Confabulator

Reading later, offline

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 23:27:00 +0000

I’m easily misdirected when using a computer or smartphone. I may pick up my iPhone to read an email, but then I check my bank account for some reason, or go to Google News to skim the ~~horrors~~ headlines of the day. It’s why I fortify myself against internet media. When people ask me about my Light Phone, they tend to assume that because I use a non-smart phone I must naturally have great habits about the internet. I have to correct them and say, no, I use it because I have terrible habits when left unchecked.

I will scroll the internet as much as anybody no matter how bad it makes me feel. That’s why I want to grab what I want from the internet, take it offline, and get the hell out. The two gadgets that have given me that experience over the last 20 years are the iPod and Amazon’s Kindle.

The Kindle, in particular, is a device that eschews the allure of internet media with it’s eInk display and too-big-to-pocket size. Virginia Heffernan writes in Magic and Loss (2016) that the Kindle is “not sensual or fetishitic… not a vanity device, superchanged with processing power and razzle-dazzle for male connoisseurs of low-mass, hi-fi, high-speed, high-def sounds and sights.”

It’s for this reason that I want to take the web offline to read on my Kindle.

A while back, I wrote my own command line script to download articles from the web, clean them up, and convert them to eBooks. It’s great when I actually use it, but the process is manual and clunky. I have to be very deliberate about copying and pasting the article URL into my script. And I can only run the script while on a PC. That friction meant that I didn’t read articles on my Kindle even a fraction as often as I would have liked. But reading articles on my Kindle validated that this is something I really want. To make reading articles on my Kindle a regular part of my life, I need something better.

Earlier this year, I started self-hosting the read-later service Wallabag after being pushed off of Pocket. I was excited to see on the Wallabag site that there is a Kindle client for jailbroken Kindles called Wallindle, and I have a jailbroken Kindle! I already save articles to Wallabag through a browser extension and aps, which is much more natural than copying and pasting a URL into a command line script. A Wallabag client for Kindle would be the best possible version of what I want.

There was a road block, though. I followed the link to Wallindle, and guess what? It’s a GitHub repository of the source code and I’m expected to compile it. Not just compile it, but I also needed to pull some libraries off of my Kindle to be used as part of the compilation process.

Well, that’s not great. My experience with C/C++ is limited to a freshman course I took 20 years ago. But we live in the age of ChatGPT, so with ChatGPT’s help I was able to muddle through the instructions to get the dependencies off of my Kindle. And I know just enough about C/C++ that I could tell if ChatGPT was off the rails and I could guide it back to reality. I hacked at this for several nights spread over a couple weeks and finally I had a binary executable that I could load onto my Kindle.

I ran the executable I built and unfortunately it had some error about another dependency. Not the dependency that I had to manually pull off of the Kindle, but something else. At that point, I said, okay I need to put this down and walk away from it for a while. The Wallindle client was a dead end, or at least more trouble than it was worth.

Later I thought, what if there’s something built into Wallabag to automatically convert my articles to eBooks. If Wallabag had a way where I could download my articles as eBooks, that would still be better than pasting URLs into my command line script. Even if I had to manually download the eBooks and transfer them to my Kindle, while not ideal, it would give me a little more of what I wanted.

I started Googling around to see if Wallabag has an eBook download feature. I didn’t find one, but apparently this was the right combination of key words because it lead me to KOReader.

I originally learned about KOReader from jailbreaking my Kindle. KOReader is the reason why most people jailbreak their Kindles. Not me. I jailbroke my Kindle because I wanted the cover of the book I’m reading to be the screensaver, something which is standard on newer Kindle models. KOReader was kind of under-sold to me in everything that I saw and heard. It lets you read PDFs and ePUBs on your Kindle, which is not super useful to me personally, so I dismissed it out-of-hand for years.

Once I found out that KOReader has a built-in integration with Wallabag, I installed it immediately. I got used to KOReader’s controls and the main menus then I connected it to my self-hosted Wallabag server and it just worked! It downloaded the top 30 articles from my account and I was ready to go.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been reading my Wallabag articles through KOReader. When I’m done reading an article, I mark it as finished, and then I sync the finished articles and Wallabag marks them as read and archives them. It’s really great!

Conclusion

My posture towards the internet is distrust bordering on hostility, but there’s so much good stuff out there. Reading what other people write is some of the best of the human experience. There are so many brilliant and interesting people publishing insightful things which are absolutely worth my time. The trouble is taking in the good stuff without getting swept away by the maelstrom of all the stuff.

Reading stuff on the internet is as important to me as anything I do on a computer. As a category of stuff, it’s up there with music, movies, or video games. It’s why I’ve worked to own each part of my internet reading. I guard my internet intake with an RSS reader. And longer pieces, or ones that I’m not in the mood to read, get saved to Wallabag.

After I saved an article to Wallabag, that’s when things broke down. Wallabag, being a web-based application, competes for my attention with everything on the web and everything on my computer. The result was that Wallabag (and previously Pocket) was a place where I saved things that I’ll never read.

With my saved web articles on my now on my Kindle, I’m actually reading them. An article that felt too long while on my computer or smartphone feels like no time at all on my Kindle. This setup has quickly become a foundational piece of my internet reading. It lets me give the proper attention to the tons of good, thought-provoking, writing available on the internet without getting caught up in the, gestures broadly, everything all at once.

Links and resources

If you’re interested in jailbreaking your Kindle and/or using KOReader for yourself, here are all the links and resources that will get you started.

A computer for my kid

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have no illusions that I can control my child or even hardly steer them. If they run into the street, I can throw my body at the problem. Otherwise I’m just along for the ride.

But I can hope, can’t I? As a technologist, my hope is that my kid comes to see computers as tools and something that they own and control.

Most computers today are smartphones or tablets rather than traditional PCs. And I don’t have to look too hard to see that Apple’s iPad is the default computer for kids (with variants of Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet a distant second). It’s easy to see why. It has almost no configuration and with a couple taps in the App Store, you can download whatever you might want for your kid.

Smartphones and tablets can be used as tools, but that’s not representative of their usage. The top apps tend to be social media, shopping, and entertainment. Those are all commercialized activities that harvest our attention or “engagement”. And while they may do something for us, they also enable companies to sell more stuff or more ads above and beyond their stated purpose.

My child doesn’t need my help getting introduced to all of that. The door to commercialized technology will always be wide open. If they need to use an iPad in the future, a happy sales representative or a shiny website will gladly guide them through to checkout.

I’d like to present an alternative vision for how to use computers. Now, we are talking about a young child. And as I’ve established, the amount of control I have is basically none. So all I can do is provide an option.

For this project, I’m going to use my wife’s old Microsoft Surface Pro 5 (2017). It has a 7th gen Intel i5 processor, which is as powerful as anything we might need. There are a couple things I like about this device. First, it’s a touch screen. I think it’s important that the device is a touch screen because touch input is intuitive to children and also because most computers, regardless of form factor, now have touch screens. The screen is also a 3:2 aspect ratio, which gives it more vertical space when in landscape compared to the typical 16:9 displays.

My customization will be focused on the software side. I’m going to install Debian Linux (or related e.g. Ubuntu) and the GNOME desktop since I’m comfortable with those.

My main goal is to simplify the computer without dumbing it down. For one thing that means no user login. The computer should be ready to pick up and go.

Simplifying also means limiting the number of choices for applications. I plan to only have three to five applications. I think if the computer is going to be used at all, it needs to be shown to have a specific set of uses. A very limited number of applications says this is what this computer does and it simplifies the decision whether to use it or not.

I want a text editor, a paint program, photo booth / selfie camera, video calling, and a site-specific browser for PBS Kids.

I want all applications and their icons pinned and visible on the dock at all times. In my day job as an app developer, my rule of thumb is that if a user can’t see something, it doesn’t exist. That’s especially true for a toddler that doesn’t have any familiarity with menus or hierarchical information. Arguably by stubbing out navigation and application menus I’m dumbing down the computer, but I think those skills will be practiced inside of the applications themselves. I don’t want us to get tripped up by menu navigation before we even get into an application.

Lastly, I want to avoid dealing with windows as much as possible. I don’t want any arranging of windows. No maximizing. No minimizing. No overlapping. Ideally each application would open as a maximized window in its own workspace. That would mean that the primary way to navigate between windows and workspaces would be through the application icons on the dock.

That’s about it. I’m keeping the requirements light in the interest of being able to hand off a completed product. I have other ideas, but I think it would be better to wait and see. The future of this computer will depend on whether and how my child uses it.

On the surface, this plan is about foisting my values around technology onto my kid, but it’s really an opportunity for me to learn how they think. There may be things that excite them, confuse them, frustrate them, or even things that make immediate intuitive sense. Also with a toddler, their interests, talents, and personality change so quickly. We’ll be in a different place in six months from now. Doing this with a traditional PC means that I’ll have the flexibility to customize to their needs over time. If nothing else, I’ll learn something as a parent before the iPad swoops in and cements itself as the default anyway.

I hacked my Nintendo 3DS

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have to admit, I’m not really sure what all I can do with a hacked 3DS. My basic philosophy is that all devices should be hacked, jailbroken, or rooted, especially when they’re no longer supported by the manufacturer.

My main reason for doing it is that I heard that aging 3DS cartridges are becoming unplayable. And I’d like to back up my games so I can keep playing them if the cartridges should fail. I’m pouring a good amount of money into buying 3DS games (though not half as much money as if I were buying Switch or Switch 2 games). It would be nice to protect that investment a little.

I followed this guide on YouTube to hack my Nintendo 3DS and it worked perfectly.

