypes—as long as you know Chinese, or have a competent technical translator, it’s a lot more cost-effective than trying to build your prototype in the West. And you can iterate really quickly.

2Square wrote: Fri Nov 15, 2024 5:28 pmI wish I knew how to design and build a fully custom phone. Obviously this not something someone does on their own typically but the dream of "the perfect mostly-dumb phone" is seared into my brain

Honestly, I have half a mind to start learning Chinese specifically for this reason. I actually don’t think raising enough capital to get this off the ground would be difficult, so long as you do your advertising and campaigning correctly, apply for small business loans and grants, maybe if you’re lucky, get approved and featured on StartEngine if Kickstarter/Indiegogo isn’t your thing. (Personally I think getting VC money would be harder, but I suppose it’s not impossible.) The hard part is assembling a competent founding team. I don’t just mean hardware engineers. A Project Manager who cares about this sort of thing, a Marketer who cares about this sort of thing, a CFO who cares about this sort of thing, a webdev who cares about this sort of thing, and so-on and so-forth.

As long as it looks cool and you make people feel happy with how it feels and works, you can convince them to buy anything, especially if it’s at an accessible price range. The Aventon e-bike is a great example of this. Their first-generation designs were actually pretty impractical and inconvenient (no head or tail lights, no bottle holder), and the quality of the actual biking parts is mediocre (riding one feels like crap compared to a high-quality mountain bike at the same price), but they looked cool like motorcycles, the step-through and low seat meant you could get on them easily (went for the general person crowd rather than the sporty super lean MTB fanatic), and it had a throttle. So even though you had to build the bike yourself, and it was shipped from China, you had crazy fun riding it, and it didn’t cost even a third as much as other e-bikes at the time. Now those bikes are even sold at Best Buy, and I always see them in my city.

We just need a few people willing to put in their savings into building the first plant (lol), and we’re golden.

Other Videos :: Re: Strange Parts - How I Made an Android Phone :: Reply by JINSBEK

2024-11-19T23:43:23+00:00

CitricScion wrote: Tue Nov 19, 2024 2:02 am I'm waiting for Fairphone to get to the point where they have better hardware that's still repairable, and a better processor that still has a long support life cycle. But it's neat to see how with more know-how than the average bear you can get far.

Mmhmm. But in a lot of cases, that know-how isn’t even accessible, let alone actionable, without the bare minimum exposure to the necessary hardware and manufacturing. For example, I have a modded e-bike that allows custom lights to draw from the battery power, but the step-down transformer (converting the voltage) that is small enough to fit within the battery case I could only get imported from China. Same with the light set-up I have in my apartment—not a single domestic vendor sold the part I needed, and I couldn’t even find it on eBay, but I found it immediately on TEMU. If you don’t expand your network of distributors, then the best theoretical know-how, goes no-where.

Honestly, you could assemble and build a professional-grade camera if you have the parts. (Yes, you can buy them, and I bought them for my apartment lighting set-up.) But the average consumer isn’t interested in assembling their own hardware, and hasn’t even been exposed to the individual, surprisingly modular components. All they’re familiar with is the finished product.

Other Videos :: Re: Strange Parts - How I Made an Android Phone :: Reply by JINSBEK

2024-11-20T22:12:38+00:00

@CitricScion Ahh, thank you very much for the compliment. Yeah, being able to source, replace, and repair parts either by yourself or by one’s trust third-party is ideal. It’s one of the reasons that I personally don’t recommend Aventon e-bikes to people looking into getting an e-bike, for example. The construction is proprietary and idiosyncratic (even typically universal parts can’t be used—Aventon only), and any mechanic/shop has to be “Aventon-certified”—and frankly there doesn’t seem to be any actual competency tested for that. So maintenance is terrible.

…I miss the old days of tricked out phones. Making and swapping out parts to style them the way you wanted. Man, phones used to be cool and fun.

trickedout.jpg

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Other Videos :: Re: Strange Parts - How I Made an Android Phone :: Reply by JINSBEK

2024-11-20T23:26:11+00:00

Yeah, for real, right? This is why I call modern smartphones depression rectangles. They literally look like that. A lot of popular phones got third-party mods, not just one brand or model: all sorts of Motorolas, Nokias, Blackberrys. You could add lights to you antennae and have them flash certain colours if you were getting a call (e.g. red and blue like a police car if your dad was calling you, lmao), add backlighting to your keypad (think fancy gamer keyboards), basically swap out your whole shell for something completely different. People were making some really frutiger aero designs, even before that style became the vogue in the early 2000s. This one is a tricked out Motorola StarTAC from the ’90s! You’d be surprised at the variety of manufacturers getting into this. One of my favourite mods actually came from a snowmobile accessory company.

I guess there’s technically nothing stopping someone from making their own Samsung case—they don’t use like ten different screws like Apple does, but people are encouraged to buy new phones so often that they don’t think about modifying anything but an external case. ...So, you end up with a depression rectangle in red with no wondrous “architectural” or sculptural elements.

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Phones :: Re: Light Phone 3 :: Reply by JINSBEK

2024-11-10T01:16:31+00:00

I’m glad it’s an option for people who want it, but I’ve never been interested in any of the Light Phones, ever. E-ink is great, but this thing looks like even more of a depression rectangle than actual depression rectangles. For that price point (and what seems to be still relatively few mechanical parts that can fail, compared to other dumbphones), I’d expect luxury material or a phone that looks like the Batmobile. I can get a Kyocera GzOne for cheaper than that, and that thing does look like the Batmobile.

Phones :: Re: Thoughts on LineageOS? :: Reply by Tam

2024-11-11T20:01:59+00:00

I think It's a solid and reliable custom ROM that stood the test of time when traced back to CyanogenMod.
It's a bit barebones when it's just LineageOS.... but certainly better than bare AOSP lol
I used LineageOS on my Pixel 3 until I got a Moto Edge 50 Ultra and didn't bother to custom ROM it yet as the stock ROM is good as is at the moment honestly.

Phones :: Re: Thoughts on LineageOS? :: Reply by JINSBEK

2024-11-12T00:17:58+00:00

I think it’s great that custom ROMs like LineageOS give people an option to extend the life of their older Android phones. I haven’t used it myself, but back when I was using my older Samsung Galaxy S4 (2013) heavily, I had been on CyanogenMod, the predecessor to LineageOS. If I were still using my Galaxy, I’d probably have moved on to LineageOS eventually.

Phones :: Endless scroll creep of smartphone apps really killed the smartphone for me. :: Author JINSBEK

2024-11-12T00:45:18+00:00

mystify.jpg

Remember when we had things like pagination, and screensavers? I keep thinking that maybe if our phones played Mystify on “idle”, instead of showing notifications coaxing us to traipse into endlessly scrolling apps, people wouldn’t be so glued to and stressed by their smartphones.

Every single media platform is vying for your attention now. Whether it’s YouTube, Reddit, or even a news website (I scroll to the end of my current article and I’m suddenly in a different article?!) they want to keep you stuck on their platform for as long as humanly possible. I’m actually surprised that Amazon doesn’t keep you in a scrolling hamster wheel—yet. But other shopping apps like Temu definitely do.

Has anyone else here been forced to drop a media platform, that you formerly used responsibly on Mobile, because of the endless scrolling design that’s so pervasive now? YouTube is the last one to drive me crazy (the others I’ve uninstalled long ago already, ha), and also the last straw.

As infuriatingly boring the depression rectangle hardware is, I actually can’t blame it for nearly as much pain as the software being designed for it.

Attachments

mystify.jpg (81.31 KiB)

Phones :: Re: Endless scroll creep of smartphone apps really killed the smartphone for me. :: Reply by CitricScion

2024-11-12T01:24:33+00:00

It's possible to get rid of many of the social media apps that run like this, but I think it would be hard for me to find an in-between. Either I am glued to a service or I am not really using it at all. If you run apps through a browser sometimes the experience is more limited than the native app, and that friction can be enough to keep scrolling at bay. Just an idea.

