Jack of All Trades, Shitty at All of Them

Something I said on this week's Worst Community Report surprised me. I needed to come up with a recommendation and I realized just how much I was enjoying using my phone less and handwriting things more. So in the flow of my recommendation to get and use a cheap pocket notebook, I said that in recent memory, as a smartphone has become a very wide tool that can do almost anything, it has become pretty awful at doing many of those tasks. It takes me more time to get my phone out and start a new note than it does for me to reach into a pocket where a notebook and a pen are waiting, ready to go. Even if I don't have a pocket sized notebook with me, I have found myself digging a reporter style notebook out of my bag rather than take notes on my phone or laptop at work.

The natural followup to that sentiment is to point out people enjoying Digital Audio Players lately. Bluzo, one of my cohosts has an Innioasis Y1, a player that basically looks like a modern iPod Classic. I know a few others who have similar devices and love them. It's the one step I don't think I'll take anytime soon, but would love to. Right now, most of my audio consumption is relegated to my phone simply because I like podcasts so much. Automatically downloading and adding new episodes to a queue is something that a smartphone still does better than most of these DAPs that don't have a wifi connection. The ones that do are basically big Android devices which means it'd be more like carrying two phones than a phone and an audio player.

The place where I have decoupled my phone has been books. In my younger years I was a voracious reader, but I haven't kept up with it as much as I would like. However, for the few books I have been reading in recent weeks, I've been doing so on my brother's old Kindle Keyboard from 2010. He was getting rid of it because the battery was dead. $20, a 1-minute repair, and about fifteen minutes of tinkering, rebooting, and moving files later and I've got a great reading device with KoReader on it so I can read without dealing with Amazon basically at all. I'm hoping this much improved reading experience will have me more hungrily consuming books. Right now, the study guide I'm reading for the CompTIA Security+ exam is a great experience there. I did also put Yokohama Kaidashi Kikkou on it, because the e-ink screen looks fantastic for manga, and that's a series I will always love to have with me. The other manga I'm currently going through, One Piece, is one I am going through colored volumes with, so I kind of have to use a good color screen rather than the black and white Kindle. Still, I'm excited to read through more manga on the kindle. I'd forgotten how much of a delight e-ink displays are.

I don't really have much else that I'm deliberately splitting from my phone because there wasn't much there to begin with. I'm trying to put some space between myself and Youtube, but that expands to much more than just the phone. Instead, I've started reading blogs more again, after some time away. I do think I need to find some more people to read, so if you have recommendations, please shoot them to me via the contact page here on the site! I also count myself lucky because my only other social media interaction is via Discord. I only have a couple of servers I frequent and do a pretty good job of limiting myself to channels I actually enjoy, so it doesn't often become a hole for me like other platforms might.

It's hard to believe now that the iPhone originally launched with no app store at all. It's even harder to believe that I'm basically working my way back to that original set of the most basic applications. Web browser, email client, texting, phone, photo gallery, a camera, and a media player.

I don't think I've ever get all the way back, but it's nice to dream.