So I’ve taken one of my recent favorite things and now I can do more with it, though the more that I can do seems fuzzy. That might mean its piracy given how litigious Nintendo is about piracy. I’ll figure it out later. In the mean time, I downloaded a cool Mario theme.

Moto G5 Plus iPod

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My latest project is an Android phone repurposed as a dedicated media player. I’ve used other Android phones as media players, but they were either over-powered or they lacked niceties like having a bottom headphone jack¹.

I landed on using a Moto G5 Plus (2017). It’s a pretty unremarkable phone. It’s specs were mid-range even when it was new. It’s old enough that it still uses a micro-USB port rather than the more modern USB-C port. But it fulfills the minimum requirements for a media player. It has an SD card reader and a headphone jack.

The software side of things aren’t that exciting either. There’s little-to-no after-market operating systems that support it. I can’t get LineageOS for it. I tried installing postmarketOS and that was a disaster that almost bricked it. It has Android 8.1 – the highest version that Motorola released for this phone – which puts it at the fading edge of modernity. But the underwhelming hardware and software of the G5 Plus makes it useful here because there’s not that many other great uses for it.

I discovered something cool about the G5 Plus that makes it uniquely suited as my media player, which is that it has a built-in FM radio tuner! I’m already a regular radio listener, so the FM tuner is the killer feature for me. I have a couple stations that I’m always up for listening to, which gives me a reason to reach for the G5 Plus without having something specific in mind. And that lack of upfront choice makes it a low-friction, approachable entertainment device.

I started with a clean factory install of Android 8.1 and I chose not to sign in to any Google account, eschewing all Google apps and services. Instead I got all of my apps (except one) from F-Droid the open source Android app repository.

There were a lot of options for music playing apps, but so far I’m happy with with my choice of Fossify Music Player. It’s completely offline and the interface is really straight-forward. I replaced the built-in Google keyboard with Heliboard to ensure that no part of Google’s internet-connected services would be invoked. The last app is the pre-installed FM Radio app from Motorola. It’s already good enough for anything I need. It automatically scans for stations, lets me save my favorite stations, and I can add labels to my saved stations.

Unlike my previous Android phone media players, I wanted the Moto G5 Plus to feel like a dedicated music player. To do that, I installed the minimal home screen/launcher Olauncher. This launcher gets rid of the traditional grid of apps and instead shows simple vertical list of app names that I pin to the home screen. I can pick how many apps I want to pin, but I limited it to three apps. I pinned both the Music Player and FM Radio to the home screen. I pinned the Settings app just in case I need it (though I rarely do so I might remove it later). Then I disabled the lock screen, so waking the device goes straight to the home screen. That’s about as close to a “dedicated” device as I can get while working within the structure of Android.

And that’s it! With a minimal launcher, a couple of apps, and some considered system settings and I have a complete media player that is very usable. All for very little effort.

This was a good exercise in “right-sizing” a device for a task. Previously I used a Samsung Galaxy S9 as media player because it also has a bottom headphone jack and an SD card reader, but it’s other specs make it useful for a lot of other things. A key part of my mission to avoid buying new things and maintain my future garbage is knowing when to promote a device to heavier work or when to use it for lighter work.

Another lesson I’ve taken from this is that, even though I’d like to install an after-market operating system, sometimes the best I can do is to just use the software that comes with the device. I’ve written about LineageOS and /e/OS as nice alternative versions of Android. Either of those would be better than Motorola’s out-of-support Android 8.1. I went looking for Lineage and /e/OS and they aren’t available for the G5 Plus. But in this case, it just didn’t matter.

While using the pre-installed version of Android may be the best I can do today, it carries longer-term risk. I found when looking for apps on F-Droid that there are a lot of apps I can’t install on the G5 Plus because it’s on Android 8.1. For example, Olauncher was not my first choice of launcher, but the other launcher I liked more requires Android 12 or higher. It’s useful to keep in mind when thinking about re-purposing or up-cycling Android phones that usually Android versions 7 or 8 is the absolute bottom-end what most apps support. And when the open source community drops support, it really is the fading edge.

Overall this project fits nicely into my goals of taking control of my media library, decentralizing features that were previously the domain of my smartphone, and getting more comfortable with using Android when re-purposing phones. I’m really satisfied that this device has found a home and a permanent place in my life.

1: A headphone jack on the bottom is the correct placement because you want the least distance between the headphone jack and your ears while holding the device. When the jack is on top, the cable has to bend and stretch around the entire body of the device before getting to your ears.

Blu-ray: The rise of Jellyfin

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Owning my digital media is off to a strong start this year. For Christmas/Hanukkah, Santa Maccabee gave me an external USB Blu-ray drive. See, I’ve been slowly growing my Blu-ray collection from thrift stores for about $3 a disc. Some I bought from Half Price Books for more money because the discs people donate to thrift stores is, well, it’s uneven.

Fun fact: the most common Blu-ray in thrift stores today is 2013’s Frozen. And it’s easy to see why that would be. Frozen is a movie that kids love and want to watch over and over (believe me, I know). Disney+ didn’t launch until six years after Frozen debuted. In that way, 2013 was probably the height of the Blu-ray discs. But that first generation of Frozen kids aged out of their watch-every-freaking-day phase by 2019. Now six years after that, any kid that watches a lot of Frozen today is watching it on Disney+.

I like the idea of physical media. I think the physicality of picking up a disc case, examining it’s cover, and deciding whether or not to watch it is a brain-healthy thing, especially for a small child. It’s less abstract and more grounded in reality than picking something from the infinite pool of streaming entertainment. I can feel streaming’s lack of grounding when I can’t choose what to watch because there might be something that I’d rather watch more at this moment. There are more options than my monkey brain can sift through.

The problem with physical media, setting aside the relative inconvenience, is that streaming is the primary way we consume media in my house. The Apple TV is my family’s front-end for movies and TV and we’ve been really happy with it for the last eight years. If I converted everything in my life over to the physical media exclusively, Blu-ray discs would be an big part of that transition, but I’m not prepared to do that. Without an entire change-over to physical media, Blu-ray is a weird outlier.

That’s where the USB Blu-ray drive comes in. I’m ripping my discs to build up my digital media library with the goal to curate a viewing experience that is competitive with streaming services. Right now my video streaming service of choice is Jellyfin running on my Raspberry Pi. It’s a great start, but there are still some features that I really want.

Speaking of Disney+, that’s the first streaming service I have in my cross-hairs. Disney’s history of making classic movies for children and families makes it different from other streaming services like Netflix. Obviously Disney makes TV shows and even has their own Disney Channel, but the balance of Disney media favors theatrical releases over TV shows. That means most of the value of Disney+ is from their stock of back-catalog movies than the flow of new TV shows. My thinking is that if I buy a critical mass of Disney movies, I may not need a year-round subscription to Disney+.

Something I’ve seen on Disney+ and the PBS Kids app is content hubs, which are collections of media shown in the top-level or front page of their app. In Disney+ they have hubs for their big media properties like Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars. Within each hub they have special playlists or sub-groupings. For example, they have the Star Wars movies both in release date and in timeline order. In the PBS Kids app, they have the seasonal selections of TV episodes and movies for fall/Halloween, winter/Christmas, summer, etc. It’s all really nice and it’s exactly the kind of curation that I’d like to have for my family.

Jellyfin doesn’t have hubs exactly, but it has collections. They’re not quite as nice as the hubs in Disney+ – they’re not featured on the front page of the app, and movies in a playlist aren’t individually selectable until you open the playlist – but they’re close. I’ve started with a great thrift store find of a Blu-ray collection of Christmas movies that includes Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, and others. That collection alone gave me what I needed to build out a winter/Christmas collection and test out Jellyfin collections as content hubs. As I said, it’s not perfect, but I’m in the early days of this project. I’ll need to sit with it, tinker a little, and test it on my family before I know if the presentation is effective.

I enjoy the work of planning something for my family in other areas of my life, such as meal planning and cooking. I learn from their responses, and make subtle variations to better meet their needs. I want to do the same thing here with digital media. Curating a digital media library will give me some (though not all) of the brain-healthy constraints that make physical media appealing. Hopefully I can achieve enough convenience to nudge commercial services out of the top row of apps on my Apple TV, and eventually out of my life.

Looking ahead to 2026

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished these last few years. My relationship to technology has changed a lot. I’m carrying a non-smartphone full time, I’m primarily using Linux for personal use, and I’ve turned cast-off and second-hand electronics into stuff I actually use. And all while working full time, cooking all my family’s meals, and being a walking jungle gym for a high-energy baby and toddler. Oh, and I write for this website to collect my thoughts and document them.

With all my lifestyle changes around technology, I want to keep the momentum going. Here are some tech projects that I’m looking forward to in 2026.

Confabulator updates

Confabulator is more than just geeky side projects (not that there’s anything wrong with those!). Everything that I’m doing is really about the future. I’m picking and choosing the future I want based on readily available technologies and the relationship I want to have to them. Much of what is said about the (capital-F) Future is influenced by, or directly broadcast by, hedonistic ends-justify-the-means plutocrats who call themselves futurists or techno-optimists. The influence of plutocrats has skewed the internet discourse into a false dichotomy. When the Future is framed as block chain and cryptocurrency or generative AI, any substantive criticism, or y’know, different interests and preferences, naturally gets framed as a regressive view of technology. Futurist plutocrats have granted themselves a monopoly on, among other things, optimism itself. I reject that. This next year I want to focus my writing on the future. I believe managing e-waste, promoting digital ownership, and protecting against internet media is part of a vision for an optimistic, human-focused, future rather than a condemnation of it.