Phones :: Re: Endless scroll creep of smartphone apps really killed the smartphone for me. :: Reply by JINSBEK

2024-11-12T16:17:21+00:00

Ah! Well, for me, it’s actually no problem to remove all SNS apps (and I suppose, refrain from reading news websites now, since they endlessly scroll…) from my phone—and I don’t even browse those on a Mobile browser. I don’t have a problem with going to those platforms only very occasionally in a homebound, desktop environment. I love Facebook Groups, but I don’t need to see, exactly, what is going on in the artisan cheesemaking group at this very moment! I can do that when I get home… And honestly, if I don’t? That’s fine, too. I can just explore those sorts of things when I actually want to look for new cheesemaking ideas, and so on. There are many things I like to do outside of work that don’t involve SNS, and I’d like to keep it that way.

Maybe it was a mistake to make the Internet always accessible from your pocket, even on the toilet. I just wish I could read a single news article without being bombarded, or just play one YouTube video (in my case, typically recordings of live performances, or someone’s mix) without YouTube immediately recommending me something else before the video has even started. I remember when Gawker Media (back when I read it…!) first abandoned their paginated layout for an endlessly scrolling one. There was an outcry in the readerbase, because at the time, everyone was reading these sites on their desktops. Ironically it seems to be a case of updating their site design far too early, before the ubiquity of smartphones. Now almost every single platform is designed to be endless, with zero discrete breaks.

Phones :: Re: What phone are you using? :: Reply by JINSBEK

2024-11-11T18:18:32+00:00

I currently have a OnePlus 8 (2020) as my daily driver, received it last year in 2023 as a gift after my old Samsung Galaxy S4 (2013) finally gave up the ghost in battery life. (I still use it as an at-home BlueTooth iPod in a charging stand.) I used to be a major smartphone nerd, testing and flashing custom ROMs, making sure I had the emoji I wanted, spoofing location data, etc. My smartphone was a real necessity for my work at the time, and I was constantly composing documents and writing notes on the go, checking emails, etc. I installed ViPER4Android, a custom audio driver, to make my headphone experience better (I used my smartphone as a music player). These days, the Dolby Atmos app that come on a lot of stock phones does a great job, and a custom audio driver isn’t a necessity for audiophiles anymore.

I think I’m pretty healthy with regards to my smartphone usage. I’m not active on any major social time-sinks like X, TikTok, Instagram, or Facebook. I don’t sink hours endlessly scrolling Pinterest. The biggest stressor from my smartphone now, comes from it being always on my desk at work because I use it as a music player, and a lot of the music I listen to are in YouTube playlists. I hate seeing everything else on the screen—I don’t want to see any notifications or anything but the current time and what music is playing, ever. I’m in the process of getting all of my music as local files away from the streaming services, and I’ve just ordered a gorgeous Fujitsu Arrows F-05G (2015) in burgundy red with a gold stripe time display to serve as an Android music player.

color01.jpg

I still need to use my depression rectangle as a biking GPS navigation tool, to pay for bus fare ($5 e-tickets on the app cover unlimited transit, including train fare, for the entire day, and isn’t an option with physical cash or bus cards), catch a Lyft/Uber, 2FA, etc. The puzzle alarm app I use is pretty nice for making sure I get up in the morning on time, too. Also need it to BlueTooth control LED lights I use for raves and what-not... But this way the depression rectangle won’t be nearly as present and visible in my waking hours anymore. I’m happy.

Attachments

color01.jpg (136.32 KiB)

Phones :: Re: What phone are you using? :: Reply by Tam

2024-11-11T23:18:51+00:00

CitricScion wrote: Thu Oct 17, 2024 1:02 am I fully expect to get a lot of dumbphone answers in this forum

Well... surprise surprise, I don't use a dumb phone.
I do have a really old one with me that my sister used to use lol
I get the appeal of a dumb phone, but I don't really plan to switch to one.

CitricScion wrote: Thu Oct 17, 2024 1:02 am I'll start even though I'm a bad example: I use a Google Pixel 8.

Don't worry, I'm in the same boat as you. I currently have the Moto Edge 50 Ultra.
I got it 'cause it's near stock Android, uses a Snapdragon (as opposed to Exynos and by extension Tensor (which is rebranded Exynos) which are infamous), and has an unlockable bootloader without compromising on the phone's features. I haven't unlocked the BL yet as it's fine atm, but it's incase there's a need.

So if it's of any consolation:

CitricScion wrote: Thu Oct 17, 2024 1:02 am I'm good with the usage. My screen time is also typically 2 hours or less, so I feel comfortable with that.

I'm not better in this regard lol

On to what I do:

I do have and use some mainstream social media (Discord, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit) plus additional ones like Bluesky and the Fediverse (even though not necessarily an "app") but I have my notifications disabled for them except for DMs which are only friends or people I follow (with some exceptions) for the sake of my mental sanity.
I use the web app for Twitter with uBO plus some userscripts to make it better because the app really isn't for me lol. I do use YouTube Revanced though. Sometimes I watch Shorts lol

For the Fediverse I mostly use the instance web app; separate apps have not worked out well for me.

I have Telegram because I have Discord semi-refugees there plus a lot of software projects use it.

WhatsApp for personal communication. Trust me, I would've preferred something else. A lot of my contacts are signing up for Telegram which is a good sign.

I use the Bunny client instead of the vanilla Discord app. Nothing deal-breaking about the vanilla app just nice to have extra features.

The official Reddit app suuuucks especially that it's absolutely not bandwidth-friendly and resource-friendly the last time I used it. So I just use RedReader which Reddit added as an exemption from their new 3rd party app policies.

For email I use K-9 Mail, which is basically Thunderbird for mobile. Except Zoho which I use for my contact mail. Can't even use IMAP without paying... kinda sucks.

I have a separate work profile created using Island for university stuff.

Oh yeah... launchers. I use Niagara launcher because I navigate the fastest with it.

I have a fair amount of games from syncing my previous phone.... but I find myself not playing more than just a few nowadays. I play more on PC anyway.

A lot of you definitely have criticisms, so I'm absolutely not the best example, but certainly not the worst either.
I personally think I'm fine with my current position.

I do not intend to influence anyone here as the conclusion is moreso that you don't have to stress yourself about trying to set a good example as ironically, it's not mentally good for you.

Phones :: Re: What phone are you using? :: Reply by TheSkellizYT

2024-11-13T15:46:19+00:00

I used to use a Samsung Galaxy Folder 2 for about a year, as I thought the speed would knock me off balance in terms of the performance, so not wanting to use it outside of normal texts and calls. When I stopped being able to do that without the phone crashing, I couldn't keep on using it unfortunately. Nowadays, I use my Oppo Find X2 Pro with Ultra Power Saving Mode on (Calls, Texts, Discord, IbisPaint & Avee Player/FiiO Music for music) so that none of the content brought from social media sucks me in. It's a pretty fast phone from 2020 so it gets the job done!

Phones :: Converting my Smartphone into a Dumphone :: Author 2Square

2024-11-14T20:54:35+00:00

Hello everyone,
I found the Reject Convenience channel yesterday and have fallen into the rabbit hole. I just watched “I Switched to a Dumb Phone – 2-year check-in” video and decided to check out the forum as well. I am in the middle of my own journey finding a healthy relationship with my phone and wanted to share the steps I took to turn my smartphone into a dumb phone. All of this is on a Samsung S22

1) Grayscale
Setting your phone to grayscale is probably the most suggested solution to screen time. For good reason too, it helps. There is still a lot of self-control needed to stop from turning it off when scrolling through feeds or in general use. Not being able to see the vibrant colors attracting the user to the app is a good first step to reducing the call of the phone. Tip: make it hard to turn off screen time. Samsung let’s you add it to your navigation bar and that is what I had for awhile but I found I turned grayscale off before scrolling social media which defeats the purpose of having it on.

2) Time Limits
Setting time limits on addicting or time-wasting apps is a good way to make sure you are limiting you phone usage. I have an overall screen usage goal of at max 1 hour a day and keep track of how I do each day in a notebook. I don’t always meet this goal and have weeks where I seem to forget I am limiting my usage at all, but it does help having a goal. I use the built in app timer features for my phone but that is because 1) I don’t want a 3rd party app reading my screen 24/7 and 2) the apps I did try did not track my app usage time consistently.

