Let’s start with the lock screen. Last time I was using a custom ROM with no way to customize it. However, since I am using a Nothing (3a) with NothingOS, I can add widgets! I have one for the weather and a global clock, both quite handy!
My wallpaper here is some official artwork from The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom—a game I have not played yet—I paid some silver points to download it from Nintendo’s rewards page because it’s just adorable and I had to have it. Not much else to comment on.
Now, the home screen itself does not have a lot going on! I am using a wallpaper featuring artwork from Into The Aether that is simply breathtaking to me. Best part? It was kind of made for me by the artist after they shared some versions where the artwork was squared or vertical with the planet at the very top. I wanted it centered and did my own version with Snapseed’s expansion tool. The artist took pity on me and gave me a proper one.
Now, the layout and mitself was made using KISS Launcher, which has been my choice for the last couple of years.
Nova Launcher is what I used back in the day, but after a whole mess that just keeps going, it’s just not worth it anymore.
KISS Launcher offers a minimal template to start building up from. I have the Minimalistic UI turned on, which let’s me add widgets to an otherwise empty screen. I just have a digital clock. I also have a row of favorite apps and the KISS search bar at the very bottom—with a three dot menu to see some settings and an app drawer button.
I set it up with a transparent theme, so it’s as simple as possible.
My row of favorites features six apps. I am starting to become a boring adult, so the first one from left to right is the phone app, I am currently using Fossify Phone, since it does what I need and not much more.
The next one is Fennec, a fork of Firefox for Android that has some extra plugins and honestly works just fine for all of my needs. I prefer to avoid Chromium browsers when I can. Fennec disables some of the telemetry of vanilla Firefox too, although I’ve heard there’s more privacy-focused alternative like IronFox, Ice Raven and iode Browser.
Next up, Signal, my favorite messaging platform. It just works and it has worked for many years now. Thanks to usernames, it has been easier than ever to make groups with the friends I’ve made online. It does everything I want it to do, and it does it very well. I have some other messaging apps but none of them I use as much as this one.
AntennaPod is simply the best podcast app for Android. It’s what got me interested into listening to podcasts in the first place. It has pretty much every feature you may need, and I like to see my stats on it every once in a while.
Besides Podcasts, there’s music! Although I grew fond of my Innioasis Y1, I still listen to music on my phone quite a bit, so I use Booming Music Player for that. I particuarly enjoy its feature to suffle albums (instead of shuffling all the songs and making a mess).
Last but not least, the Fossify Gallery app. It is the fastest and simplest of them all, loads super quick and has every feature I may ever need in a gallery.
Now, besides the minimal home screen, KISS Launcher has a History screen, which displays frequently used apps. These can be sorted in a variety of ways, but I just sort based on frequency, instead of recency, time of day, or other modes available.
Right now, my most frequent apps are the following:
These change every once in a while but it looks like a pretty accurate list of the sort of apps I use the most.
KISS Launcher has been around for ages. It is, in fact, featured on my very first proper blog post, and even though I have mentioned it in my uses page too, I thought it was worth sharing how my phone looks like thanks to it.
Of course, the icon pack featured here is Arcticons, the one I’ve made contributions to for a long time now, it just has everything I need, and if it doesn’t, I make the icon myself. Good stuff all around!
This is day 72 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>I don’t like to think of myself as someone with “brand loyalty”, but it’s undeniable that I have preferences for the tools I use hardware and software-wise.
When it comes to brands for any product, I like to think that I do my research and often go for the most budget-friendly options. I used Xiaomi devices for a long time because they were easy to jailbreak and install custom Android versions on them that allowed me to customize my device however I wanted.
I chose my Kobo Clara 2E because it’s not Kindle and it was easy to install KOReader on it. If it were any other brand, if it lacked a built-in store and if its default OS were bad. I wouldn’t mind, the hardware allowed me to do what I wanted, it was the most practical choice. The XTEINK X4 showed up much later to fill a different niche, but I still would have gone Kobo for a proper-sized reader, Amazon is just evil.
I went with Anbernic and Miyoo handhelds since they simply had the most community support around them and I knew the hardware was plenty for my needs. I could have gone with even cheaper no-brand options too but the amount of information available would not have been as big.
Built-in features are almost never what I care about, a pretty logo does not matter to me, I don’t need some comfy walled garden either, when it costs me my freedom.
However, I am weak when it comes to one brand: Nothing
Or at least, that design language of theirs.
Yep, the title had a double meaning, I apologize
I don’t think this warrants a super long blogpost, you can just look up what they sell and you’ll clearly see how incredibly unique they are.
I own one of their phones—Nothing Phone (3a)—one of their wireless earphones—Nothing Ear (a)—and I just purchased their of open earphones too—Nothing Ear (open)—that I’ve been testing for a couple of days and plan to use while cycling around my city.
