Technology on Sure but on the other hand

Reviving a 'dead' 10 year old laptop

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday at my parents-in-law’s house I was looking at the old laptop that’s been sitting there in a corner more or less forever. My father in law noticed and asked me if I know of a place where old electronics can be dropped for recycling, because they couldn’t find anything near them and that’s why this laptop is still there. I asked what’s wrong with it; he said that the screen is dead, and vaguely remembered there was another hardware problem that had to be fixed but they never got around to fixing it because the screen then died.

I offered to take it, but said that before having it recycled I’ll take out the hard drive and return it to them in a USB enclosure, and that I’ll see if there’s anything else which is still usable. They were happy to finally get rid of it, and maybe even get their ’lost’ files back.

Back home, I tried to turn it on and saw that the computer seems to be alive but the screen indeed remained off. I connected an external display; the computer itself was very much alive. The touchpad wasn’t working; and the battery indicator went suspiciously quickly from empty to full. But overall this didn’t look like a dead computer.

I then removed the bottom cover and took out the SSD. Then I noticed a disconnected cable… sure enough, after connecting it and closing up the laptop, the screen turned on. Somehow the touchpad also started working. The only thing not magically fixed was the battery; but a new generic battery for this model costs around $20 - it probably won’t last long but it would still make this thing usable. Given that the hardware specs are quite impressive (Core i7, 16GB RAM, 15.6" FHD display, discrete GPU), it seems like $20 to get it back to working condition is a bargain. Sure, it’s a 10 year old laptop, but in my book that counts as brand new. A brand new old living dead computer.

People nowadays are so used to being helpless about fixing things that they don’t even try. I guess I should have known better; old laptops are definitely not as bad as new ones in this respect. Anyway, better late than never.

Mostly-offline week summary

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This past week was, for me, a small experiment in using the internet as little as possible. My goal was not to be totally offline - which would have caused some real problems for people I have to communicate with, and also I know it wouldn’t be something I could really stick to in general. Rather, the idea was to see if I can start building healthier habits about the amount of time and attention that I devote to online stuff.

This was not meant to be governed by a very rigid set of rules, but more by somewhat flexible guidelines:

Open my email once a day, unless I know I’m expecting a specific message that requires somewhat fast attention
Same for Telegram
Refresh and go over my RSS feeds once a day; save anything I find interesting for offline reading/viewing
No news sites, shopping sites, or other mainstream websites
No search engines unless I really need to find information about a specific topic which is important enough to justify an exception; in those cases, save the results for offline reading

Since I don’t use social media, this more or less covers my most likely scenarios.

So, how did it go?

Email: No problem, mostly. I did have two occasions in which a work email made it clear I should expect a follow-up that shouldn’t wait until the next day, and on those cases I checked again a few hours later - reminding myself that I’m not looking at any other messages.
Telegram: The same.
RSS: Perfect; I really think RSS is the key to getting this kind of system right. Things to read went to Readwise Reader, to be read later on my Boox device. Youtube videos - downloaded using yt-dlp for offline viewing. That gave me plenty of ‘fresh’ materials that I won’t feel too disconnected or bored, while avoiding the temptation to dive into an endless sea of content. The list of new items on my RSS feed is always a finite, bounded set; when I get to the end, that’s it. This is an extremely important aspect of using RSS (in addition, of course, to the fact that I get a personally curated set of high-quality content).
News: No problem at all (I do get the daily headlines from 2 newspapers, one local and one international, in my RSS reader, and that’s more than enough; I rarely bother opening the actual article). Shopping sites: I did visit these twice, but I kept this very short and focused on answering questions like ‘how expensive is…?’ and ‘does such a product exist?’.
Search: Here I made a conscious decision to allow myself to search for study materials on ‘healthy’ topics I focused on as learning projects this week: building a blog with hugo and org-mode; and using FreeBSD jails. In general I tried to follow a similar workflow to what I do with RSS feeds: Find relevant materials and save them for reading/viewing offline.

Overall I’m quite happy with how this week turned out. I think there are three aspects here that I should constantly keep in mind beyond this week:

Boundedness
Offline consumption
Offline projects

Boundedness means that there’s a clear limit to any online activity; there’s no room for infinite scrolling. You don’t go to an ‘all you can eat’ buffet with as many refills as you want, you go to a place where you decide in advance what you’re going to eat.

Offline consumption means that by making a clear separation between the collection stage and the consumption stage you can set up an environment where reading is just reading, and watching a video is just watching a video. No notifications, no temptation to look for more, no other distractions.

And offline projects are the other side of the coin - not what you don’t do but what you do do: By placing an upper limit on what you do online you also place a lower limit on what you do offline, and vice versa. Having something meaningful to do offline reduces the urge to go online again; whereas if you don’t have a clear purpose for your offline time you end up asking yourself what’s the point of not at least using your time for doing something online. Interesting and challenging projects offline are the real thing, and no ‘detox’ is going to succeed without this aspect.