In the short term, I’ve made some updates to the look of the site. I want to arrive at a design that I’ll keep for at least a few years. I feel like I’m close.

In the long term, I’m thinking about changing web hosts. This website is hosted with GitHub Pages which has been great for how easy it is to publish and it’s no maintenance. But I assume that one day GitHub will betray us. They have to. It’s practically their fiduciary responsibility to make user-hostile changes. I’d like to evaluate some alternatives so that when the day comes that GitHub steps in the poop, I’ll already be halfway out the door.

The big project: A family computer / computer for my kid

As a parent, it’s not really up to me what kid absorbs from the world around them. Despite my best efforts, and rarely carrying a smartphone, my kid has internalized that all screens are touch screens. My goal with a family computer is that I’m giving my kid something to play around with, but on my terms with built-in guardrails. Something that is attractive enough to want to use, but that isn’t quite as addictive as an iPad. This project is largely a thought experiment about what sorts of applications a small child might use and enjoy and what I can do to make the computer more usable.

Long term project: Owning my movies, TV, and music

Admittedly this is a couple projects in one. It’s not about replacing music and video streaming services today. I want to have a baseline of media services that I own and run. Over time these will improve. I’ll keep them maintained and ready. They’ll serve as a commercial-free alternative in the face of increasing prices and changes in terms of service. Similar to the family computer, the measure of success is if my alternatives are attractive and usable enough for my family. I’m not shutting off even a single streaming services until I have comparable alternatives in place that my family uses voluntarily. Since streaming services are just icons on our Apple TV set-top box, the scene it set for something like Plex, Jellyfin, or others to rotate in over time.

Nice to have: Wallabag on Kindle

I got pushed off of Pocket when it reached end-of-life this summer and I installed Wallabag on my Raspberry Pi. So far, so good. But what I really want is to read my saved articles on my Kindle. That would cut down my internet consumption and dovetail nicely with my curated RSS feeds. A Wallabag client exists for Jailbroken Kindles (which I have), but getting it is more involved than downloading a binary. I need to compile it and whatnot. So I’ve queued this up as a project when I have the time and mental energy for that sort of thing.

Nice to have: Dumb phone alternative

I love my Light Phone 2, but the battery is not replaceable and the micro-USB port is wearing down, so unfortunately it is future garbage. I should get at least another year or two out of it, but if it broke irreparably, I don’t know what my best alternative is. I wouldn’t buy another Light Phone 2 because of its age and lack of repairability. I didn’t care for the Light Phone 3 which I pre-ordered last year and promptly sold on eBay. My goal for the year is to evaluate my options and have a front-runner even if I don’t buy anything.

/e/OS, favorite tech 2025

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

While trying different mobile operating systems, I came across a really interesting option called /e/OS. I learned about /e/OS through its association with the Fairphone. I’ve been following the Fairphone from a distance because it’s the rare phone that’s designed for repair. I noticed that you can buy the Fairphone pre-installed with /e/OS from Murena (the developer of /e/OS). And if it’s good enough to pre-install on a phone, it’s most certainly good enough for me. Murena even sells refurbished Pixel 5s with /e/OS, and because I had one lying around, it was game on.

The Pixel 5 is the newest of my “old” phones so it has the best specs of all my cast-offs. It has 8 GB of RAM, a fast processor, great battery life, and a sharp display. It’s thin, measuring only 8 mm thick, with basically no camera bump. The screen has small bezels and the edges of the phone curve to match the corners of its screen which makes the screen feel edge-to-edge. I really like the shape, size, and the look of the Pixel 5. It’s an attractive package with hardware that has many good years left in it. But at only five years old, it won’t receive any more major Android updates. And since it won’t receive updates, it’s fair game to unlock the bootloader and install something else.

After installing /e/OS on the Pixel 5, I was struck with the polish of the home screen – in Android the home screen is called the launcher. The /e/OS launcher borrows heavily from classic iOS before version 14). Every installed app is on the home screen, as opposed to having some app shortcuts on the home screen while the rest are tucked away in the big list of all apps (the app drawer). You can drag and drop app icons into folders, and there is a dock at the bottom of the screen that holds four icons. Also similar to iOS 13 and earlier, widgets are restricted to the left of the home page, and shown as a verical list. It includes built-in widgets for app suggestions (much like Siri suggestions), weather, and Advanced Privacy (more on that later).

The first thing to do with a fresh install of /e/OS was to get the apps I wanted. Now this is a “de-Googled” version of Android, so it doesn’t come with the Google Play Store. Instead it has the App Lounge. The App Lounge is interesting because it has all of the apps from the Play Store, but you don’t need to be signed in with a Google account. It means that despite having a de-Googled experience, I’m able to use all my usual third party applications such as 1Password, Chase, Spotify, and Todoist. In addition to the Play Store apps, it has all of the apps from F-Droid, the open source Android app repository. I appreciate that open source and commercial apps are in the same unified interface. I have a mix of Play Store apps with open source apps, and I can receive automatic updates for both. It’s very convenient and without requiring a Google account.

A major feature of /e/OS is its Advanced Privacy features. And before I get into it, I need to describe what privacy means in this case. Here the privacy concern is that mobile apps collect data about your app usage (often called analytics). They do this mostly through well-known analytics and advertising services (e.g. Firebase and Admob). By default, /e/OS blocks connections to these services. What that does is prevent mobile apps from collecting data that can be used to track your activity across the web. The blocking and reporting of blocked attempts is referred together as Advanced Privacy. You can view which services were blocked and which apps attempted to use them in either the system settings or from the Advanced Privacy widget.

Taken together, it’s a great mobile operating system and all without a Google account. So what’s the catch?

I mentioned earlier about the App Lounge providing apps from the Google Play Store. I can’t imagine Google is happy about their Play Store apps being available on an unofficial platform. Additionally /e/OS includes something called MicroG, which is an open source alternative to Google Play Services. Google Play Services solves the problem where Android users all have different versions of Android. To smooth out the differences between the versions of Android, Google create Play Services, a set of features available to other apps that that can be delivered and updated through the Google Play Store. All of this is replaced by MicroG on /e/OS.

My main concern is that these are not supported use cases. Google has no interest in making sure this continues to work, and if anything, they will do things to break it. If there’s something keeping /e/OS and MicroG safe from retribution, it’s that the install base is so small. If /e/OS gained steam, Google may take active measures. And unless the European Union (Murena is based in the EU) is willing or able to step in, Google could break the App Lounge and/or MicroG.

To be fair, these issues have been true for the entire lifetime of /e/OS (since 2020) and MicroG (since 2015) and today everything works fine. But I have to mention my concerns about its future.

Conclusion

In my survey of alternative mobile operating systems, I’m looking software that lets old hardware do something, and that something may not be a full-fledged mobile experience for daily use. I’ve written that LineageOS is the best alternative mobile operating system because it’s available for a lot of phones. Installing it will often give you a newer base version of Android, adding years of modern software and application support. /e/OS doesn’t support nearly as many devices, but it adds some extra features and a level of polish that makes it attractive for daily use.

My primary phone is the Light Phone 2, but I still live in the modern world and need access to third party applications. This is especially true as more services require the use of a mobile app and make analog options (like a printed Metra ticket) less convenient. For these cases, I have a six year old iPhone 11 Pro which gives me access to essential apps. But the dual problem of future garbage and software precarity means that the hardware is not made to last forever and the software changes independent of my needs, beyond merely supporting my phone.

With my goal to only buy second-hand consumer technology, I’m thinking seriously about what that future looks like and its limitations. I’m looking for tools that enable this future for me. /e/OS gives me a commercial-free mobile operating system and it’s really very good! It’s a strong contender for my future smartphone OS, and I’d welcome it.

FreshRSS, favorite tech 2025

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A mention goes out this year to the application FreshRSS, which I’ve been hosting on my Raspberry Pi computer for the last three years. What’s different this year is that I’m using the FreshRSS web interface. Previously I used FreshRSS as nothing more than a back-end for other applications, namely NetNewsWire on Mac and iOS. And as I look to disentangle myself from Apple’s platforms, I switched to using FreshRSS in the browser. Part of it is that I never found a good RSS application for Linux. There are a few, and I thought they were awful in one way or another, either looking like they were fresh out of 1999 or not working in a way that I liked.

As I used my Linux laptop more, I found myself using FreshRSS in the browser and then I bookmarked it on all my devices, and I really liked it. It even looks and works well on mobile. Normally I prefer a native application to a web application because I feel like it’s a waste of system resources to run a browser when I could have a native application running locally. In the case of RSS, it feels different because the content of all of it is web-based, so viewing it in a browser feels native to that content. When I open links from the RSS feed, I’m going to open it in a browser anyway. RSS feed items are all of the internet and on the internet and it makes sense to have it all in a web browser from the get-go.

This year in particular has required a different approach to media. My country, the great United States of America, elected a new (old) President, and this guy is far more interested in creating headlines and spectacle than running things well. He needs to be the center of attention for something every single week, if not every single day. And for the last 12-13 years that he’s been in politics, the mainstream media can’t help but play into it. Internet media drinks up traditional media and dissects it into thousands of tiny bits of re-packaged out-of-context twaddle. It’s not a sane person’s quest to sift through that, especially when the sifting is aided my algorithms tuned for maximum emotional reaction and engagement.

It’s more important than ever that I can pick and choose my sources and put them into a system that lets me manage my reading, group my sources however I like, mark news items as read to get them out of the way, or star them to reference later. It puts some control back in my hands rather than being the recipient of a feeding tube. And I find that control has been really healthy and wholesome.