For the price, the brand is well placed, offering affordable devices with some compromises that I don’t really care about. But when I purchased these earbuds (and the ones I already had, to be honest) I realized that I completely ignored my “budget-friendly” ideals of before. I would usually go for something like SoundCore or Haylou back in the day.
I got them because they were competitive, sure—any more expensive and I would not have bothered—but the design is what won me over. They look unique, they say something about you. And as much as I don’t want a brand to represent me or seem superficial, I just can’t help but love it.
There are better products for better prices, but the creativity just won me over, their phones’ bootloader is also unlockable so that’s a plus for the day I finally decide to get into rooting and installing a rom on my phone again.
Now, if it’s not obvious. Nothing (the brand) doesn’t actually deserve brand loyalty. They have done some sketchy moves too. I am not a fan of the pathetic AI button on my phone that can’t be reprogrammed by default. There are also some updates that have shown some notifications with ads for app recommendations and the like. Definitely not perfect at all.
I just love that their phones and products are more than just boring rectangles and Apple clones, okay?
Oh, actually, I am also weak to Nintendo, they suck, they do terrible stuff sometimes, but those games are just so goood…
Sorry, I am just a hypocrite. Enough.
This is day 68 of #100DaysToOffload)
All of my Nothing products, very aesthetic!
Apple and affordability
A €700 laptop is not cheap, a €700 phone is not cheap. My iPhone SE from 2022 cost €500 and it wasn't cheap either given what it had to offer. The price may be lower in comparison with other products from the brand and the prices of modern technology—which are madness. They may offer a good value for the money. That seems to be the case for this laptop. But it is not cheap.
I saw this post (originally in Spanish, title and quote translated by me) which dealt with something that I used to think a lot more, and even if I sort of accepted it as a part of life, I still hate it.
Back in the day, I used to watch phone reviews that recommended budget friendly devices. Stuff like the Redmi 4A and 5A were the kings of low-budget gadgets, at a price around $100 bucks. That was the first phone I ever paid for, and 18-year-old me only had half of that money, my dad paid the rest, and even that was too much for him. He wasn’t being greedy, but my previous phone still worked, so it was not a necessary purchase.
The flagship smartphones at the time? $500 bucks or so, the base iPhone 7? $650 USD, the one with 256 GB of storage? $969 USD. We all know storage wasn’t worth that much—even then the Apple markup was acting up. The high tier was expensive, and it still is. Like Adrian, I am extremely surprised when I see people saying the Macbook Neo is “budget-friendly.”
I’ve said before how I am often disconnected from my own culture, as a Latino who mostly interacts with American/English-speaking communities online and watches video reviews from people in those regions.
The people in my country who buy a Macbook Neo seem to me like part of the upper class—or in debt. After all, owning an Apple device is a status symbol for some reason, and even those who can’t afford it want those bragging rights.
The average person where I live has a two or three year old device that they got used from Facebook Marketplace, a chinese device from Oppo, Poco, Honor, Xiaomi or maybe Motorola. People will buy the flagship devices from these brands and think they are expensive and great quality. And yeah, they often have much better feature than Apple or Samsung products, even if riddled with tracking and advertising.
Alas, such brands are at a price people are actually willing to pay, as much as I don’t like it.
I have purchased devices and things from China and chinese online shops before. Let’s talk the Miyoo Mini Plus, the Anbernic RG35XX SP, The Miyoo Mini Flip and the XTEINK X4, and all of them have been at under $70 USD. All of them are extremely affordable and found for even cheaper during sales. That’s the kinda tech that still is actually budget-friendly.
Some of that price may be lowered because Chinese companies overwork people or do shady business practices, but reality is that the markup of most modern tech sold from more popular brands on this side of the globe are simply off the charts. A clear middle ground with a sensible approach can’t be that hard, right? But no, just look at the “minimalist” devices out there, all above 300, 400, 600 bucks and they are hardly worth that much, the marketing is more expensive than the hardware itself, I suspect.
I guess most big tech review channels seem to just take this for granted, 700 bucks for an Apple laptop? Very cheap, sure, you’ll finally have a Mac, yay!
The worst is that they barely mention actually cheap stuff. I think they realized that people who watch phone reviews for a living like to see expensive stuff—that they won’t buy—more than cheap stuff—that they won’t buy anyway, so they go and make that kind of content to appease the algorithm and get more revenue. Also cheap stuff has compromises which are often negative, so brands don’t like those to be brought up, even if at the price they are justified.
The people who genuinely look for reviews for actually affordable devices are usually confined to videos from smaller channels or from creators from India where those devices are more popular. Nothing wrong with that, of course, it’s a similar situation to Latin America, the concept of “budget friendly” is more akin to reality, and those reviews tend to be more honest anyway.