3) Get rid of all those apps!
Getting rid of apps is the hardest step. I went from around 120 apps to 67 (over half of which are forced installed thanks to Samsung). If I need to use an app, I download it and use it only for what was called for in that instance, and the second I am done with that task, I uninstall it. This keeps the distractions my phone can offer limited. I uninstalled all my social media apps and access those accounts through my browser if I want to. Rejecting convenience is one of the best ways to keep from mindless usage.

4) Get rid of those app icons!
This is the biggest and most effective way I have limited my phone addiction. I do not have a single app icon on my home screen. I downloaded a launcher called AIO Launcher (I recommended the launcher but have not investigated any data collection practices, take my recommendation as a user experience only) and turned my home screen into nothing but the 4 non-social media apps I use most often all in text form. My app library is a list of text rather than folders of icons. Now if I want to use something other than my main apps, I have to search for it specifically instead of its icon catching my attention.

I attached two screenshots of my homepage to show what I mean

These are the most impactful steps I have taken to reducing my phone addiction, other steps such as decentralizing the actions I take on my phone, i.e. getting rid of Spotify and using Tidal and Pocket Casts separately instead of both my music and podcasts on the same app, and blocking all but important notifications have helped a lot as well. Let me know if anyone has started a similar journey and how similar or different the steps you took are compared to mine.

2Square

Attachments

Screenshot_20241114_142931_AIO Launcher.jpg (25.69 KiB)

Screenshot_20241114_142912_AIO Launcher.jpg (35.23 KiB)

Phones :: Re: Converting my Smartphone into a Dumphone :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-11-15T01:15:12+00:00

I love how thoughtful this is all presented!! It's super helpful to see how other folks handle things to help inspire yourself! Thank you so much for sharing. I think switching what you already have is a fantastic way to handle things! ALSO @2Square welcome to the forum, it's pretty cool here, enjoy the frog pics!

Phones :: Re: Dumbphone and Smart Watch? :: Reply by caracalled

2024-11-21T10:31:30+00:00

I've never thought about the apple watch + dumbphone combo, but that makes SO much sense! watches are a lot less addictive I think and I imagine the benefit of having something on your wrist must be immense for ADHD!
Since my dumbphone runs android, I'll definitely look into the pebble watches!

Something I've been looking into as well is SensorWatch, for the tinkerers out there...
It's a motherboard switch for casio watches (or at least for some casio models) that gives you the option to customize your watch faces in a bunch of ways, and you can even make your own (although I think some basic python is needed for that).
I don't quite get the different restrictions on the different models/firmware versions yet but it seems like there's the option for a pedometer, heart beat tracker and temperature sensor on some of them, which are the tools I'd mainly want in a smart watch. It also has the buzzing feature in a newer version it seems, which @ambiarock mentioned as something they'd need.

I gave my old apple watch to my partner a while ago, since he's into bodybuilding and benefits way more than me from the exercise helpers it provides, but have been missing the basic tracking functionality and timers. I would love something similar back, but also love my old, beat up casio very dearly (lmao)

Cool Websites :: Re: 00's feeling websites :: Reply by Mark

2024-10-31T04:55:46+00:00

rejectconvenience wrote: Wed Oct 16, 2024 12:13 pm
Softlywool wrote: Tue Oct 15, 2024 6:35 pm how could 12 year old me have such patience customizing my profilepages with html.
We didn't have to pay bills

Did you ever Xanga

Cool Websites :: Exploration Websites :: Author rejectconvenience

2024-10-28T21:35:17+00:00

I LOVE websites that encourage exploration - I stumbled across this one today and I want to see more of this. Just poke around have have fun!

https://brawlersworld.com/

Cool Websites :: Re: Exploration Websites :: Reply by PossiblyAxolotl

2024-11-04T05:40:44+00:00

Some of my favourite websites I've been exploring a lot lately are https://melonking.net and https://melonland.net, he's got a whole weird internet universe going on over there and it's really fun to explore

Cool Websites :: Re: Exploration Websites :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-11-04T13:16:43+00:00

whoa, that "Ozwomp is Arriving" game is a trip

Cool Websites :: Re: Exploration Websites :: Reply by CitricScion

2024-11-05T01:46:19+00:00

How in the world is this real? How? I love this so much. I want to return.

Cool Websites :: Two Helpful Privacy Websites :: Author TheGreatTurtlexP

2024-11-20T23:21:19+00:00

The first one is from Reject's latest video "The Success Disaster of the Cookie" https://www.amiunique.org/privacy-tools/ the second one is something I found https://www.privacytools.io/

Computers :: Re: I use arch, btw :: Reply by rejectsocietynorms

2024-11-09T12:08:04+00:00

I actually use vanilla arch (btw). I have to say i genuinely don't get all the fuss around the difficulty. Yes, it takes a week or so to set up properly, but after that it is imo easier to use than any other distro cuz any bugs you run across u can usually solve with tinkering , wiki or ai chatbot (ikik) but i really think arch is easier to use than other distros if you do the install properly. But ig the installation is most of the difficulty so that's that. Do use plasma , so ig im not a sweat in that, but i just love the ui and customization. Not trying to convince anyone to use arch, because somethings do be stupid. but just saying. sorry for yap

Computers :: Re: I use arch, btw :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-11-10T02:11:43+00:00

Firstly, welcome, @rejectsocietynorms! Also, I know it's a meme, but I had a realization the other day - why does arch have such a devout fanbase? It is more stable? Is it more customizable? Like what's the big catch? I'm really curious as I've never actually thought about it before.

Computers :: Re: I use arch, btw :: Reply by Tam

2024-11-11T19:56:21+00:00

rejectconvenience wrote: Sun Nov 10, 2024 2:11 am Firstly, welcome, @rejectsocietynorms! Also, I know it's a meme, but I had a realization the other day - why does arch have such a devout fanbase? It is more stable? Is it more customizable? Like what's the big catch? I'm really curious as I've never actually thought about it before.

Arch isn't really more stable as it is a rolling release distro, you're moreso on the edge when it comes to packages.
Customizability plays a big part because you basically start from a minimal distro when done with setting it up.
It's a huge meme cause it's not user-friendly to install and people like to flex the fact that they installed it which did contribute to growing a fanbase xd

Computers :: Re: I use arch, btw :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-11-12T01:25:22+00:00

Tam wrote: Mon Nov 11, 2024 7:56 pm Arch isn't really more stable as it is a rolling release distro, you're moreso on the edge when it comes to packages.
Customizability plays a big part because you basically start from a minimal distro when done with setting it up.
It's a huge meme cause it's not user-friendly to install and people like to flex the fact that they installed it which did contribute to growing a fanbase xd

Haha okay, got it, it's a flex distro. Also, welcome @Tam !!!

Computers :: Re: I use arch, btw :: Reply by CitricScion

2024-11-12T01:30:36+00:00

I like to think that me using Linux at all is a flex, but the people around me don't give me credit for using Linux, so I need to one day install Arch to get the cool points from the Linux community. lol

Computers :: Re: I use arch, btw :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-11-12T01:45:28+00:00

I'm just here for stability haha Windows has been so unstable for me in the past, and so I used macOS. When Ventura hit, I looked towards linux, cause that was HOT GARBAGE. Now that Apple is blocking unsigned apps, I'm happy to be fully moving away from macOS. I was editing in Final Cut Pro, but the new video (that will be up soon) was entirely done in Blender!

Computers :: Re: I use arch, btw :: Reply by CitricScion

2024-11-13T02:01:59+00:00

Open source software for the win! You're free now (in your workflow, hopefully). Blender is such an awesome success story of an open source tool that has become popular in the industry its meant for. In so doing, it protects its artists from future exploitation by a company! I hope it continues working for you.

Computers :: Re: I use arch, btw :: Reply by Crazyroostereye

2024-11-21T12:31:47+00:00

I did use Arch for a majority of the Time I have been using Linux. But I do hop Distros every now and then, when they have something Special that they offer. I did it with Universal Blue and am Now been trying NixOS for the Past 3 Month now. The Atomic/Immutable Desktops are truly Interesting.