And that’s why I give FreshRSS a 2025 Favorite Things honorable mention. Because of the capabilities of the software, which is very good and reliable, and also that the media landscape in which I live makes this kind of thing necessary.

Nintendo 3DS, favorite tech 2025

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a lifelong Nintendo fan, but I never gave much thought to Nintendo’s DS and 3DS. I was inspired by ProZD/SungWon Cho’s YouTube video Top 20 Nintendo 3DS games, which showed off a treasure trove of games that I completely missed, including series like Mario and Zelda that are otherwise must-play for me. So I went out and bought a Nintendo 3DS XL from my local GameStop this last April.

I also bought Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. Partially out of brand loyalty, but also morbid curiosity. My impression of the game was that it was a remake of A Link to the Past with a new story that served to paper-over the fact that it’s a remake. And things I’ve heard and seen over the years suggested it’s not a worthy entry in the Zelda series (see Why Modern Zelda Sucks: A Link Between Worlds). But as it turned out, I loved it. My initial impression of it being a kind of remake of A Link to the Past was not entirely mistaken – it’s set in the same world as Link to the Past – but it’s its own game with all original dungeons, items, and mechanics. I enjoyed it so much that when it was over, I played through the whole over thing again on Heroic (hard) mode.

Another game I’m playing though is Super Mario 3D Land. 3D Land is the predecessor to Super Mario 3D World. Both games reuse the style of classic Super Mario Bros. games and translate it into 3D. Compared to 3D World, 3D Land is a smaller game. The levels are shorter with each level focused on a single mechanic or challenge (like platforms that appear in time to music). That makes it more of a portable game, where it’s designed for filling shorter slivers of time. The first play-through of 3D Land is enjoyable, but the levels are pretty easy, almost making for more of a visual demo of the 3D capabilities of the system than anything else. After beating Bowser, the special worlds are unlocked with soul-crushingly difficult variations on the regular levels. Between going back to get Star Coins that I missed in the easy levels along with fighting my way through the special levels, I’m getting my money’s worth of game play.

Lastly I’m playing Pokemon Sun. When I was around 9 or 10 years old, I played the hell out of Pokemon Red. But I lost interest with the Pokemon sequels Gold and Silver. Back then I had very strong opinions about games and the new Pokemon in the second generation rubbed me the wrong way. A few decades later, I’m enjoying going back to the generations of Pokemon that I missed since the first generation. The Pokemon formula is so familiar to me that it makes for a cozy game like the way people talk about Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley. It gives me just enough fiddly tasks to keep me interested and feeling good.

Any of these games would make the list of my favorite things in any given the year. The fact that they are all on it is why I have to give it up for the Nintendo 3DS.

It’s a delightful game system with a great catalog of games. A truly portable system that fits nicely in a bag or pocket it a way that the bulky Nintendo Switch doesn’t. This thing sat in my blind spot for years despite the fact that I’m its exact target market. I’m grateful that I finally got back around to playing this system. I’m pleased with the game play I’ve gotten from it already, and I’m excited because I know I’ve only gotten started.

Confabulator 2025

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I took all of last week off from work to clean my apartment and prepare food for a Thanksgiving feast of about 20 people. All this in spite of both my spouse and I having parents with extra medical needs these last few weeks.

This time of year is always its own animal, a distinct phase from the time before and after it. At work, somehow things both slow down and speed up with the sinking realization that there is only so much a team can accomplish in the next three weeks while not having your full staff. In my personal projects, including this website, it’s when I reflect on what I hoped to accomplish this year and re-evaluate what I might work in around the holidays.

This year is different. I declare 2025 over right now. With everything going on with multiple family medical emergencies and an active toddler, I know that I’m not accomplishing anything more of note this year. And that’s fine. It’s not my job right now to satisfy my interests and hobbies. It’s my job to facilitate things for my family and make sure things go as smoothly as they can.

That said, I’ve tried to keep a bi-weekly publishing cadence for this website. Nobody is imposing that on me, but I’ve found that two weeks is a sweet spot to take something I want to write about and polish it into something to publish. If you look back at the dates on previous posts, you’ll see that there may be months between them. And that’s what happens when I don’t have a schedule and rather wait until I think a piece is a pretty enough flower to pick.

Since 2025 is over for me, my posts from now until whenever I run out of things to say will be retrospectives on the last year. What went well, my favorite things, and thoughts for the next year.

December 10, 2025
Nintendo 3DS, favorite tech 2025
The 3DS is not new tech, but it's new to me and I'm having a blast!
December 11, 2025
FreshRSS, favorite tech 2025
No matter how many times I re-learn that RSS is the answer to managing internet consumption, I'm always charmed by it.
December 27, 2025
/e/OS, favorite tech 2025
/e/OS is a commercial-free version of Android that has the level of polish befitting a daily driver.

The best alternative to iOS and Android is... Android

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We need alternative software that extends the useful lifespan of mobile phones and we need it now. The phones getting pushed into the back of junk drawers today¹ have 8-core processors with 6 GB of RAM or more². We’re talking about hardware comparable to low-end and mid-range laptops. And for many of those devices, the manufacturer stopped providing software updates, locking it to a version of Android that falls farther behind every year.

postmarketOS

I want to re-purpose abandoned devices. And if possible I’d like to use the opportunity to support my other values and priorities like software freedom and breaking out of the iOS/Android duopoly. In my perfect world, an alternative mobile operating system is one based on Linux because of its openness, extensibility, and access to a large ecosystem of software. That lead me to postmarketOS. It’s a real Linux distribution for (mostly) Android phones with the goal “to extend the life of consumer electronics… [to] promote a healthier and more sustainable society.” Exactly what I’m looking for!

Playing around with postmarketOS has been less playing and more fumbling. I installed it on any device that might work, including a Nexus 5, a Moto G5 Plus, and a Pixel 3a XL. The results range from a non-starter (Moto G5 Plus), to unusable even with the most minimal user interface (Nexus 5), to lousy but recognizable as a mobile operating system (Pixel 3a XL).

To be fair, the postmarketOS team is open about the rough edges. They say that “postmarketOS is definitely not yet ready for everyone”. But based on my tinkering, the word “yet” still does a lot of heavy lifting in that statement. The things that aren’t working, or not working well, means that postmarketOS is not ready for pretty much anyone. I’ve heard anecdotally that certain devices such as the OnePlus 6T work well. I could buy one of those, but it’s not really my goal to use postmarketOS. I want to install something useful onto the hardware I already have lying around.

My hope was that even if I couldn’t use postmarketOS as a full-fledged mobile platform, I could at least use it as a web/application server since that’s a pretty baseline Linux-y activity. And if the only thing postmarketOS could do is turn Android phones into home servers, that’s still a very useful tool in the fight against e-waste. But very few postmarketOS phones have support for USB-OTG (on-the-go) – 20 by my count. USB-OTG allows a phone to act more like a normal computer and be the host for other USB devices that connect to it. USB-OTG is necessary to use wired Ethernet, an essential feature even for small home servers. The Pixel 3a XL didn’t have support for that, so I couldn’t use it as a server. Since postmarketOS on the Pixel 3a XL was already a lousy experience from a mobile/graphical perspective, that was the end of the experiment. I don’t have any devices on-hand that will become more capable by using postmarketOS.

A lot of great work is happening in the postmarketOS project. More devices are added to their stable release every few months, and the feature support for existing devices is improving. I still think postmarketOS will play a role in the future of up-cycling old phones, but what that role will be and when it will happen is unclear. Today postmarketOS does not solve the problem of having an out-of-support smartphone that I want to revive. It’s more oddity than utility.

LineageOS

LineageOS is another alternative operating system available for Android phones. It’s based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), the open source core of the Android operating system that Google and device manufacturers use to create their own versions of Android. It’s been around a long time, having split out from the CyanogenMod project.

I have to admit, as someone looking for an alternative to Apple and Google, a version of Android feels a little unsatisfying. Though much of Android is open source, it’s still controlled and directed by Google. On the app side, Google has total control over the Google Play Store, which has been deemed (correctly) to be a gate keeper between software providers and end users. While it’s possible to load (not sideload) applications outside of the Play Store, Google is asserting control³ over that too.

Even if Google is a perfectly benevolent steward of the platform, Google’s involvement in any project casts doubt on its future. Will they lose interest in Android in favor of another operating system or kill it off entirely?

Setting aside concerns about the future of Android, let’s focus on what LineageOS can do today. It’s available for a relatively large number of Android devices, and those devices have full hardware support. It keeps updated with the latest major Android version updates. And it can run the Google Play Store. It has everything a normal person would expect from a mobile operating system.

I installed LineageOS on a Motorola G7 Play and it instantly became a modern device. Previously the phone was stuck on Android 10 and LineageOS brought it up to Android 15, adding on about five years of modern software and application support. Installing LineageOS made the phone more capable today. I can’t ask for more than that.

Conclusion

When thinking about smartphone hardware as future garbage, I’m forced to reckon with the gap between how I think the world should be and how the world really is. I don’t love that my best option for old smartphones is Android, but squeezing more life out of aging electronics is an exercise in making do. It doesn’t do any good to get bogged down in a middle class morality when the choice is between something useful or the landfill.

I’d prefer to install new software that lives up to my highest aspirations of security, privacy, openness, software freedom, and all that good stuff, but that ship has sailed. The original sin of e-waste is in the product design and manufacturing. Now whatever’s in the product is in the product. And of course it’s easier to put an alternative Android on a device designed to work with Android than it is to port over a completely different operating system.