Right now I’m thankful for my current situation, which is rather privileged—single and without any debts—allowing me the purchasing power to consider expensive tech (as long as it isn’t Apple) among my options (although I would still probably go for whatever is cheaper or has better design). Still, I’d love if we recalibrated what “value for money” actually means, and what sort of hardware is actually enough, so we can stop allowing these companies to raise prices for no reason.
This is day 56 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>Along James, some other people I follow on the fedi got it, such as Neil, who shared his thoughts on it too.
And because of me (yes, I’m taking all the credit ;) Jeremy got one, wwwgem got one, Robert got one, njrk got one… so on and so forth. A quick look through the hashtag will show how the device’s gotten popular for a few months now.
There really are not a lot of reasons not to give it a go. With a price of 70 bucks or much less on a good sale, there is no excuse, in my opinion.
The XTEINK X4 has excellent battery life, a great set of physical buttons—with no touch screen—and, best of all, a community building homebrew for it and making it better day after day!
The most popular firmware is CrossPoint, which optimizes quite a lot of things compared to the built-in OS. In fact, I didn’t even use the device until I got it installed—it took me less than ten minutes.
All I did was change the language, plug the device to my dad’s Windows laptop—because I couldn’t bother to figure out permissions for the serial USB access on my Linux-powered laptop, sorry not sorry—and off I went.
I went for a minimal and more manual approach. I only have eight books on it, and I will only be replacing them as I go through them. The device doesn’t have a lot of memory—much less than a megabyte of RAM—so it’s ideal to format the EPUBs accordingly to avoid high-resolution covers and unsupported features diminishing the experience.
Honestly, the EPUB files look great, the font included with the firmware, Bookerly—which was made for Kindle back in 2015—is a pleasure to read through as well. Here’s how a page of text looks like:
You can change the font, margins, UI theme, and most other regular settings, and the controls for it all are very intuitive. There’s also plenty of mods and forks adding even more features, such as reading statistics.
www-gem has done a lot of work finding links and extra tools, so definitely check out his posts on the device if you’re curious about all its possibilities.
I already finished one book on it, and I am making progress on another two. The reading experience is excellent and I really have no complaints about it other than the lack of a backlight.
I carry it almost everywhere, and reading one or two pages—often many more—at any point is painless, as it wakes up in just a couple seconds from sleep. The portability really is killer too. Like Jeremy, I also added a magnet to my Nothing (3A) to stick it there and have it with me.
I don’t know what else to say, I’ve not even charged it since I bought it! I’ll just keep reading on it and enjoying the process.
Even though I still love my Kobo Clara 2E, this makes for an excellent companion device. The lack of stats on CrossPoint at the moment makes it so I don’t really want to read big books on it as much, but maybe I’ll get over that soon. I’m happy to read Clarkesworld magazine and short novellas on it though…
This is day 47 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>Of course, I see no use for such a useless feature, and if you don’t either, here’s how to hide it completely:
True.All the references and buttons will be gone from Calibre’s interface, it’s a bit of a bummer that the plugins can’t be fully deleted, but hey, as they say, out of sight, out of mind.
Of course there are also some forks made due to this addition in the form of Arcalibre, as well as library management alternatives like Booklore.
Personally, regular Calibre works fine and I don’t really feel the need to fully switch away from it. It has been a great project for years, and since most of the alternatives are rather young and have yet to prove themselves, I am inclined to just not bother, at least for now.
This is day 41 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>The e-ink display—the technology itself—actually represents something different: Focus, simplicity, and going back to our roots.
There’s just something about the slow nature of the display that just feels out of place in a world where everything is just speeding up. And yet, it fits perfectly.
Over time, more and more people actually turn to this technology because of the really cool features like the incredibly good battery life; and the one thing that I personally love the most about the e-ink technology is the fact that when you introduce more light, the more viewable the display becomes.
As you know from your phone, when you go outside, the display actually becomes, you know, worse. When it’s sunny outside, you basically cannot see anything on the display. That’s not the case with e- ink. The more light you introduce, the better it looks.
And this is sort of what I mean by going back to our roots. It feels very human.
When you increase the light around you, you can see more with your eyes. You will see less on your phone, but the e-ink display will become clearer and easier to read.
– David Pavlicek on This E-Reader Changed My Life: Xteink X4 Review
This is, on hindsight, a rather obvious statement, but it really resonated with me and—even though the video itself is “just a review”—I thought this statement was worth sharing in written form.
This, among other videos were the last straw that got me to order this device even though I already own my Kobo. I want to see if the reduced friction of this form factor will help me read even more.
Besides, maybe it’s weird, but I think I actually read multiple books much better when it’s done in multiple formats? I can read something on a paperback while keeping up with my reading on Kobo, as well as the manga I check on my phone. So, maybe an extra eink device means I could easily switch between more reads at a time, the difference in presentation helps me compartmentalize it better, perhaps.
It could all just be excuses of course, there’s always others who will fly through books regardless of the format or friction.