Computers :: Re: I use arch, btw :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-11-21T17:12:40+00:00

@Crazyroostereye Welcome! I've been seeing a lot more on NixOS, maybe it's high time I check it out

Computers :: What computer do you use? :: Author CitricScion

2024-11-05T02:02:46+00:00

My main computer is a ThinkPad T480s with Aurora, a custom image of Fedora Kinoite. It's working well but I'm thinking about upgrading to a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 11 or a Framework 13. Unsure which way I'll do right now.

Computers :: Re: What computer do you use? :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-11-05T20:31:39+00:00

I've been using a base M1 MacBook Pro for a while, and these new animations are starting to hit the limit. I was planning on getting whatever the new M4 stuff was, but after seeing how much AI nonsense there is, and Apple wanting to kill 3rd party apps that aren't signed, I decided to look elsewhere. I'm highly considering the Framework 16, cause that macropad looks sick for custom Blender shortcuts. I also love that you don't have to buy storage through them, which is great, because I happen to have a 1TB nvme just laying around. I don't think I'd get the GPU since I use a desktop for the rendering of my videos, but that's the big perk of Framework, I can always get it later if I do want it!

As for that desktop, it's a custom desktop that I use pretty much just for rendering at this point. I like to be able to animate from anywhere, which is why I prefer the laptop. I'm gonna be popping in a new GPU in the desktop so I can render things a lot better. GTX 1080 TI was good back in the day, but it's struggling with Blender these days lol. Going up to a 4070 Super, which should help a lot. Yes, it'll be slightly bottlenecked, but again, I'm just using it for Blender, and I can always upgrade things later.

Computers :: Re: What computer do you use? :: Reply by PossiblyAxolotl

2024-11-09T06:05:46+00:00

I use an Asus TUF A15 laptop with Windows from a few years ago exclusively, but I'm planning on building a proper desktop and switching to Linux with it as my laptop requires proprietary Windows software so I can't switch sooner. Probably gonna go all AMD for the desktop since Linux likes that from what I can tell.

Computers :: Re: What computer do you use? :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-11-12T12:57:15+00:00

wait a minute.. @PossiblyAxolotl I've totally seen your videos before! Great animation work! I also don't recall if I've welcomed you here or not but W E L C O M E either way!

I need to look into those thinkpads everyone is so attached to. I'm also thinking about just going all out on a laptop only setup with a System 76 setup, but those are e x p e n s i v e

Computers :: Re: What computer do you use? :: Reply by JINSBEK

2024-11-13T01:45:36+00:00

I have a Wacom MobileStudio Pro 13'', a drawing tablet PC, running Windows 11 as the primary OS. It’s not a powerful computer by any means, but it’s enough for me to play Another Crab’s Treasure and Cult of the Lamb on the lowest settings, and most importantly, it’s portable and allows me to draw in my digital painting software anywhere I’d like, without having to lug both a laptop and a Cintiq. I have a very thin Bluetooth keyboard, a Bluetooth mouse that looks like a race car, and a decent portable Bluetooth speaker. I’m able to both paint on my balcony, and play Cult of the Lamb in my bathtub.

Computers :: Re: What computer do you use? :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-11-13T02:24:53+00:00

JINSBEK wrote: Wed Nov 13, 2024 1:45 am I have a Wacom MobileStudio Pro 13''

ohhh these are so cool, I always loved this device

Computers :: Re: What computer do you use? :: Reply by Bobzilla

2024-11-21T19:35:14+00:00

I use an Asus G13ch Desktop. Generally rule of thumb is to check pc pricing in January right after Christmas sales. You should also focus on the difference between "gaming" and "office" desktops. Laptops are almost never worth the money you sink into them. If you want portability, get a tablet. If you want something that will last and has the processing power to handle large projects, get a pc. Pre-builts are in a decent spot in the market where if you know where to look and check enough, you can actually get a pc cheaper than the individual parts inside of it (albeit with worse specs than a top of the line newer one, but being half as good as something 2 years newer than it isn't a massive deal unless ur rending large projects)

Gaming :: Re: Playdate and other Dedicated Portables :: Reply by PossiblyAxolotl

2024-11-07T06:39:57+00:00

I love handhelds, I've got a whole shelf of handhelds including a Playdate, arduboy, and some more normal stuff like a switch lite. I got my Playdate on day 1 and I really like it, especially making games (I made the game Rocket Bytes which came out pretty early in its lifespan on itch!). It's definitely a little expensive but I've really enjoyed it personally

Music Players :: Re: Modern Android Music Players :: Reply by JINSBEK

2024-11-13T02:30:57+00:00

Stefen_Maxwell wrote: Tue Aug 06, 2024 12:59 pm
rejectconvenience wrote: Tue Aug 06, 2024 12:50 am Do you have some links to some? I'd love to check these out.
Link1 Link2 Link3 Link4

Here you go. I don't recommend quoting this lol.

Oh wow, those are pretty pricey… And the tactile design doesn’t seem to be as, well, existent, as with older portable music players (iPod, Discman, Walkman). I’m opting for an older Android clamshell phone (T9 keyboard and shortcut buttons) to use as a dedicated music player. I’m hoping it can run the GoneMAD music player app. If not, I can always just use VLC. I’m using Dropsync to make accessible local directories to sync to my Dropbox (the Dropbox app keeps “offline-available” files in a cache folder inaccessible to other apps). Once my clamshell phone arrives from Japan, I’ll post about how it’s going.

Music Players :: Re: How to back up the existing music on an iPod :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-11-16T11:43:17+00:00

Just updated the guide referencing the original format of the iPod that it was synced with. I also added a note in the Windows guide to not reformat the iPod if you asked to in Windows. As always, Windows makes everything harder by not being able to read a file system that other systems support, and really wants to use an outdated filesystem with horrible speeds and storage limitations.

(I may or may not hate Windows lol)

Music Players :: Re: Ordered an iPod :: Reply by caracalled

2024-11-13T08:05:22+00:00

Other people who mod iPods :DD
I have an iPod classic (5th gen) as well as an iPod mini, and I like taking both apart and messing with them. (also an ipod nano for the bluetooth!) There's not that much to do with the iPod mini in terms of modding, I gave it a new battery and hard drive because the old one was failing, but I hope that the community around it will pick up a little and we'll see some more fun stuff people do with it!
As for the iPod classic: I've given it a bigger battery and a 520gb SD card (which was kind of overkill tbh) and next up I'd like to USB-C mod it and maybe eventually add a bluetooth mod as well. Has anyone here tried this before? I have very little experience soldering so I'm a little intimidated and I'm interested to hear if someone has tried it here!

Music Players :: Re: Ordered an iPod :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-11-13T15:20:34+00:00

Firstly, welcome @caracalled! We're happy to have you here

I've really been wanting to try the taptic mod, where you replace the clicker speaker with an old iPhone 7 taptic engine so it clicks the whole iPod, but I am very new to soldering, and haven't had success without breaking the taptic engine haha. Luckily, they're crazy cheap on eBay. My main iPod 7th gen has a red faceplate + white clickwheel + extended battery and 256GB storage, which is plenty for all my music, as well as some cozy shows and movies. Nothing like watching classic Simpsons on an old iPod screen haha.

Music Players :: Re: Ordered an iPod :: Reply by caracalled

2024-11-21T10:09:58+00:00

rejectconvenience wrote: Wed Nov 13, 2024 3:20 pm Firstly, welcome @caracalled! We're happy to have you here

I've really been wanting to try the taptic mod, where you replace the clicker speaker with an old iPhone 7 taptic engine so it clicks the whole iPod, but I am very new to soldering, and haven't had success without breaking the taptic engine haha. Luckily, they're crazy cheap on eBay. My main iPod 7th gen has a red faceplate + white clickwheel + extended battery and 256GB storage, which is plenty for all my music, as well as some cozy shows and movies. Nothing like watching classic Simpsons on an old iPod screen haha.

Ohh I hadn't even heard of that one, that sounds awesome!! I will put it on my list!! I'm lucky to have a prototyping lab at uni where I can use the equipment and there's someone there to help me out when I'm stuck... Maybe there's something similar around you? I'm not sure if you're in university/have friends in university or maybe there's a community owned lab like that similar to how there sometimes are for pottery/ceramics places?

The red face plate sounds really nice... reminds me of those bright red iphones they sell sometimes (i think for aids awareness?), those are so pretty! monochrome red devices are super rare i feel but they look so fun!
If you have a picture, I'd love to see!