LineageOS is here now and it’s quite good. For the time being, I’m taking a pause on tinkering with postmarketOS and Linux for smartphones. My time is better spent getting comfortable with Android rather than holding out for some ideal that may never come.

1. As of 2023, phones are replaced every 3.6 years on average. So the average phone replaced today was originally bought in 2021/2022. https://www.sellcell.com/blog/how-often-do-people-upgrade-their-phone-2023-statistics/

2. Amount of RAM in phones sold in 2021: Google Pixel 6: 8GB, Pixel 6 Pro: 12 GB, Samsung Galaxy S21 5g: 6-8GB, Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G: 8-16GB, Motorola Moto G30: 4-6GB RAM

3. “Starting [2026], Android will require all apps to be registered by verified developers in order to be installed by users on certified Android devices.” https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/08/elevating-android-security.html

It's not sideloading and it never was

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Brent Simmons, Why NetNewsWire Is Not a Web App:

What I want to see happen is for Apple to allow iPhone and iPad users to load — not sideload, a term I detest, because it assumes Apple’s side of things — whatever apps they want to. Because those devices are computers.

I’ve been calling it sideloading all along, but of course installing software is not sideloading! Words matter. The way things are framed affects how we think about them. We’re so used to locked down systems that installing software from anywhere other than Apple’s blessed App Store feels practically like a hack. Our expectations have been manipulated and now there’s no accountability for it. I think most about these low consumer expectations and lack of corporate accountability in the context of e-waste.

Smartphones are computers. They have an open-ended purpose. We expect to be able to use them for things in the future that we don’t use them for today. If you’ve ever downloaded an app in a pinch, like for hailing a cab or presenting your ticket for an event, then you’ve seen this in action. Despite smartphones’ open-ended purpose, they’re locked down like appliances. And based on how we talk about “sideloading” of software, that’s what we expect as consumers.

It’s refreshing to come across a re-framing of loading (formerly sideloading) because it’s something I’ve taken for granted for so long. And I can feel that I’ve grown quite cynical. I wouldn’t have re-examined this framing of loading software without someone else pointing it out. When I learn about most any of today’s products, I just think Well, what do you expect?, I get to feel smug, and then I move on. I think that cynicism has ironically caused me to give a pass for some consumer-hostile practices. So this is a gentle reminder to expect better because when we expect less and less, corporations get away with giving us just that.

All software is precarious

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last couple years, I replaced my Mac-only applications with alternatives that are available for both Mac and Linux. The first and biggest switch was using Firefox, and I’m really satisfied with it. I felt like Mozilla’s history in creating a browser for Linux meant I should just jump into whatever Mozilla was offering, including the bookmarking and read-later service Pocket.

I used Pocket steadily ever since. Admittedly, a read-later service is at least partially a place I put things that I’ll never read. I read around 20-40% while the remainder is pushed down the unread stack, becoming a museum of things I wish I had the intellectual curiosity to care about. Nevertheless, it’s valuable to have a priveleged group of web links, especially ones that are cleaned up and easy to read. It was a nice addition to my tools for consuming the web. And then this past July, Mozilla shut it down for good.

I’m not naive about corporate interests. I try to avoid apps and services backed by big tech companies. For any private, closed source, or for-profit services that I use, I’m already brewing an exit strategy. I’m familiar with the purposeful degradation of platform quality a.k.a. enshittification, and I’m comfortable switching services and platforms. But this hits differently because it’s Mozilla. In all the apps I’m looking to replace, Pocket was not under consideration, not even in the same universe. That’s why it’s frustrating. It feels like replacing Pocket is a project that fell on me out of nowhere.

Look, it’s not for me to say what a company should or shouldn’t do, especially when providing a free service. I know that these things have ongoing costs and require maintenance, but I assumed whatever motivated Mozilla to acquire Pocket in 2017 would lead them to eat much of its cost too. I’m left wondering, if I can’t depend on Mozilla for the long-term, who or what can I depend on?

I think this why self-hosting is having a moment, even if for a limited group of people. The drawbacks of self-hosting are obvious. It requires technical background knowledge, research, and maintenance. It takes time to do all of that, and when you do, you end up with something that is often not as polished or feature-rich as commercial alternatives. However, using feature-rich commercial stuff is no protection from rug pulls of one kind of another.

Right now I’m self-hosting wallabag is my solution. I haven’t used it long enough to form a strong opinion about it, but so far it seems like a perfectly good one-for-one replacement for Pocket. It has a browser extension, mobile apps for reading, and it was able to import all my exported Pocket data. I can’t ask for more than that.

But it’s no salve for my broader concerns about relying on software. There’s no escaping that all software is precarious. It’s not because it’s technically unreliable or unstable, but because the overlap between my needs and the provider’s needs is fleeting. It’s especially the case for commercial software, but it’s still true for community software or even independent one-person shops.

Over at 404 Media, Sam Cole was similarly frustrated when she learned Pocket was shutting down. A colleague suggested to her “copy-pasting links to articles into a giant document to read later”, and she concludes by writing “I might have to start doing that.” It’s not a bad idea. A simple file-based solution is more durable and easier to maintain than anything will ever be.

I’ve been thinking since Pocket’s shutdown announcement that if I had saved my read-later links in a text file, none of this would matter to me. A text file is immune to the changing expectations of software. As I plan my exit from other commercial apps and services, it’s a great time to consider whether they can be replaced with a text file, document, or even a spreadsheet.

A new minimalism

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In my 20’s, the only tech I owned was an iMac computer, Nexus 5 smartphone, Nintendo Wii, and a TV set. I had this setup in part because I was broke and moving around a lot, but I was also a minimalist.

I wanted to rebuke the accumulation of stuff that I saw with my parents, so I got rid of everything that wasn’t necessary or serving my needs at the time. I avoided buying physical media, and I looked to digital technology to fill in the gaps.

The smartphone was the driver in the minimalist setup, particularly my Nexus 5 (2014). It was faster and more powerful than anything I had before, with a larger high resolution display, and it finally had good enough battery life for all-day use. When I went out, I no longer had to huddle around power outlets in public places!

Smartphones had reached maturity, and everbody knew it. A Radioshack advertisement from 1991 went viral because a smartphone could replace nearly all of the advertised gadgets. Steve Cichon wrote “the technology of only two decades ago now replaced by the 3.95 ounce bundle… in our pockets.” It was goodbye to all our old crap and hello to modernity. We now had the everything device.

Later that year, Slate called 2014 “The Year of Outrage”. They documented that every day of the year a public figure or current event caused a backlash on social media. At the time this was kind of an oddity, though now we might call it The First Year of Outrage. (What do you mean, one?)

It’s no coincidence that the year smartphones reach maturity is The Year of Outrage.

What makes the mobile medium different from the traditional PC is that it’s always on, always with you, and always connected – which means there is no rest from it, no boundaries, and no time to mentally reset.

The smartphone combines with internet media to become always-on internet media. It’s the internet with no natural boundaries of space, time, or context. You don’t have to wait to get home and log on to find out about something outrageous. It’s always with you.

No wonder the media environment feels angrier and crazier all the time. The emotional outrage harvests attention, the structure of internet media funnels our attention into apocalyptic thinking, and thanks to the new packaging, it’s everywhere all the time.

I originally thought of the smartphone as a simple exchange of one kind of stuff for another. It takes up no square footage in my home, sure, but the content of the phone takes up as much attention, or square footage of my mind, as I let it.

It was a mistake to think that reclaiming physical space by replacing a bunch of stuff with one device necessarily meant reclaiming mental space. It just didn’t work out that way for me, at least not once the everything-all-at-once aspect of internet media included all the time and everywhere.

I’m sure there are people who are bathed in internet media and handling it great, though I have my doubts judging from the weird and uncomfortable conversations that I find myself having. And maybe I’m more sensitive than the average person, more prone to ruminative thoughts, more likely to get into a negative feedback loop. It doesn’t really matter. Whatever the case, it’s how I’m wired and it’s what I’m working with. To reclaim space in my mind for what truly matters, I must keep smartphones and internet media at a remove. To me, that is the new minimalism.

Future garbage

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It was The Great Raspberry Pi Shortage of 2021, and also a global pandemic that claimed the lives of millions of people. Busying myself with trivial things, I made a retro video game system out of a Raspberry Pi 4. It was so much fun that I wanted to buy another one, but any available Raspberry Pi was being flipped for many times the retail price.

I thought, No problem, I have all these smartphones gathering dust in a drawer. After all, a Raspberry Pi is just an ARM processor and every smartphone has an ARM processor. Some of those old phones might even be more powerful than a Pi 4.

I assumed that I could install a conventional version of Linux onto Android hardware. Even if it was the most bare bones version of Linux, without a graphical user interface, that would give me enough to work with.

My research turned up almost nothing. I was genuinely embarrassed. I should’ve known better. I did know better! Yet I stupidly thought that the Android open source project combined with somebody, or “the community”, had a solution for reusing all this hardware. It was unthinkable that the last twenty years of smartphones were destined to be paperweights.

For years, I heard all this talk about Android’s openness, with software built on open source, and Google wanting to appear to be the good guy opposite Apple. Now it’s been seventeen years since the first Android phone and we have nothing to show for it. There is no consensus alternative software for Android phones and no straight-forward way to install it.

(More on this later. I’ve spent a lot of time researching alternative smartphone operating systems.)

After that, the spell was broken. I realized that my technology products would all become garbage in the future, and much sooner than I expected. I started to see all my technology as future garbage.