So, anyway, E-ink devices are great technology, and I am looking forward to check the Xteink X4 soon.
This is day 34 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>
I’ve been cleaning up my bedroom again—and this post is definitely not a way to procrastinate doing that—so I’ve found a lot of things that I don’t really use or need anymore, but at the same time, I don’t feel comfortable just throwing them away.
Some are pieces of nostalgia that simply mean a lot to me—others are simply outdated and unnecessary. I keep hoarding them though, and they take up space in my drawers.
When it comes to phones, my Poco F4 and my Mi 12T Pro have power buttons that aren’t working properly. I don’t know what to do with them, I could look into a repair shop to see if they can replace or clean up the hardware in some way, but for now they are still there gathering dust.
Another phone I got here is a Redmi Note 7 my mom owned but the display died after it got ruined by water—the display turns out but it is extremely dim—and the repair technician said he couldn’t do anything to it without replacing the whole motherboard, which seemed not worth the effort and the money for us. Another phone, this one with a broken display and a dead battery, would be a HiSense brand budget phone my sister used to have, that phone is more than 10 years old and not even working, why is it there?
Not to mention, all the cases, unused screen protectors and cables generated by these, to think about the ewaste kind of hurts, but alas.
How can I forget about my HTC Status—or the ChaChaCha in some other countries—one of my first devices that came with a keyboard included, and pretty sick design for its time. This one actually still boots super well! I remember installing emulators on it and mapping the buttons to the keys in the keyboard itself with a GBA layout, it made for a terrible dpad…
Speaking of which, I also have an original red Game Boy Advance SP. A lovely handheld console that I got around 2011 and that I only have 4 cartridges of. I have no reason to really use it over my current emulator and gaming devices, unless I wanted to play something straight from the cartridge itself, I guess, which I find highly unlikely.
I also have two desktop computers that are both more than 10 years old—one of them is probably 20 years old—in a corner of my bedroom, I can’t really bother myself to try and get them running, I think they have power supply issues, and extremely outdated hardware. I removed the hard drives from both of them to recover the data, but I don’t really have a purpose for them anymore.
I still have my old laptop around, the Lenovo Ideapad 510, and it works wonderfully well whenever I test to see if it still boots, I think I could turn that one into a pretty functional server, since it should offer me enough power to perform quite a bit of what I need it to. A while back I even updated my Fedora install on it like 5 versions in a day.
The Raspberry Pi 4 that I used for so many projects during my last semesters at University is also there, and that one is actually super dusty, I went to pick it up—it was still in the same place it has been since I was still using it as a local server—and yeah, it’s a complete mess with dust in every crevice…
Honestly, this is pretty much a collection at this point, even though I don’t display them neatly or anything, I can’t deny the amount of things I have unused, some of which even still works! I’ve been considering getting back into selfhosting, maybe this time using my old laptop, to have some extra juice and speed!
This makes me think about all the devices I still use, what is going to happen to them in 3 or 4 years, or 10, or 20? I still live with my parents, for example, how many of my things will they get rid of without me knowing, how much of it will I carry with me whenever I leave the house and go my own way? And when I move? When I have to make space for a bigger family of my own?
Some of these things I may be attached to today and forget about in a year, some I don’t care about right now may be around for a decade, but one thing is for sure: my PSP still lives, and I still can’t find my Hollow Knight map, what a tragedy…
In any case, I would love to know if you also have old devices and peripherals taking up space in your houses too! It should be kind of fun to have a conversation about it.
This is day 20 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>This is just a joke, but I would appreciate the support, feel free to look around the rest of my website :3
As I shared on previous posts, my dad and mom acquired new devices, the same model, but with quite different uses!
Regardless, as the more tech-savvy member of the family, the responsibility to set them up fell upon me, having to deal with a lot of progress indicators, toggles asking me to track everything the phone does, and logging in to a online accounts, because that’s how these things go now for regular people.
Many years ago, this blogpost could have been quite different, I may be mentioning some nifty program that can easily back up things and transfer them to the next device.
Especially when I used custom ROMs and root utilities to do all the heavy lifting, I often loved setting up my device again and again every few months. Even getting a new one wasn’t bad at all when I knew I’d eventually use it how I want.
But as time goes on Android has been more locked down, and I have to admit I haven’t caught up with recent backup tools that deal with all that—Even less so when my parents have phones that I can’t really root.
At the very least, the backup tools by OEM’s have caught up quite well, if at the cost of my peace of mind.
I must admit I didn’t do that much this time around. Just the bare minimum list of the things that I had to change.
Data migration - I did this with the Android built-in method, transferring data from device to device. I hate to admit I also used Samsung’s Smart Switch to migrate even more data, like all folders and files, photos and the like. This was not ideal, but I was lazy.