Also, thank you! Happy to be here! I joined from another forum and then realized that I know your youtube channel from when I was looking into switching to a dumbphone BWAHAHA

Music Players :: Re: Ordered an iPod :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-11-21T17:09:48+00:00

I'll get a photo of mine up here soon, I'll start a new thread for sharing iPod pics haha

caracalled wrote: Thu Nov 21, 2024 10:09 am Also, thank you! Happy to be here! I joined from another forum and then realized that I know your youtube channel from when I was looking into switching to a dumbphone BWAHAHA

What fourm?? I know I've been poking around in a few

Online Privacy :: Image sharing privacy - theyseeyourphotos.com (Ente) :: Author Mark

2024-11-15T07:04:16+00:00

This is an interesting tool used to show just how powerful data in an image/photo is. It the Google Vision API to identify the contents of an image as a description very accurately, but also the EXIF and other metadata. It's not perfect, but it's interesting.

https://theyseeyourphotos.com/

Something to note - it seems to be made by a company trying to show off privacy issues with online sharing, while selling a cloud storage service for photos. Though interestingly, they fully open sourced it.

Online Privacy :: Re: Image sharing privacy - theyseeyourphotos.com (Ente) :: Reply by CitricScion

2024-11-19T02:05:40+00:00

To vouch for the company a little, I have heard good things about Ente as a service provider in the digital privacy space. They're newer than many companies in this market, but they've developed a positive reputation.

Online Privacy :: Re: When privacy clashes with user experience :: Reply by JINSBEK

2024-11-20T22:26:34+00:00

Oh, this is going to train users to be less mindful of their settings and what they tap on—not only within their own Mac, but elsewhere. Let me give you an example: my fiancée is a manager in a grocery store. Every now and then, at the self check-out aisle, something happens (e.g. problematic item barcode) that triggers a pop-up on the screen informing the customer to please wait for assistance. These customers have been so trained by their iPads that they instinctively try to tap outside the pop-up in order to close it, and they don’t read it. They hate those prompts. They don’t read it at all. It skims the surface of their consciousness, if at all. They don’t understand that they can’t continue without store faculty helping them.

That’s at the self-checkout aisle where you’re spending money and approving transactions! How do you think people will respond to weather apps repeatedly asking people for their location permission?

Online Privacy :: Re: When privacy clashes with user experience :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-11-20T22:58:18+00:00

1000% agree.

Online Privacy :: Two Helpful Privacy Websites :: Author TheGreatTurtlexP

2024-11-20T23:19:29+00:00

The first one is from Reject's latest video "The Success Disaster of the Cookie" https://www.amiunique.org/privacy-tools/ the second one is something I found https://www.privacytools.io/

Other Tech :: Re: What desktop browser do you use? :: Reply by Mark

2024-11-03T03:01:00+00:00

Didn't get a chance to vote but I'm still a filthy Chrome user. Unfortunately and to @rejectconvenience 's disdain, I accept the Chrome and Google ecosystem because less friction with high convenience is highly important to me. There simply isn't enough impetus for me to make a switch. My most recent attempt was Vivaldi.

Manifest V3 is probably the most likely thing to get me to move, because the modern web is such a shitfest of ads layered on top of ads with more autoplay ads to go with the other ads. I was never a uBlock origin enjoyer, having stuck with good ol' Adblock (the getadblock.com one). I'm also totally uninterested in doing a pihole because I can't be bothered (which is a recurring theme).

I also never have the performance issues people complain about with Chrome, but that's probably because I'm an outlier in system specs so overhead doesn't impact me really (my personal daily is Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 64gig ram, RTX 4090).

To what I would switch to though, I have no idea. Firefox is the most likely candidate unless Vivaldi gets me interested again, or if Arc shows they can wear the big boy pants. Though I'll go kicking and screaming to whatever I have to move to.

Other Tech :: RSS Readers? :: Author onelius

2024-11-21T21:02:14+00:00

Since the forum has an RSS feed, I thought I'd ask if anyone has RSS reader recommendations!

I'm still figuring out how to use RSS feeds effectively, and I downloaded Fluent Reader a while back to test one out (mostly for newsletters) and it's worked fine, but I haven't looked into alternatives much. I've looked into building one myself as a fun project as well but that's gonna take a while...

Other Tech :: Re: RSS Readers? :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-11-21T21:08:56+00:00

I am very much in the market for one for Linux. On macOS I've used NetNewsWire. It's fine, pretty simple, but since I'm transitioning away from macOS, I want to find something new!

Tech News :: Re: 23andMe will pay $30 million to settle 2023 data breach lawsuit (oh and the whole board quit) :: Reply by Mark

2024-10-31T04:54:59+00:00

CitricScion wrote: Sat Oct 19, 2024 5:51 pm You can change a password. You can't change your thumbprint.

Not with that attitude

Art :: Practice drawing big cats :: Author Felid131

2024-11-15T04:29:51+00:00

Hello. This is my first time posting here. I've been off and on practicing drawing for the past few years. Of interest is big cats. Here's a Snep I did in my notebook. What I did is go to Random Big Cat Generator and look up pictures of the species it said, pick one I like, and then draw it. I'm hoping to continue drawing more, get better, and post my work here.

IMG_0056.JPG

Attachments

IMG_0056.JPG (180.46 KiB)

Art :: Re: Practice drawing big cats :: Reply by 2Square

2024-11-15T17:25:54+00:00

Very good work, keep practicing!

Art :: Re: Practice drawing big cats :: Reply by JINSBEK

2024-11-21T23:42:46+00:00

Oh! Is that a snow leopard? I love how shaggy it is. Random (wild?) cat generator is a great idea for drawing prompts.

Somewhat related, this humourous video on your life as a snow leopard might interest you.

Art :: Re: Practice drawing big cats :: Reply by Felid131

2024-11-22T03:21:27+00:00

Quick and dirty one. Wish I could erase pen. I kept adding to the mouth trying to fix it and made a mess of it. Thin-furred cats are not my thing and not very enjoyable to draw. The boney skull translated poorly to a sketch and looks quite ugly.

IMG_0062.JPG

The picture from Wikipedia that I drew from.

Puma_concolor_stanleyana_-_Texas_Park_-_Lanzarote_-PC08_(cropped).jpg

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Puma_concolor_stanleyana_-_Texas_Park_-_Lanzarote_-PC08_(cropped).jpg (167.37 KiB)

Art :: Re: Practice drawing big cats :: Reply by JINSBEK

2024-11-22T18:37:45+00:00

That’s pretty cool! The North American cougar, huh? It’s good that you’re challenging yourself to draw things outside your comfort zone, you’ll learn quicker from those mistakes than from any other. When you think of a big cat’s head, what helps me is thinking about how the muscles spread out from the bony ridge, almost like a pair of wings on each side.

IMG_20241122_115710_cropped.jpg

I tried giving it a go and misjudged how much room I had left on my page, ha. I messed up its left eye trying to shade it like in the photo, and I had a little trouble judging the jowl, but overall I like how it turned out. The musculature in the front leg is very prominent and that struck me particularly.

Attachments

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Books :: Book recommendations :: Author mushroomchild

2024-10-26T18:59:02+00:00

I've really been getting into tech-related stuff recently (partly because of the Reject Convenience channel itself), and was wondering if there are any good books about tech in general. I'll read pretty much anything, so please feel free to mention books about slightly more niche topics. Sorry if this is a vague request, I'm just finding it difficult to explore such a vast topic by myself.

Books :: Re: Book recommendations :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-10-27T12:29:02+00:00

I highly recommend the book "Ghost in the wires" by Kevin Mitnick. It's about Kevin's life as the first FBI's most wanted hacker, and it's a wild ride. It talks a lot about one of the most common forms of hacking, social engineering, which I think is super important to understand when getting into tech.

Animals :: Frog :: Author 2Square

2024-11-15T18:15:15+00:00

My Frogs

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Snapchat-1452174846.jpg (258.21 KiB)

Snapchat-1634532299.jpg (149.68 KiB)

Animals :: Re: Frog :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-11-16T15:40:13+00:00

good frogs

Animals :: Frog :: Author CoolCrescent186

2024-11-20T19:27:44+00:00

Took me forever to cut down the filesize to fit! Taken with my Motorola Moto G100 running LineageOS, the ultrawide/macro sensor using OpenCamera. I shoot in webp, and I converted to jpg to upload. This is an example frog to make a point from an earlier post (viewtopic.php?p=61#p61). Devices like this take photos that are fine for most things, even in low-ish light.