Drawing a Line in the Sand

I’m taking a stand against the future garbage cycle. In the short-term, this means no more money for new devices. With the long-term goal of reinventing my tech ecosystem using things I already own and second-hand tech. The most important part is to not buy anything brand new.

I’ll make compromises . It’s okay if I have less computing power or fewer features.

I’ll dabble in hypocrisy. I still live in modern society and have to negotiate it.

I have questions that I need answered. How much can I cut down on e-waste by making different consumer and lifestyle choices? How much will I have to give up by relying on aging and second-hand products? Will I need to buy something new to keep using essential services? Can I replace mainstream commercial services with more durable alternatives?

I won’t have the answers to these questions for years. And this is the exciting part. This is where I learn, in a visceral way, how much I need mainstream technology, and how much of it is truly garbage.

My new seven year old laptop

Sat, 03 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I bought a laptop on Craigslist because I wanted an inexpensive entry into trying Linux. I’m weaning myself off of the planned obsolescence of consumer technology. And I’m preparing for a future where all of my computers are second-hand.

I scoped out laptops on Craigslist for months. Some of the things I wanted, like replaceable parts or more ports, are things you tend to get with older laptops, while newer laptops are thinner and lighter at the expense of repairability and ports. But coming from my very powerful M1 MacBook Air, I was worried that any Intel processor would run like crap by comparison. So I prioritized getting a newer processor (and a newer model) over other features.

Finally I settled on an HP EliteBook x360 1030 G3 (Catchy name, right?!). It was a good price at $150 with an 8th generation Intel processor. It has a pair of USB-C Thunderbolt ports, a USB-A port, and HDMI.

I’m getting comfortable using Debian Linux. It’s not as polished as macOS, but I haven’t found any major usability issues. There are some quirks because apps are written using different tool kits and lack a common look and feel. (For example, the appearance of the window buttons for minimize, maximum, and close are different between applications. This does not happen on macOS.)

I see all this as a long-term investment in Linux as a skill.

It’s interchangeable components and applications gives me an insurance plan against future updates that I don’t like, and it means I can carry my experience to another Linux distribution that is nearly the same as what I’m used to.

I’m more prepared to take a cast-off computer and put it to use because Linux uses fewer system resources than macOS and Windows, and if that isn’t enough, there are distributions designed for less powerful hardware.

This 2018 EliteBook running Linux is good enough for my personal needs. With that, I can check out from consumer technology and keep this second-hand computer deal going forever. No more comparing what I have to the latest model. No more reading the tea leaves of the Apple rumor mill. And no more tech news.

To the tech reviewers and content creators, keep it up. After all, I’m gonna need your ten-year-old reviews whenever I get around to upgrading.

Giving up the dream

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I spent most of the last 15 years trying and failing to be an independent mobile application developer.

I should note that, professionally, I’m still a mobile application developer. But coming out of college with my computer science degree, all I wanted was to be an independent developer. Emphasis on independent. I wanted to be my own boss and work on my own products. That was The Dream.

I released three different applications independently. One each year from 2010 to 2012. But none of those applications are available to download today. And of the dozen or so other applications I started since, not one of them has ever made it into any app store.

There are a lot of reasons why my production fell off in 2012. Unfocused development, for one. Two of my apps were for Android, and one was for Windows 8 (?!). I was even working on a hybrid mobile-web application at one point.

There was some procrastination too. And there was the kind of procrastination where I felt like I was doing something important because it was vaguely related to my goal. Prime examples were consuming tech news and fiddling with my computer/smartphone/tablet setup. The seasoned procrastinator knows this as yak shaving.

I still had to make money while doing all of that. I actively avoided commitment because I didn’t want other priorities to get in the way when I would leave in pursuit of The Dream. That motivation was short-sighted and lead me to make a lot of bad business decisions.

Contracting helped me avoid the commitment of salaried employment, or so I thought. I took the first clients that came along and they were pretty bad. Out of inexperience and hubris, I negotiated fixed-price contracts that looked good for me in the short-term, but they assumed the project scope was bounded and straight-forward. Invariably my clients demanded more features and changes and the project scope ballooned. The fixed-price of the contract meant that as the project dragged on, the amount I earned for the hours I worked fell below minimum wage. I worked myself into literal poverty.

The Dream was still alive, but being truly broke changed me. If I had made good money from one of my independent apps, or if a client that paid me fairly – rather than exploited my lack of business experience – I would be a very different person today.

Instead I spent several years living in a world where nothing was free and everything was a struggle. I scrambled in the hope to make some software product that would somehow catapult me out of my situation.

In that moment, my software ideas completely curdled. The purpose of my first few apps had been easy to explain to normal people. I made a music player, a LinkedIn app, and a text editor.

But after a few years of not releasing anything, and facing a harsh economic reality, my ideas turned into I need to release something that will make money, which is not the basis for a strong product vision. My ideas became technically convoluted, difficult to explain, and had questionable value.

For example, I spent a couple of years building a content management system for mobile apps. It was along the lines of the crappy cookie-cutter websites that a lot of restaurants have today, but in mobile app form. Sound good? Didn’t think so. It’s okay because it never saw the light of day anyway.

I felt like a failure all the time. I frequently ran into one of the unwritten rules of our society. If you don’t have any money, you need to have a story that you can tell middle class people about how you’re working to solve your lack-of-money problem. At least that’s the rule if you want to avoid strangers giving you advice on how to run your life.

In the early days, I could say I was an independent mobile application developer because I had a couple apps. No matter that I wasn’t making any money from them. I could spin it in the language of upward mobility, like saying I was getting experience or learning about the app market. But after several years without releasing anything, my story lost credibility. And I felt the discrepancy between my story and what I actually accomplished. How could I be an independent developer if nothing I made was available to the public?

I was reminded of this difficult time when a couple months ago I saw a video on YouTube called The Art of a Flop Era (a desktop documentary) by Elanor Nadorff. Elanor had a childhood dream of becoming a filmmaker and her college experience was cut-off by the Covid-19 pandemic. Now several years later, she hasn’t achieved anything that she hoped she would by 24 and feels ashamed and disappointed in herself all the time. At times she was driven by a fantasy that the excitement of her ideas would drive her. Instead her reality – which is the part I relate to the most – is that she’s overwhelmed by the weight of what she failed to accomplish and wonders if she will ever break out of the cycle. She is chasing a fixed point of success which seems to be getting farther away the more time passes.

For me a lot of the cycle of depression was a product of the perspective of youth. My mid-20’s was an imaginative boundary where I couldn’t envision much of anything beyond it. This is sometimes called a “quarter -life crisis”.

The Dream’s timeline carried me through college, with another four or five years to get my life together – putting me around 24 or 25. Reaching the end felt like approaching a kind of death, as if my life story was concluding. There would be no sequel because I hadn’t become interesting or successful enough to justify one.

I experienced – much like in Elanor’s video – that life goes on with or without a plan. I met someone that I was crazy about. I made efforts to show up for her in a way that I didn’t in previous relationships. We moved in together and merged lives, far more than being roommates that are romantically involved. Her concerns and responsibilities were added to mine. Her dog became my dog. Her family became my family. And not long after, we got married. And I got a full-time salaried job so she could quit hers to find another.

I found more purpose and meaning in a few shared experiences with my spouse than in all my pursuit of The Dream. I still clung to the idea of returning to it and I wasted plenty more time on it, but The Dream’s days were numbered, whether I accepted it or not.

It’s been about three years since I officially quit being – or more realistically aspiring to be – an independent software developer.

Around the time I officially gave up the dream, I read this article in The Atlantic about “quiet quitting” where Amelia Nagoski said (emphasis mine):

Once you see evidence that quiet quitting would be better for you, the real challenge is grieving the loss of something you thought was valuable, mourning the time and energy you invested into a relationship where you were not valued the way you deserved to be, and finding something new in your life that does give you what you thought (and were told) you would get from your work.

Giving up The Dream was my own quiet quitting. It was painful to give up being an independent mobile app developer, regardless of my lack of output and success. Even if my time as an independent developer was largely delusions of grandeur, they were my delusions of grandeur. They were my aspirations, my self-image. It was an important part of my life. And it was over.

I let The Dream drag on for so long because I love computers. I’ve been using them since I was four and can’t imagine life without them. But aligning my hobby with my career was a mistake—it turned everything I did into a pursuit of profit, even indirectly. I couldn’t just make a mobile app for myself like I had done when I made my first app. Instead I had to make an app business. And things that should have been fun and whimsical turned into thankless work.

That’s why it’s so satisfying to do things like make a retro video game system, try out using dumbphones, and writing for this website. These are things I never would have done a few years ago. I would have found them in conflict with The Dream. Better to be yak shaving.

Now, I look back on letting go of The Dream with relief. For years, I was haunted by imaginary obligations and the guilt that came with them. Cutting that madness out of my life freed me to focus on what truly matters—things unrelated to profit or success.

Light Phone 2, my favorite tech thing of 2024

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have an annual tradition where I make a list of all of my favorite things from the past year. This year the headlining tech thing is the Light Phone 2.

I used to believe that making computers more accessible to everyone through smartphones would benefit the whole world. But as internet brain has afflicted the real world, I’ve looked for guardrails that reduce the flow of internet nonsense into my head. That search has taken a previously unthinkable idea – of using a non-smartphone or “dumb phone” – and moved it into the realm of reasonable responses to the current state of internet media.

I bought the Light Phone as a present for myself more as a novelty. It was not my goal for it to be a serious purchase or an across-the-board lifestyle change. I wanted to see how well it worked and maybe use it as a backup phone.