Log-in to Google - Rather unavoidable for a normal person who uses a phone, unless I offered myself for tech support even more setting up Droid-ify or something like that, but no.
Avoid extra log-ins - I didn’t make a Samsung account nor used their Microsoft OneDrive Integration. Of course, some preinstalled apps like Netflix went away too, so no big deal.
Avoid telemetry - Disabled every checkbox that I could find, including personalized ads, both from Google and Samsung services.
Uninstall Bloatware - Removed any Samsung duplicates and most of Google’s junk—still keeping some basics like Calendar or so, sadly. These devices come with a lot of unecessary things…
Default browser - Samsung Internet and Chrome went poof, and I decided to switch both phones to Vivaldi Browser, there was a time where Firefox would have been it, but not today.
Other app replacements - There were not many extra apps I installed on their devices—you are always free to check what’s on my phone though—other than Vivaldi Browser, Fossify Gallery and a password manager like Bitwarden or KeepassXC. I could install some more things, but, meh.
All in all, the new phones are pretty good hardware-wise, and I still need to do a couple of things like installing their banking apps or maybe a few logins that I missed.
Honestly, this experience and the implications was kind of terrible.
Without me, my parents would have ended up creating at least one extra Samsung account. Cloud services like OneDrive or Google Photos would be sucking up files and copying them to their servers, getting filled up with the data and then asking them to subscribe to unlock more storage a couple of months down the line.
Left on their own, my parents may be seeing ads popping up constantly in OneUI, as well as browsing the web without an adblocker, they would be using default applications that don’t work as reliably, that track whatever they do to a certain degree.
And of course, all of those AI assistants would be listening in in the background. It really is a nightmare out there, and it’s not only affecting my parents, it affects all of those unaware of the dangers that these practices bring. It’s a mess all around.
I don’t know how to get out of this one, the hold these companies have is just too much, and I keep on losing my patience and conceding more and more of my—or my family members—data just to get over with it.
So, do you have have any advice or thoughts about this? What would be some phones that don’t have as many privavy-invasive tactics? It would be nice to be aware of hardware that doesn’t do this as much…
]]>When heading elsewhere, my mom suddently had the desire to get a new case for her phone, a Redmi Note 11 by the way—a pretty okay midrange device. I have to admit I had zero hopes they would find anything at all, I tried to tell her getting something online going to be much cheaper and that we could find something she actually likes.
No point arguing with mom, she wanted to at least ask, and so we did.
After standing in front of the seller for way too long—I didn’t remember the device name and clumsily searched in the settings for longer than I’d like to admit—I was surprised they didn’t immediately said no. The guy got searching in a few drawers full of cases, under the stand, higher up, checking some sort of index every once in a while.
A few even more agonizing minutes passed where he kept searching but, eventually, he had to give up, tough luck this time around—and then my dad spoke.
My father saw a few cases in a shelf up above that started with “RN”, they were at the bottom of the pile, so only the spines of the boxes could be seen—I have no idea how my father even found them from where we were standing—the guy immediately checked closer and pulled out a couple cases for my mom to choose from.
She picked a golden colored one, and I was absolutely impressed. They did have something in the end, so they earned my respect.
I wasn’t too happy about paying like 10 extra bucks than what the case would cost online, but I digress, I took my losses and got my mom what she wanted.
I’m rather amazed by little moments like this, it really lets me know that even a tech enthusiast such as myself often ends up in a bubble when compared to other people who just use technology without being deeply interested on the latest and greatest.
The Redmi Note devices are fairly popular in some countries—I used to have one myself—and some folks who don’t follow tech as closely as I do, aren’t really tempted or in need of upgrading devices every one or two years, which means that even a device as old as the Note 11 has plenty of accesories and cases made for it, due to the marketshare these phones have among the less techy people.
The same is true for a lot of other things. Most people have not bought a Nintendo Switch 2 yet, most people won’t even realize that a Steam Machine is, plenty of regular folks don’t care their phone is 4 years out of date, and that is absolutely fine. I don’t know why I keep forgetting stuff like this…
My mom has showed signs of wanting a new phone, and I have felt like I should get something new to her, but at the same time, I think all she really needs is a nice factory reset to get her device snappy and fluid as new. I haven’t been the best example when it comes to sticking to a device for a long time, I know, buying like three phones since this blog got started… but alas.
For now, I spent more money than I wanted on a case, my dad has better eyesight than me, I should look at myself in the mirror when it comes to my assumptions, and in any case, my mom is happy.
This is day 5 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>More than a month ago, I wrote about listening to full albums again, a post that gathered some interesting conversations and emails from people who shared their thoughts about it. Another thing that happened was that my post was shared to Hacker News by someone. It didn’t get any traction at all, however, a single comment was left there, recommending this little device I never heard about: the Innioasis Y1.
It was described as “A modern knock-off of a click wheel iPod, smaller, lighter, bit more plastic.”