Attachments

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Animals :: Re: Frog :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-11-20T21:51:36+00:00

l i g h t f r o g

Self Promotion :: Re: I make a bit of art so this is where i post some of it :: Reply by Softlywool

2024-10-23T21:04:30+00:00

Stefen_Maxwell wrote: Sat Oct 19, 2024 5:19 am Your art is really good. What programs do you use to make all of them?

Thank you! I use clip studio paint for those specific pieces!

Self Promotion :: Re: I make a bit of art so this is where i post some of it :: Reply by CitricScion

2024-10-26T00:56:13+00:00

Awesome tool and awesome art!

I have a basic blog on Bear Blog that works with markdown and that's about it. Not for everyone, but for someone who just wanted a simple place to host long posts, it works a charm.
https://bearblog.dev

Good News :: Helped my fiancée make her first website! :: Author JINSBEK

2024-11-14T12:48:24+00:00

Woohoo! My girl’s been wanting to create a personal website, but has been hemming and hawing about it for almost a year now. I finally got through to her when I explained that a personal website is like a bonsai tree—it’s supposed to grow with you, there’s no making it perfect on the first try. You shape how it grows, it might grow weird branches that you really like, you might take off an entire branch or rearrange things, you’ll put it in a different pot, and so on. It’s a digital scrapbook. She got really excited when I explained it like that.

She’s never touched HTML or CSS in her life. I walked her through Phoenix Code editor and gave her answers to her questions (“How do I put a bunch of bunny images in a row?” etc.), and in two hours she was able to make and compose her first bunny pages. Future things she’ll add include a gallery of her naturalist beach photography, a guestbook, and a diary!

I have to say, it was really neat and funny to teach someone how to use , and so on. I grew up making webpages on Neopets, reading up Lissa Explains It All, and so on. So HTML tags are like alphabet letters to me.

https://seabunny2006.neocities.org/

Good News :: Re: Helped my fiancée make her first website! :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-11-14T14:07:14+00:00

I LOVE this! I've been saying it for a thousand years, the internet is open for anyone, and if existing platforms don't mesh with what you want to share, make it yourself That's why this entire forum exists! I didn't want to make a discord server, because I didn't want to make people feel required to sign up for some account that the privacy policy could change on a whim. I wanted people to be able to read the discussions with no account needed, and if they want to engage, they can sign up knowing that I'm not selling their blood type to The Zucc.

Anyways, I love the site, bunny facts are sick

Good News :: Re: Helped my fiancée make her first website! :: Reply by CitricScion

2024-11-19T02:10:18+00:00

This is adorable. Good job to her! Now I'm feeling a little inspired to try something. I was thinking about setting a blog recently to but opted for Substack. Maybe if I stick with the blog I will try my hand at hosting a Ghost instance.

Good News :: What projects are you working on right now? :: Author JINSBEK

2024-11-20T18:30:22+00:00

Thread to discuss whatever it is that’s keeping us busy now! Art, home renovation, decluttering, etc…

Right now, I’m working on my modern personal website for my art. Chiefly, it’s going to be my art gallery, but I’m also going to include a blog, essays, links to my other projects, and a guestbook. Since so many people browse the Internet on a smartphone now, I’ve been forced to create Mobile-friendly responsive designs. Still, I’m trying (and enjoying trying!) to keep a magazine-like quality with things like overlapping images, TTS-friendly drop caps, and different fonts in different faces, weights, sizes, styles, kerning, capitalisation, and colours for emphasis. Typographic hierarchy is near and dear to me, but web design these days seems to be focused on blown-up images.

Most of my work right now is writing the content for dedicated pages of my artworks. I also still need to design how the breadcrumbs will look; I think I’ll get started on that this week.

What about you?

Good News :: Re: What projects are you working on right now? :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-11-20T21:53:05+00:00

I just wrapped up my big project haha my next one is to relax a little. I have lots of ideas for the next project, though.

Good News :: Nice and funny things that happened to you today :: Author JINSBEK

2024-11-21T15:20:12+00:00

Did something cool, neat, nice, or funny happen to you today (or yesterday)? Thought I’d make a thread where we share!

I work in a law firm, and I’m in our secure (locked) mailroom, just getting our mail ready to be sent out… One of our firm’s leading attorneys, a very old, loud man, who has no business in the mailroom (all modern machinery intimidates him and it’s hard enough to get him to use his email), bursts in, brusquely marches up to me, and barks, “Want a doughnut take a doughnut just one.” (I take one.) “Sally should get a doughnut take a doughnut just one.” (I take another one.) And I’m practically forced out of the mailroom in the middle of getting our correspondences ready, just to bring a chocolate doughnut back to my supervisor, lol… I was having a bad day at work that day yesterday, so it was really nice being given a doughnut and err, transporting a doughnut to my supervisor. That attorney isn’t the most personable man, but he does care and try to be nice, and he frequently brings doughnuts, cookies, cupcakes, or chocolates to the office for everyone. It’s his way of making up for his loud, shouty voice.

Good News :: Re: Nice and funny things that happened to you today :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-11-21T21:04:26+00:00

This happened yesterday, but I have a ton of music on my iPod (upwards of 15k songs), but I haven't heard all of them. Back in high school, when people would ask me to repair their iPods, I would make backups of the drives just in case I screwed something up, and a side effect of that was a massive collection of music I would have not normally been exposed to (I know this is sort of piracy, but whatever, this was over a decade ago and I was a kid). I don't know why but I kept those files around this whole time, even when I switched to Spotify in 2016, they just kinda sat in the background for a while, and when I picked the iPod thing back up again in 2021, I realized I had a bit of a head start to my tunage. Of course, I've added quite a bit since then with new music I have paid for and such, so it got to be a pretty big library of music.

So, a couple times a month, I'll just play everything on shuffle (I have it set to shuffle by album, so I get the whole experience of a random artists intent), and yesterday, I was greeted by Troy and Gabriella from High School Musical 2. Gotta get your head in the game and bet on it and I was just thrown back a million years. I remember being so annoyed at my sister for days on end because she'd play the music on repeat.

The funny part?

It kinda slaps now.

Other :: Reject Convenience spotted in Nomad video comments! :: Author xan

2024-10-26T05:06:21+00:00

I found Reject Convenience in the comments of Nomad's video "Why Being A Small YouTuber is Impossible"! (linked comment)

alt text: Oh man that flatline feeling when a video picks up steam super fast and then just dies... that feeling is brutal. I have a video that I put a TON of research into and it was my #1 and I was like awww yeah and then at 3k, it dropped to 1 view per 48 hours. I've had several videos do that, and my most recent one I was fully prepared for it to flatline at 3k views, tops... and then.. it didn't stop. I don't know why. I don't feel like I did anything differently, but YouTube was like "hey yeah this one will go". It's a wacky system and I very much cannot imagine trying to make this a full time job given how random it all feels.

Crazy that I spotted that while reading the comments on a TV. (Using the app SmartTube!)

Other :: Re: Reject Convenience spotted in Nomad video comments! :: Reply by CitricScion

2024-11-05T01:53:48+00:00

Aww, heck yeah! W for @rejectconvenience!

Other :: How successful have you been with disconnecting? :: Author CitricScion

2024-10-26T01:15:15+00:00

Every so often I think about having a digital detox day, but it's hard to do when you're surrounded by tech and live with others who aren't as interested in joining you in the experiment.

Have you tried going a day or more without using a certain piece of technology? How did it go for you? What did you learn? What steps did you take or would you take next time to be more successful?

Other :: Re: How successful have you been with disconnecting? :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-10-26T03:09:31+00:00

I mentioned this in a previous video, but I spent 1 week off any internet connecting devices, and honestly, after how drained I am from this week, I want to do it again soon - it certainly has it's perks. I think next time, I'd aim to balance things a lot better. I went out of town and that seems a little too extreme. I'd love to be able to do it where I live, you know?