It’s perhaps a bit ironic that a major project over this offline-oriented week has been this blog - which is not exactly an offline creature. Yet working on the blog is mostly offline; isn’t it beautiful that I’m now sitting and typing this in Emacs on a laptop bought in 2012, which might as well be totally offline at the moment, and the words I’m typing will eventually find their way online without me having to even open a web browser? That’s what call a healthy balance.

This tiny phone is not convenient at all. I love it.

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Even though I try as much as possible not to carry a smartphone, sometimes I have to; and on those occasions I do like it when people notice my somewhat unconventional choice. The Unihertz Jelly Star has a 3 inch display, and I am often asked questions like whether it’s a real phone and does it have a camera/internet/apps etc.

A few days ago I went to pick up a package, which required me to have the smartphone in order to show the pick-up message and confirm delivery. Both the shop owner and his younger employee, who asked to see the message, were amazed to see my phone. The shop owner commented on how everyone is always looking for bigger and bigger and how rare it is to see someone go in the opposite direction. The employee wanted to hold it in his hand to see how it feels. Then he asked something like ‘yeah, but is it convenient to type on? Do you use Whatsapp or anything on this thing?’. My reply was that it’s not really convenient, and that I don’t use Whatsapp. At this point the shop owner started smiling synpathetically, while the younger guy looked quite confused. So I added that I prefer to use my phone as little as possible and that this inconvenience really helps. Well, it was worth going there just for the shop owner’s smile; he clearly got the idea.

Buying this phone about a year and a half ago was a brilliant choice. My screen time immediately dropped from 2-3 hours a day to less that 30 minutes (and now it’s more like 3 minutes a day). I use it when I have to, and that’s it. I don’t use Whatsapp; and other than phone calls I handle all my electronic communications on my computer. The Jelly Star is far from perfect, but that’s exactly the point: I love it mostly for how convenient it is in my pocket; the fact that it’s really inconvenient on my eyes is, paradoxically, a huge plus.

We live in a world where ultimate convenience and lack of friction make addiction something we have to actively defend ourselves against. Sometimes choosing an inconvenient option is the way to go.

Firewalling my brain

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Christopher Butler recently published an excellent blog post which just happens to perfectly characterizes the different strategies I’ve been playing with for getting more focus and clarity into my life as regards to the flood of technology-induced options we so often blindly adopt by default. In particular, my recent attempts to reduce my online time, which by now is more than just reducing smartphone use, can all be seen as instances of what that blog post talks about.

Butler distinguishes between three types of approaches: elimination, curation and optimization:

Elimination means totally removing something from your life. For instance, closing an account and no longer using a service.
Curation is being more mindful and picky about what you let in and what you don’t. For instance, picking interesting blogs to follow while unsubscribing from newsletters I’m not really interesting in reading.
Optimization is working on the details of your system and workflow. One recent example: Setting up Readwise Reader on my Boox device so I can more easily read on the ‘peaceful’ e-ink device rather than open a browser on my laptop.

Now, I’ve been planning to make this a (mostly?) offline week, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it: Should I just disconnect from the internet entirely for a whole week? Should I allow myself to access a small set of ‘healthy’ things while blocking everything else - and if so, how do I make sure I’m not tempted to do other stuff online? These are exactly questions about the balance between eliminiation, curation and optimization.

Unlike a lot of what I read/see, my goal here is not simply to do a ‘dopamine detox’. What I have in mind is more a long-term, sustainable change. In this respect, an extreme no-internet experiment (=total elimination) that won’t have a lasting effect is pointless. So this shouldn’t follow a ’let’s see how long I can hold my breath’ kind of logic. Therefore, really spending the time to give this some thought is important. And, viewing it not just as an experiment but as an ongoing project where I use the outcome of experiment n to design experiment n+1.

So, what do I have so far?

A surprisingly successful start is my phone situation. A full discussion of that deserves a post of its own, but in short: My smartphone is now kept with internet connectivity off, in my bag or in a drawer, and only turned on when a specific need arises; my main phone which I carry around is a dumbphone which functions as - well, a phone. Transitioning to this setup has been surprisingly easy. This isn’t elimination (I still have a smartphone and internet connectivity), which might have caused too many problems and failed; it’s curation (choosing to have two separate devices, with as little as possible on each of them) plus optimization (having a clear system for how I use these devices, which works very well for my needs).

An additional very successful curation+optimization is my system of RSS feeds and tools for reading them, as hinted above. Again - a topic for a separate post; what’s currently important is the observation that by supplying myself with high-quality sources of fresh reading materials supported by reading tools that don’t require access to ’noisy’ systems I have plenty to read without feeling the urge to ‘just browse’. Just as eating healthy food which is also tasty and filling removes much of the craving for junk food; similarly, instead of being focused on what NOT to do you concentrate on the positive and satisfying. Both for diet and information, curation of your inputs and optimization of your process can be much more effective than elimination - which might happen ‘by itself’ as a kind of welcome side effect.

Our default mode of approaching information and the technology that bring it in is often ‘grab whatever is loudest and most popular’. A halthier and more sustainable attitude is to think about a process of designing the optimal system of living in a potentially unhealthy environment. The metaphor of a firewall seems helpful to me: You usually don’t want to pull out the cable entirely, but you do want to be very clear about what you let in and how you do the filtering.