Honestly, my interest was immediately piqued. Especially one of the thoughts shared further into the comment:
Leaving the house without a phone and listening to an album end to end is amazing and changes music consumption from Spotify background noise to actual mindful enjoyment.
It’s not as frictionless as paying for streaming but if you got the time and inclination I definitely recommend.
So, without further to do, I went ahead and bought one to try it out for myself!
I must admit, the first thing I thought—as soon as I turned it on and fiddled with it—was regret, not because the device was that bad, I simply didn’t want to stop scrobbling my music to Listenbrainz, I just think it’s fun to have those stats out there.
In the end, common sense remained, I had my albums and files ready, so I I decided to stick to my decision, and I’m happy to say it was quite the big success!
The second thing I felt was its cheapness. I own some other budget devices in other categories—such as the Miyoo Mini Plus—but that hardware has no real compromises for what it does, which is not the case for this one, where your mileage may vary depending on what you are looking for. Here are some things to note:
Personally, the most annoying thing for me is the lack of other input options besides the wheel. You can’t change the volume without waking up the device screen, going to the playing screen, and scrolling the wheel, for example, something that a simple set of volume buttons on the side would have fixed.
Most of the other issues are nitpicky and rather easy to ignore for me, especially when you consider the price around 40 USD, I have managed to overlook pretty much everything else.
Another small issue is that some FLAC files won’t play, I think there’s a limit to the quality it can handle, but most of my FLACs have worked, I’d have to test which ones fail and why and report later.
The stock firmware is functional, it does the basics, play music, display albums, radio FM support, audiobook support, etc. I must admit I didn’t use it for long, I couldn’t even figure out how to create playlists on it.
It does have a few things that aren’t very well ironed out though, for example, the songs of an album are not sorted by track number, but by filename or songname, so you will have to to rename files and add the track number at the start, not an ideal solution.
Theme support is also rather limited, you can apply skins and replace assets, but positioning things or animations are out of the question. Of course, this is plenty for most people, including me, to be honest, but I still wanted to play around some more.
That’s where Rockbox comes into play, and I’ve already wrote a bit about it, in short, it works great, and does everything I need, although it has its own set of nitpicks. Also, it is not officially supported, but the community made its own fork and got it running just fine.
The installation method can be a bit of a pain, it’s nothing that bad. I’m rather surprised at the efforts made to improve the firmware and even adding a dual boot option to switch between OSes at will.
Although there are 240p themes originally created for iPod devices, and working just fine, it’s been cool to see many community members and creators coming up with new themes that look super crisp on the Y1’s 360p screen, along themes for the original OS, with plenty of options as well.
I’m still fiddling around with the settings available, and the Rockbox build doesn’t seem to come with plugins, games and other extras that officially supported devices have, but the basics are there and it’s awesome.
For the price, despite all the caveats, this can’t be beaten. If you want something close to the iPod experience, and you don’t care for high-fidelity audio. If you don’t care for streaming apps, or any kind of online functionality, then this device is for you.
After a whole month, I must say I’ve really enjoyed my commutes to and from work listening to music on these. I have no proof, but—other than a couple nights where I played some tracks to sleep from Nintendo Music—I can promise I’ve not listened to a single song on my phone ever since I made the switch to this device.
I really, really love interacting with it, and carrying it in public feels kinda cool. Even going back to wired earphones has been a vibe I didn’t really expect to miss so much, even if I have to deal with tangled cables every once in a while.
One thing I used to do on older phones with an input jack, was carrying it and flipping it around while holding it by the cable, basically playing with it as if it was a yo-yo or some chained weapon.
Anyway, all things considered, it may not be the best thing ever, but there’s something especial about it, and thanks to the efforts of the community efforts around it, it’s super fun to use and toy with, after a few headaches with the firmware installer.
I do wish they added some sort of online connectivity at some point in a future revision, the lack of scrobbling is probably the thing I dislike the most, but if you can get over that, go ahead and give this a try!
It became a thing with my Android phones, from 3rd party launchers, icon packs, widgets, or wallpapers, to the good old XPosed or Magisk modules, power apps, and custom ROMs. All that with the purpose of making it mine.
Modding my PSP also opened a different can of worms, I put custom themes and icon sets, changed the wallpaper accordingly, put some plugins to organize my games, quick launchers and whole custom GUIs too. Not to mention all the homebrew, emulators and backed up games I could run on it.
This obsession grew some more after I put Linux on my computer, I remember starting with Pop_OS. I figured out GNOME extensions, I got into GTK themes, terminal color schemes, and everything in between. I explored other distros like MX Linux, Void Linux or Fedora, which came with XFCE or KDE. I tweaked every setting to my liking.
Eventually I became aware of the world of window managers, where I learned to customize everything further more, I stuck with AwesomeWM for months, one of the all-timers with the most features, settings and scripting capabilities. At some point I switched to SpectrWM, more bare-bones, but easy to customize, I even shared my config at the time in case you care to check it out.