Other :: Re: How successful have you been with disconnecting? :: Reply by CitricScion

2024-11-05T01:57:39+00:00

That sounds really nice. I'm thinking about how to do something like that soon, but it's tough.

What I have done in the past, intentionally or unintentionally, is ghost services that are causing me anxiety. Like, when a certain social media platform or community is becoming too much for me, I just ghost them for a few days and it feels like I've reset a little bit. Sometimes in ghosting the source of anxiety or stress the anxiety builds in the opposite direction and then I don't want to go back for fear of what I will find, lol. It's a small way of getting away when I can't do something bigger, but I guess it only looks like that in retrospect.

Other :: Re: How successful have you been with disconnecting? :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-11-05T20:33:45+00:00

I saw a Dankpods video a while back where he suggested getting an eye mask and some headphones and just listening to music. Not being able to see helps you get in the groove, and I've actually found it to also be really helpful for relaxing (as silly as it might look)

Other :: Re: How successful have you been with disconnecting? :: Reply by CitricScion

2024-11-12T01:39:39+00:00

Yo, I can absolutely imagine that happening! I have to try that on a day I have the house to myself.

Other :: Re: How successful have you been with disconnecting? :: Reply by JINSBEK

2024-11-20T00:09:48+00:00

Generally, I’ve been pretty good about disconnecting. When I was still a healthcare worker (I used to work in a hospital), I spent my downtime either working on fiction, drawing, or writing movie reviews to post on my old personal website. All my other co-workers were glued to their phones any time there was a lull, but I was too busy being an excited hobbyist gamedev, I guess. When I quit healthcare and became an apprentice butcher, there was really no time and space to use a smartphone, so even when we had our breaks, I just went outside and did cartwheels. When I got off work, I went to the gym, painted, played video games, and did scrapbooking in my bullet journal. On my weekends, I biked.

My biggest problem came from when I started working for tech start-ups and went as a fully-remote travelling worker. That… required me to be on top of technology. All the time. There was no home-office separation, and thus, no work-life balance. I’m now weaning myself off of a year and a half of that, and the biggest hurdle for me has just been the geographical distance between me and my fiancée (she’s still awaiting VISA approval). Discord was the best way to keep in touch with no barriers. But, I have all these other things on my smartphone that also want my attention… Notifications from everywhere, let alone other Discord servers. That was hellish.

Also, my city is always full of events, so Facebook kept suggesting events to go to… I wasn’t doomscrolling like a lot of other people, funnily enough. I was FOMOing into vintage fests and volunteer work and raves LMAO. Yeah that was fun but not sustainable.

Since being glued to our smartphones has been negatively impacting both of us, she and I have switched to email and Skype calls only. As soon as we got into that routine, everything was smooth sailing for us, techwise.

Other :: Re: How successful have you been with disconnecting? :: Reply by CitricScion

2024-11-20T02:27:05+00:00

I do see notifications get talked about a lot as part of the struggle with living intentionally, but that's never been a pain point for me because I aggressively manage what can notify me and in what way. Android has been great for that - it's actually the number one reason I could never consider an iPhone.

Do you guys do this? I can make a new thread for this as well if it's too off-topic.

Other :: Re: How successful have you been with disconnecting? :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-11-20T13:58:56+00:00

I mean I do it more as a side effect of not having anything that can notify me haha

Other :: Re: How successful have you been with disconnecting? :: Reply by JINSBEK

2024-11-20T16:49:51+00:00

CitricScion wrote: Wed Nov 20, 2024 2:27 am I do see notifications get talked about a lot as part of the struggle with living intentionally, but that's never been a pain point for me because I aggressively manage what can notify me and in what way. Android has been great for that - it's actually the number one reason I could never consider an iPhone.

Do you guys do this? I can make a new thread for this as well if it's too off-topic.

Completely turning off notifications isn’t an option for me, because I need to know when my packages are delivered. I’ve suffered stolen packages before, because many times, the carrier isn’t the most professional—leaving parcels on the steps outside of the lobby, allowing anyone from outside the building to steal. Ideally the carrier contacts me via the ButterflyMX app, and I can either remotely give them access to the apartment lobby and secure mailroom, or just go downstairs and greet them myself to retrieve my package.

I don’t have annoying notifications from other apps anymore, because they are either not installed on my phone, or, I’ve blocked them during certain times and locations.

Other :: The internet has changed. How I've disconnected and my concerns. :: Author MikeGs

2024-11-21T04:54:40+00:00

I wanted to post this as an answer to @CitricScion 's post, but It came out a little bit long. So here's my approach on how my internet usage changed, how I've disconnected, my concerns, and what I feel the future of the internet might be.

Mine is an interesting story. I've been into IT since I was around 8 years old. I have tons of CD's and DVD's of backups, software and operating system ISO's that I downloaded back in the day. I remember being able to install iAtkos' version of Mac OS X Leopard on my non-apple laptop, creating tons of virtual machines, batch files, modding and digging through Windows regedit when I was around 11 years old.

Currently, I have three degrees in IT and software dev. Worked as an IT technician at 15-16, and as a full stack dev during covid all the way up until mid 2022, when I finished a project and felt burned out. I'm currently working as a smart-home, intranet, coax and electrical installer. I basically plan and execute the entire wiring of newly built/renovated houses, apartments and flats worth hundreds of thousands (€).

For some reason, I feel way happier with my current job. I feel like days go by slower, I get to chat and meet all kinds of people, I feel welcome, and I feel that my work actually makes a difference. I don't want to go back to sitting in a cubicle for 8+ hours a day, I already had enough of that after spending more than 7 years getting my degrees. Also, in my current work position, there's no incentive to check my phone at all.

Around 2020, shortly before the pandemic, I used to take two different trains to get to my university. I'd take me around 1,5 hours to get there, and another 1,5 hours to come back home. Public transportation sucks in my area, and it probably runs even worse nowadays.

One day I noticed that I was the only person in the entire train car that wasn't actively looking at their phone, and I've been thinking about it ever since. I know that people used to read newspapers or books when taking the bus or train, so it's nothing new. What worries me is that most were scrolling through social media. It's not like I'd peek at their phone screens or anything, but the hand gestures were a dead giveaway.

I've been off of Twitter for three years now, and off of Facebook for six years. I only use Instagram DM's (which I check every three days) and Reddit. I don't watch Youtube or any kind of content on my phone. I side load all of my movies and TV shows. There's no social media apps installed on my phone at all. I've got Focus and Do not disturb modes enabled.

I exclusively use Reddit on my PC, and I purge what subreddits I follow every single month. I want to make sure that whatever pops up on my home screen actually benefits me and it's of my interest. Nothing political, no massive subreddits, and niche oriented subs are my rules.

I also try my hardest to make my internet usage as active as possible. There's a difference between active and passive:
- Active: Intentionally searching and looking for content and information that you're willing to find.
- Passive: Letting an algorithm feed-based platform dictate what you're going to see next.

In my country, using Whatsapp is a must, and it's one of the few things that's keeping me from buying a dumb phone, apart from online banking and two-factor auth. Ever since I've used Whatsapp, I've muted every group chat that I've joined, and I've always had the "last online" feature disabled. People can't add me to groups unless I accept a group invite.

When these groups become overwhelming, and muting them is not enough, I move them to the "Restricted chat" folder, where you'll not see them unless you scroll up and input a security code or biometrics.

This has really made a difference, I feel less anxious and less worried about missing out. Days last longer, I get to do more things and be more productive. I get to enjoy little things and down time again, letting my imagination go rampant. This has allowed me to go back to software dev as a hobby, and I've had a great time. I spend some hours every week working on projects and tinkering the same way that I used to when I was 10 years old.

Even though I've done my part I can't help but wonder if the average person out there has even thought of doing something similar. Sometimes it's not a matter of whether or not I do it, It's a matter of how/if this be reversed. People are still going to be stuck, they'll keep consuming mindless content and wasting hours in front of their phones.

With the dead internet theory slowly becoming a reality, eating away most organic traffic and replacing it with AI generated content on social media, I can't help but wonder what comes next.

I feel like the future of the internet is self-hosted, self-regulated independendent intranets. There's a chance that most of the public internet will become unusable within 5 years.