What made the Light Phone stand out from other dumb phones is that it has a Qwerty software keyboard. I didn’t have to sacrifice my familiarity with the layout of a keyboard and go back to the old rotten days of T9.

It has no web browser, no email, and no third-party applications. Instead it has a limited selection of applications called tools. Tools are available for calendar, calculator, turn-by-turn directions, and others, but they’re not intended as one-for-one replacements for smartphone apps. The tools exist to give me something, and maybe just enough, to not need my smartphone.

The transition away from my iPhone 11 Pro to using the Light Phone full-time was gradual and, as I said, not really my goal.

I had a rough start. At first I couldn’t get text messages from my friends that use iPhones because of iMessage, an instant messenger service that Apple puts on top of the text messaging application on the iPhone. If two people have an iPhone, messages are automatically sent over the internet using iMessage rather than as cellular SMS text messages. Because my iPhone was still linked to iMessage, I kept receiving messages from my iPhone-using friends on my iPhone even when my SIM card was in the Light Phone. I hoped that I could have the best of both worlds and keep using iMessage when my SIM card was in my iPhone then automatically switch to using use SMS when my SIM was in the Light Phone, but it didn’t work out that way. I had to opt-out completely.

Once I could send and receive calls and texts with everybody, using the Light Phone was an exercise in getting comfortable with discomfort. I mean, it can be scary to not have a smartphone out in the world. After 17 years of smartphone usage, I was out of practice living like that. I was used to having all sorts of apps and websites that remove or reduce uncertainty, even small amounts of uncertainty. For instance, I’ve used Google Maps so many times while walking around downtown just to check if I’m facing and walking in the right direction. With the Light Phone, all that uncertainty came right back.

So at first the Light Phone was just a home phone. I used my iPhone outside the house but switched to the Light Phone at home for serenity.

A couple months later, the Light Phone became my weekend phone. If my SIM card was still in my iPhone by Friday evening, I moved it back to the Light Phone. Over a few weeks, the Light Phone’s weekend time bled into the week.

Then at some point the Light Phone became my full-time phone. By then it happened without friction or fanfare.

The loss of iMessage has been difficult because photos sent over iMessage are full quality, while photos sent over text message are heavily compressed. I always want the highest possible quality images, especially photos of my family. I already have to ask Android users (whose messages are sent to iPhones as SMS text messages) to email me their photos, but now I have to ask that of everybody. I would like a better photo-sharing solution for that because nobody wants to be asked to send an email in the middle of a party, but that’s a project for another time.

Other than the loss of some conveniences, it’s been great. I really needed this. These days I don’t have the brain space to deal with all the things my smartphone would like me to do. The reduced mental load from switching to the Light Phone outweighs any features that I’ve lost.

Freeing up some brain space is a big deal for me as a parent of a toddler, where there are already so many reasons to feel impatient and frustrated. Like when I’m struggling to get my kid to leave the playground, or to stop throwing things, or to get ready for sleep. It’s easier to practice patience when there isn’t a bunch of “important” stuff I could be doing in my pocket. I would handle a lot of situations worse if I was also half-doing a bunch of stuff on my phone.

What sealed the deal for me was seeing how my kid reacts to the Light Phone. Normally if she spies any screen or smartphone, she hunts it down and messes around looking for stimuli. But with my Light Phone, she just picks it up and hands it to me because she knows it’s mine. She has no interest in it. I think a lot about the difference in her reactions. It really solidifies the idea that something about smartphones are attractive at a basic level, that both full-grown adults and toddlers are susceptible to its charms.

Whether to use a smartphone usually doesn’t feel like a choice at all. I’m grateful that the Light Phone exists to let me experiment and decide for myself. For most of the year I had the choice between a lifestyle with a smartphone or the Light Phone. I chose the Light Phone more and more often until it became my default. After this last year, I don’t see myself carrying a smartphone full time ever again.

I like the Light Phone for how well it works at its intended purpose, but I love it for what it represents. It demonstrates a happy medium where a technology product can provide utility without stoking my worst and most addictive impulses. That makes it my favorite tech thing of 2024.

It's not my civic duty to be famous

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A thread that emerged from the post-election analysis is about how much the election was influenced by, well, influencers.

Makena Kelly over at Wired in The Future of Political Influencers writes in her conclusion:

The election, and the future of the political influencer, has forever changed as we know it.

Maybe so, but I need to pump the brakes on what comes next.

The internet is not built for nuance. If influencers had any demonstrable effect on the election, and they probably did, then the narrative will emerge that influencers decided the election.

And if influencers “decide” elections, then it’s practically your civic duty to become an influencer, or at least your participation in online platforms is equated more with civic engagement.

For example, Jules Roscoe of 404 Media published an article about a rise in interest in South Korea’s ‘4B’ Movement after the election. The article cites a post on Reddit as an example. Without getting into the substance of the 4B movement, I want to highlight something the original poster wrote to address men responding to their message (emphasis mine):

To the men asking in good faith what they can do to be an ally, I don’t know. It’s really up to you. Start a podcast or something and get more popular than Joe Rogan and the other manosphere influencers who peddle conservative-lite to suck men in and push them further right.

The poster’s tone is half-hearted and this is clearly not meant as capital-A advice, but what it shows is that to many people hurting and looking for answers, the influencer question is top-of-mind right now.

Over at The Atlantic, Spencer Kornhaber wonders aloud about political engagement with influencers and online platforms. Writing in Why Democrats Are Losing the Culture War he says:

Unfortunately, the only way to change what’s happening in an echo chamber may be to add your own noise.

I lifted that quote out of context, so I want to point out that Kornhaber is specifically talking about how Democratic politicians engaged with influencers in this election, but I bring it up because the same sentiment is repeated: More engagement in online platforms is the solution.

An answer that doesn’t challenge the powerful

The emerging narrative of an influencer election troubles me because it puts implied blame on powerless, regular people. It’s regular people’s fault for not being internet-famous or influential enough. That means it’s not the fault of corporate interests and their powerful platforms which favor sensational algorithmic content.

An influencer election narrative suggests that political action and our short-term next steps are to spend more time on internet media platforms. We just need to follow the good influencers, and produce more content for the platforms ourselves.

That doesn’t challenge anything about the status quo, so I imagine it will gain traction.

Do what you want, but please take care

If it’s your thing to start up a blog, a podcast, a YouTube channel, a TikTok whatever-they-have, then go for it. But if you’re anything like me, it will not help to feel that – on top of taking care of the very important business of your day-to-day life – you need to invest heavily in your online profile, or else you let the bad guys win. Feeding more of myself to the corporate internet media machine without any accountability for that machine is not for me.

The excesses of internet media have sown confusion, frustration, and noise that has bled out into real life. It’s a mess. It’s profitable for a handful of companies, public figures, and financial speculators, but it comes at everyone else’s expense. Any narrative that suggests that we aren’t engaged with the internet media slurry in the right way deserves scrutiny.

Make it yourself book from NODE

Sat, 02 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

NODE is a creator (or a group?) that publishes interesting technology projects and supporting ideas on their N-O-D-E YouTube channel and website. What makes NODE interesting, beyond any individual project or video, is the ethos behind their work. In the zine Node VOL 02: Manifesting Reality, manifesting reality refers to a decentralized community using readily available technology to build the future that they want to see. It’s a critique of commercial technology, but presented with an optimistic and empowering tone, rather than complaining about any particular company or product.

The most recently published work is Make it Yourself: 1000 Useful Things to Make (YouTube) (and blog post), which announced the release of a PDF book also called Make it Yourself: 1000 Useful Things to Make. The book compiles 1000 different do-it-yourself projects from around the internet into a kind of greatest hits album.

The book’s contents are links to web pages with the original author’s instructions on how to make those projects. You will need to read it on a computer with internet access and a web browser (as opposed to an e-reader).

Most of the projects are beyond anything I would attempt, but it’s really fun to see so many nice do-it-yourself projects in one place, organized, and with attractive renderings. Check it out!

Internet brain

Sun, 27 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

My descent into YouTube hell started when I searched for a tutorial about the to-do app Omnifocus. The right-hand column of recommendations showed a TED talk about productivity that eventually I clicked on. Then a recommendation caught my eye that looked like a kind of “power of positive thinking” version of productivity with a heavy Christian slant. I clicked to watch it ironically because I’m a bad person (or something).

But before that video got started, I saw it. A thumbnail of dark ashen humanoid creatures with beady red eyes and gnashed teeth. They looked like Smeagol from The Lord of The Rings. The title of the clip was “How to know if your friends are controlled by demons”. Of course I clicked on it.

(I wish I could still find this video but it’s either been taken down or inaccessible through YouTube search.)

The message of the video was that my friends are controlled by demons if they are not sufficiently supportive of my life goals or my methods for achieving those goals. Questions, doubts, or dissenting opinions are all evidence of possible demon possession. Yikes!

If you suddenly felt that you can’t trust your friends – that they are agents working against you – your reality has destabilized. On YouTube it only took four videos and three clicks to reach the end of reality.

Back in the real world…

Several months later, my wife and I were at a funeral luncheon seated with a group of strangers. They were three married couples, all old friends in their mid-60’s. It was after the worst of the COVID-19 lock-downs, and we made small talk about little ways that daily life has changed since the pandemic.

One guy remarked that some businesses will now only accept credit card payments, but he still preferred to pay with cash. He told an anecdote where he had gone to a gas station and tried to buy something with cash, but the cash register system had broken down. The cashier, described as a kid, was apparently unable make change without the assistance of the cash register.