After a few jumps to other places, I finally landed on dwm.
Since then, my config went through a lot of patches and settings until it was perfect (for me), and it has remained virtually unchanged since then, just some keybinding or start program every once in a while.
However, I think something changed when I started to learn Inkscape. I was not just applying some icon pack to my phone, I was putting my own work on my phone.
That flipped the script and gave me a whole new way to make a device my own.
So, when I started to get into Linux-powered emulation devices such as my Miyoo Mini Plus, I couldn’t help but get obsessed with it. I put OnionOS on it, I created my own theme for it based on Arcticons, I created my own videogame art because I didn’t like the existing ones, among many other customizations.
I did the same thing with the Anbernic RG35XX SP! And that was a crazy ordeal as well since the theming is much deeper and powerful on muOS. I even had to update it and remake it couple of times because themes kept breaking after every update.
Now that I acquired yet another single-purpose device, the Innioasis Y1—a cheap music player device that happens to have Rockbox support—it was time yet again to make it mine, although I ended up going for a new approach this time.
I have zero idea of how Rockbox theming works, so I initially went with one of the themes available, thinking that’d be good enough.
However, I noticed the themes were simply upscaled to 360p (the resolution of the Innioasis Y1) from the original 240p versions (which is the resolution of most iPods that run Rockbox). So, when I noticed this issue, I decided to try and fix it, and it would be an interesting learning experience as well.
I figured out where all the assets are located, a set of folders filled with BMP image files. I remade most of them on Inkscape or GIMP, I reformatted them to a specific BMP version with ImageMagick. Not to mention messing around with converting font files to an appropiate format.
I ended up having to edit some theme files, so I also had to learn a little bit about how themes actually work, and now I have a pretty perfect theme based on AdwaitaPod. Same colors and shapes, just some icons remade in the Arcticons style.
All of this to say, I think I am getting an idea about how all of this works under the courtains, so I may end up creating, or at least heavily modifying, my own theme in the future. It seems rather inevitable at this point.
Gotta theme them all!
Rockbox is an alternative software that works on lots of music players, most commonly used with modded iPods. It fulfills a similar function to what KOReader does for Kobo, Kindle and other e-readers. It’s free, more powerful, more compatible, and more customizable.
This is not a tutorial—here’s a decent one from Reddit—just some thoughts and observations about the whole thing thus far. Yes I am aware the tutorial tag is there.
The community developed Innioasis Updater—a fork of the MTKclient for this specific device—which let’s you flash the official firmware, or Rockbox, or both at once!
One of the most interesting things to me when it comes to installing random programs like this is the barrier to entry. Specifically, how installations methods differ between operating systems.
I was reading some of the comments across a few reddit posts, from people who clearly come from Windows, saying things about drivers not working, or how some step went wrong or how themes don’t show up.
I must admit I chuckled a bit. The installation method for Linux is not officially supported, it basically consists in following the instructions from MTKclient’s repo: Install some dependencies, run a command or two, setup a python virtual environnment (or just run pip as is), then run python ./updater.py, and you’re golden, the updater interface will show up and the process from there is self-explanatory.
I sometimes like to think Linux is usable for most people, but it’s weird at moments like this, because it kind of represents how many basic things I take for granted that a normal computer user might not—even worse when people barely know how their phone works nowadays.
A newcomer would not understand what the venv command does (to be fair, I don’t know either, but I get the idea), or why they can’t find the .rockbox folder in their file manager.
In a way, Linux encourages you to learn how a computer system works. I now know what packages are, I can uninstall or install them with a simple command, they will go to a certain location and can be called in a script and be depended upon by other programs. I also know hidden folders are a thing, and that most file managers on Linux display them with a simple Ctrl + H or a checkbox in a right-click menu (or just an ls -a in the terminal of course).
I’d say it was worth learning and doing that. Even if it is more complex at first, it’s better than dealing with Next, Next, Next install wizards and drivers that will do who-knows-what on who-knows-where in my computer. Those easy installers and countless drivers can end up being a pain. Same goes for trying to remember where the File Manager settings are, a panel (which looks straight out of 1998 as well) with a bunch of tabs and checkboxes to go through, all just to show hidden folders or file extensions.
And yet, that second option is what most people do and deal with.
What is easier then?
Obviously I am biased towards Linux. I guess I just like to bring suffering to myself or something.
Back in college I remember installing stuff like LabVIEW, MATLAB or Code Composer, it was absolute torture, so much so I chose to dual-boot for many years because of some of those programs—although I got some working on Linux at some point.
However, while the install on Windows was fine enough, they were also super bloated. LabVIEW would ask me to install some stuff from National Instruments, driver after package after plug-in. And I could not uninstall any of it from the control panel because they had to be removed from a package manager that got installed too.