That's why one of my projects has been to archive and self-host everything that I might need in the near future. Software, media, custom offline maps with directions, dev tools, VM's, ISO's, voice and messaging servers, anything that I might need, from things compatible with Windows 98, to a whole bunch of Linux Distros.

With my hopes of finding stuff through search engines getting slimmer every day, AI generated content polluting most of the web 2.0 and archive.org getting targeted every few months, I can't trust online availability anymore.

Other :: Re: The internet has changed. How I've disconnected and my concerns. :: Reply by JINSBEK

2024-11-21T16:56:38+00:00

Hey, thanks for sharing such a thoughtful response. I hadn’t heard of the “Dead Internet Theory” before, so I just watched a Kyle Hill video on it. Like you, I’ve been exposed to software, and later the Internet, at an early age. When I was 4 my dad got one of those eMachines, and I used the Internet on it… Pretty soon I was playing things from Japan, Mexico, France, whether it was games, books, movies, or music… I made my own stuff and shared them on the Internet: graphics, websites, even a little music. I learned a lot from other creators about all sorts of fields. It was neat.

For about a year and a half during the pandemic, I became a fully-remote IT worker. It was the most miserable time of my life, because in all my other jobs, I was so used to talking to people, learning from them, interacting with them face-to-face. It was my favourite part of working as a journalist, as a healthcare worker in a hospital, and at the meat counter as an apprentice butcher. When I travel to places, I love taking Lyft/Uber/taxi because I love talking to the drivers and getting to know them and their place in this area. But that’s just commute—suddenly, I was spending 10+ hours of my day without real human contact, and engagement in a physical environment. When I attended a work-related tech conference in Denver, I realised I was socially starved and danced my heart out at both the sponsored concert and the afterparty at a nearby club. After hanging out with a bunch of guys, talking like normal people in a lounge instead of over another f’kin’ Zoom or Discord call, it started to sink in that I needed to get out.

I don’t have something like 99+ Slack notifications to bother me anymore. My work email stays at work. I go to my office Downtown either biking or taking the bus, I talk to people, I interact with my co-workers and we do things like alcoholic mini-golf for Christmas parties. One of our leading attorneys barges into the locked mailroom just to give me chocolate doughnuts.

The rise of AI-generated content has been such a schlock. I used to work for an artists’ self-publishing platform. It started out with us trying to introduce Vietnamese fine art to the West, which was awesome; I played a curatorial role in critically educating people on the pieces à la Robert Hughes, and giving people an understanding of Vietnamese history, geography, and culture often depicted in these paintings. Sounds great, and we opened our platform for other artists to use. Verifying artists whom the team hadn’t met physically in Hanoi quickly became a pain: can you show us your process? We got a surprising amount of pushback from “artists” interested in using our platform. I think the most annoying incident was the case of this one artist who was quickly gaining a following on Twitter, for her imaginative digital ink works. I was always skeptical as she never showed WIPs and sketches, but her Followers just loved what she was sharing and were eager to buy her future works on our platform. It finally came to a head on World Oceans Day. She produced a work featuring a skeleton of a sea turtle with human teeth and arm bones… My fiancée, who was studying marine biology and is personally involved in sea turtle care, took this woman to task, and she never appeared on social media again.

I want to have fun on the Internet again, and I think self-hosted, self-ruled instances on the Fediverse and webrings in general may see a surge in growth. But I’m skeptical as to whether any of these will ever reach mass adoption.

And maybe that’s fine.

As the wider Internet has started to push me away, I’ve been throwing myself more into my immediate community. I moved across the continent to settle in the historic arts district of this city, I’ve befriended local studio artists, I regularly volunteer with surrounding neighbourhood organisations, I go to parties and raves again. A few years ago I thought the Internet would make up the meat of my life, and now, it’s just a peripheral facet of it.

I just worry about how our kids will grow up, y’know? My fiancée and I don’t even want to have kids if they’re just going to grow up with phone zombies as peers. I can’t control what other parents do. (Believe me, working in an emergency department you really wish you did.) I grew up being taught how to answer the phone properly, these kids literally don’t know how to say hello in real life. We might just stick to rehabbing orphaned baby squirrels because we know we can release them out into a healthy squirrel society, haha.

Other :: Re: Introduce yourself! :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-11-12T12:59:08+00:00

Bump for all the new people

Other :: Re: Introduce yourself! :: Reply by JINSBEK

2024-11-12T16:29:56+00:00

Hi, @kamp ! Funny to see someone else from the Twin Cities here! I actually live in the Northeast in Minneapolis, love being so close to countless parks, the North Loop, and Downtown at the same time.

I’m a hobbyist artist and I currently work at a law firm. I’ve been in the founding team of a couple start-ups, found that incredibly satisfying but too draining. Prior to that, I worked as an apprentice butcher (my favourite job but doesn’t pay well outside of the Army), a healthcare worker in a hospital emergency department (my longest career; I quit after my 4th COVID infection), political journalist, and video game scenario writer.

My favourite hobby is dancing; if you’re in the Twin Cities, you’ll probably see me at the head of the pack of the regular DJ bike raves here (paused for the wintertime!). Other interests of mine include sabre fencing, devil stick juggling, cardistry, and scrapbooking/bullet journalling. Nice to meet you!

Other :: Re: Introduce yourself! :: Reply by kazhan

2024-11-14T19:33:24+00:00

Hi everyone; nice to meet you all!

I'm Kazhan -- you can call me Kaz or Bat if you'd like -- and I'm from the US. I enjoy reading horror and non-fiction/historical books, playing video games, drawing and painting, and nerding out about music. I can kind of play the guitar, but it's been a while so I'm rusty. As for games, I must confess that I am a League of Legends player (as you may be able to tell by my Warwick pfp; I'm also not very good xD), but otherwise I also really like Team Fortress 2, Disco Elysium, Bioshock, Stardew Valley, and Fallout, just to name a few. I'll give just about any sort of game a chance -- variety makes things more fun. Oh, I also really enjoy the show Smiling Friends!

I have a tendency to ramble sometimes. I'm also never quite sure what to put in introduction posts haha, but anyone is more than welcome to come chat with me; I promise that I don't bite :p

Other :: Re: Introduce yourself! :: Reply by 2Square

2024-11-15T14:19:07+00:00

Hello everyone,

I am 2Square. I recently started my reduce convention and reliance on technology journey and enjoy reading as a past time now with some video games mixed in. I dabble a little in ttrpgs and DnD but still dipping my toes in.

One thing I have a new appreciation for while reducing my screen time and phone addiction is music and purposeful listening to whole albums rather than mass playlists.

Hope to get to know you all through posts and conversations!

Other :: Re: Introduce yourself! :: Reply by onelius

2024-11-21T18:19:04+00:00

Heyo!

I go by Onelius or Osku, and I'm a CSE student in Northern Europe. I'm just old enough that I had my formative online experiences on forums and flash games, before they quite rapidly disappeared in lieu of modern social media. Been nostalgic for that and times before mine ever since! I'm into web revival, cyber security and politics among other things :-)

When I'm not struggling through my classes or being chronically online (work in progress), I play the guitar, try to read books (mostly SFF), take walks in the woods and kill my houseplants (not on purpose! I feel like I just wasn't destined to be a plant parent, but I'm trying really hard to defy that).

Feedback :: RSS feed for the forum :: Author caracalled

2024-11-21T11:05:24+00:00

I usually follow the forums I frequent on an RSS reader so I don't have to remember to log in and I can make sure I read all the posts. I was wondering whether it would be possible to have an RSS feed for the posts on this forum? I'm not sure if anyone else would even really use it, but if there's any crowd for it I think it would be this one BWAHAHA

Feedback :: Re: RSS feed for the forum :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-11-21T16:07:43+00:00

Ooooo I like this idea - let me look into it!

Feedback :: Re: RSS feed for the forum :: Reply by rejectconvenience

2024-11-21T17:06:52+00:00

Just got this added, there's a new button at the top called "Smartfeed", just tested it in my RSS app and it works!

Feedback :: Re: RSS feed for the forum :: Reply by caracalled

2024-11-21T18:44:44+00:00

Thank you so much!! I added it to my RSS reader and it works perfectly! :DD

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