The man demonstrated to the cashier how to count the change he expected to get back and together they were able to work it out. He was proud that he taught someone about making change, but he was distraught at the cashiers shortcomings.

The man rhetorically asked, “What is the world coming to?”, which is a question so banal that anyone can agree to its sentiment without endorsing any kind of worldview. I nodded along.

“It’s the new math.” said his wife, who identified herself as a teacher.

Knowing nothing about so-called new math, I took the bait, “What about the new math? What’s wrong with it?”

She offered no specifics, but she felt the curriculum didn’t really teach kids the basic arithmetic they needed, and they were unprepared for practical uses of math. A damning criticism, if true.

Before I could ask another question to try to understand this problem of new math, another woman at the table interjected, “But they have tampons in the boys bathroom!”

That’s when the conversation turned.

She continued, “And that’s why they have a lot of rape at the schools.”

For my sensibilities, this was so far past the line for appropriate conversation with strangers at a funeral. Claims of widespread child rape demands justification and evidence. And you may notice, what it really demands is attention.

I said, “One rape seems like a lot of rape. What’s a lot of rape? How often is this happening?”

“All the time!”, she said.

This obviously couldn’t be true. In my last appeal for normality, I asked “If this is so common, wouldn’t the police be investigating it?”

Another couple offered that one of their adult children was a police officer. According to them, police are essentially not allowed to stop crime anymore. They continued, that if homeless people were to squat on your private residence, the police can no longer remove the squatters, and the squatters can now sue you if any harm comes to them while they were squatting.

I couldn’t keep up with the pace of it. I thought to myself, “Why is this happening? What the hell is going on here?” The group fully agreed that these ideas were connected, not separate conversations.

As though he heard what I was thinking or noticed the expression on my face, the father of the police officer declared, “It’s because the Communists are taking over and they want to take away our property!”. There seemed to be agreement around the table and similar concern. He added, “That’s why I keep a gun.”

It ended there. It had to. We reached a conclusion where society as we knew it was over. There’s nowhere to go from there.

I stared down at my half-eaten food and pretended that I was studying something on the plate, feeling unsettled.

How did we get here?

The conversation at the funeral reminds me of my YouTube rabbit hole. In both situations an innocent topic connected to the end of the world or the end of society.

We started with “the kids” not knowing how to do math, which connected to transgender accommodations, which was somehow a cause of rape, which connected to restraining police officers and the end of the rule of law. Finally the total takeover by “Communists”, which can only be mitigated with gun ownership. That’s a straight line between buying something at a gas station and the end of society!

That’s internet brain. Internet brain is where our internal narratives take on the shape of the internet as a medium.

Traditional media of television, radio, and print all have linear presentations of content. The media of the internet is more about the connections than destinations. It’s right there in the name: the World Wide Web. The order and relative position of content is completely fluid. Everything is connected to everything else.

The content of the internet is a reflection, of sorts, of the real world. There is very little we can do about the quantity and kind of stuff available on the internet because the world contains everything, including all the wonderful and terrible possibilities. We can’t medicate, legislate, or pray that away. But we don’t need everything tied together. We don’t need the ability to reach any destination from any origin.

The people I met at the funeral think of themselves as smart. While I disagree with everything they said, and even more of what they believe, they were not stupid people. They were retired teachers and (unspecified) professionals. They had careers doing jobs competently for 30 to 40 years. Yet their mode of thinking about current events has taken the same shape as internet media.

Please understand that I’m not picking on these people. My point is that no one is so smart that they can spend hours a day steeped in media and end up unchanged. And by the way, conspiratorial thinking is far from the only way that internet brain presents itself in the real world.

Going forward

I take this problem of internet media more personally than most people because I arranged a lot of my life around computers and the internet and, to put it mildly, this is not the future of the internet that I wanted.

I was a tech-savvy kid in the late 90’s. I imagined the internet would connect the world like a giant library, breaking down barriers of wealth and education in the process. I was in college for computer science when the iPhone was introduced. I believed that making computers more accessible to normal people through smartphones would benefit the whole world. I have made a career as a mobile application developer. I wanted all of this to be great. I still do.

Instead the apocalyptic energy of the internet seeps into the real world. And my own internet usage drags on me in ways that are often difficult to articulate. I don’t want this for myself, my family, or anyone else.

I think the right approach to this problem is to fortify my own mental and emotional integrity. After all, if I try to counter somebody’s internet-brained nonsense with an equal and opposite dose of my own internet-brained nonsense, I only add to the noise.

My goal is to put up guardrails that interrupt, or at least slow down, the connective tissue of the internet. All of my technology projects right now are about this. I’ve deleted my social media accounts. I avoid services that push recommendations. I jump between using my iPhone and a Light Phone. I’m building more of my own stuff (including this website!), and experimenting with free software alternatives to commercial products.

Some of these things stick and others don’t, but I know I’m on the right track. My perspective is shifting. When I run into internet-brained weirdness in the real world, it’s more apparent than ever.

I’ll make any lifestyle changes needed to avoid succumbing to ‘internet brain’ and becoming what I dread: a living hyperlink between real people and online noise.

My GameCentre

Mon, 26 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Originally I planned to make something very complicated. It was supposed to be a home media center for my living room television. In addition to playing retro video games, it would play movies, music, and stream whatever else. I wanted it to upscale the games to HD somehow, and I’d get a fancy graphics card with an HDMI port, and on and on.

That wish list might sound fine for a lot of people, but for me that’s a recipe for disaster. It’s just too open-ended, too slippery in its definition of done. If I’m honest – and honest with myself – it would never happen.

This is a pattern with me. I’ve been working on the side to build and release independent mobile applications for 14 years. In that time, I’ve released only three applications, and none in the last ten years. There’s a folder on my computer named “Old Projects” that is a boneyard of abandoned software projects.

Normally, projects go like this: I start strong and make a proof-of-concept in a short amount of time (like a weekend). Then I go back-and-forth about critical details indefinitely. Eventually I abandon the project because I can’t justify the ongoing time and energy.

I was in the proof-of-concept phase of the home media center project. I bought a Lenovo ThinkCentre with a 7th generation Intel processor from a guy on OfferUp for the fabulous price of $70. Then I bought an SN30 Pro wired controller from 8BitDo.

I wasn’t sure what software I needed to tie the media center stuff together, but I wanted to try the Lakka operating system. I loaded it up with some games, just to see how well the computer performed as-is. It played Nintendo 64 games perfectly, and both Gamecube and Wii games quite well.

That was all I needed on the gaming front. But I still needed a graphics card to add an HDMI port to the ThinkCentre and connect it to my television.

This is the point where projects of mine go off the rails. I had a good-sounding reason to make changes and buy more stuff – ignoring that the purchase might be its own quagmire and still not get me to the final product.

I was saved by serendipity.

My mother-in-law asked me to recover some personal files from a couple old computers she found in her basement. Along with the computers, she gave me an LCD monitor. Which was great because those computers only had VGA output, and I didn’t have any displays that could connect with VGA.

I set up one of the computers, but I couldn’t get it to power on or display anything. To make sure there wasn’t something wrong with the monitor, I plugged it into the ThinkCentre and, holy crap, it was beautiful!

The display has a 5:4 aspect ratio, which is close to the 4:3 aspect ratio of traditional tube TVs, and it has a resolution that is high, but still below high definition (at 1280 x 1024). This makes games look very crisp without the distortion that normally comes with viewing lower resolution media on a higher-resolution displays.

It was game over the moment I plugged in that monitor. This project was done! Even though I planned to use the ThinkCentre for a bunch of other things, nothing would be as good as what I had on my desk at that moment. With a beautiful LCD monitor, built-in speakers, and enough computing power to play any game I wanted. I had a complete system.

I love that the computer’s capabilities are severely restricted. It’s an appliance, and I can’t fiddle with it too much. I don’t think about all the things it doesn’t do, or all the things it could do. I just play.

I’ve played a lot of these games in different formats; on original hardware, on the Wii Virtual Console, migrated to the Wii U, through Nintendo Switch Online, and even with a Raspberry Pi.

These games are important to me. I always want access to games like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Mario World, Donkey Kong Country, and more. I play them from start to finish every couple of years. To borrow a phrase from my local radio station, these games are “the soundtrack of my life”.

Since my video game playing is measured in decades, I don’t want to mess around with what service or system has which games, when, and for how much.

Now I have a long-term solution for my nostalgic gaming needs with my GameCentre, and one day it’s coming to the nursing home with me. It doesn’t get any better than that.

Confabulator

Reading later, offline

Conclusion

A computer for my kid

I hacked my Nintendo 3DS

Moto G5 Plus iPod

Blu-ray: The rise of Jellyfin

Looking ahead to 2026

Confabulator updates

The big project: A family computer / computer for my kid

Long term project: Owning my movies, TV, and music

Nice to have: Wallabag on Kindle

Nice to have: Dumb phone alternative

/e/OS, favorite tech 2025

Conclusion

FreshRSS, favorite tech 2025

Nintendo 3DS, favorite tech 2025

Confabulator 2025

Related

The best alternative to iOS and Android is... Android

postmarketOS

LineageOS

Conclusion

It's not sideloading and it never was

All software is precarious

A new minimalism

Future garbage

Drawing a Line in the Sand

My new seven year old laptop

Giving up the dream

Light Phone 2, my favorite tech thing of 2024

It's not my civic duty to be famous

An answer that doesn’t challenge the powerful

Do what you want, but please take care

Make it yourself book from NODE

Internet brain

Back in the real world…

How did we get here?

Going forward

My GameCentre