When I eventually figured out how to use LabVIEW from Linux—a couple distro-hops later or so—I was happy that at least every single thing I installed was inside the /opt folder, and the script was a simple uninstall.sh that was very pleasant to run once the semester was over.
I guess that at this point I just prefer to maybe have a harder time, while also understanding what is going on behind the curtains.
Back to Rockbox, the install went well, although I’ve not been too happy with the 240p version, it is recommended because it has a lot of themes, but it is too blurry or pixelated for my liking. Besides, many themes are not looking right for some reason, gotta learn some more I guess.
I think I’ll install the 360p version instead, less themes but at least they’re good ones, I want to try Adwaitapod, which seems to work fine. It looks like 82Mhz contributed to it back in the day? Cool stuff.
Anyway, installing stuff is more fun when you are actually able to learn and understand what’s going on and you can have a sense of control on everything. Wether you use Linux, Windows or Mac, you can still learn anyway. I’m only a bit annoyed at how much the younger generations are missing out in the current technological landscape.
Seriously, a lot of them don’t even know what adblocking is anymore, they are just accepting advertising as something normal, even as a feature, because “that way I don’t need to look up what to be interested about” or whatever.
I’m gonna end it here, because I can feel the rant incoming, but this is plenty enough for a day. The Innioasis Y1 is fun to thinker with! Next time I may end up doing some hardware mods to it for some reason. Whatever happens, it will.
It went well last time so, yeah! I’ll even actually come up with a title that lets me search for whatever I was talking about on the post this time…
Yesterday I took some time to update my uses page! I added some things like my music player and e-reader, as well as some apps, check the changelog at the bottom for a full list, I am not sure why I took so long to change some of the stuff there. Not even my current phone, the Nothing 3(a) was listed yet!
RL Dane suggested me to add my Fountain Pens to the page, but since I only have a couple of them, I don’t really feel like doing so. Besides, I am yet to create a page for my Casio watch collection, and that takes priority at this point in time.
I guess I could just add “Pen” and “Watch” there, list the model and leave it at that. Actually it may be already done by the time you read this post…
I’ve been updating and adding music to my Innioasis Y1 and it’s been quite a fun experience. I keep thinking about switching to Rockbox now, since I am literally a couple of clicks away from giving it a go, but yesterday I forgot the device at the office like an absolute fool, and today I’ll be busy, so the switch to Rockbox won’t happen until the weekend comes.
Another reason I am interested in trying Rockbox is that one of my albums refuses to be displayed properly, no metadata is shown, it’s just the ugly filename, but for some reason three of the songs are getting recognized and grouped properly. I spent a while trying to tag it a certain way, with Kid-3 and MusicBrainz Picard, and even used ffmpeg to re-encode the file on Linux, checked the output with file and metaflac, comparing to working tracks, etc. No idea what happened yet.
Want to know which album is it? The Chrono Trigger soundtrack, dude!
Still loving the device though, my experiment continues!
It’s super effective!
Jana already wrote a reply to my reply with some extra thoughts on the matter. I find myself in a similar situation. During my Mastodon break in August—I wonder how many realized that happened—I uninstalled Tusky and limited myself to using the browser to access Mastodon only if necessary, which should’ve been never to be frank.
Initially it was just logged out, to maybe see posts linked to me in some chat. In the end I ended up logged into my accounts from the web client, and even though I managed to do it more purposefully—since there are no notifications—I still knew I was just getting around it and missing the point.
I’m not sure I want to go all in on splitting everything a phone can do into different pieces of hardware or techniques, but I guess I am kind of already doing it since I got a music playing device, a retro handheld console and my kobo e-reader. Where’s the harm in getting a camera at this point? Hmm…
For now, I’m good.
]]>Escaping my phone
I've recently become disgusted by how much I use my phone. Probably has to do with the YouTube algorithm having decided to serve me a lot of these "switching to a dumb phone", "I went x days without my phone" type of videos. Though I hate to be trendy, it made me think...
I’ve seen many posts recently dealing with this theme lately, which tends to show up over and over again. I literally wrote about my phone usage earlier this year.
Thomas had a very interesting take, not blaming smartphones—since they are really good tool in the right hands—but the attention-seeking design behind apps fueled by greed and algorithms, and Ava says she doesn’t care about screentime at all, since she simply uses it for practical purposes—which just happen to require the screen to be on.
However, the conclusion I’ve reached is closest to Jana’s.
I am not addicted to doom-scrolling, I am not addicted to algorithms, I am not addicted to AI slop, I am not addicted to posting random stuff online—other than this blog, but not microblogging-style posts.
I simply enjoy chatting with people a lot, I guess.
Signal, XMPP, Discord and Tusky remain at the top for me, even Matrix shows up sometimes. Jana says:
Whether it’s family, friends, or people from the other side of the world, that I have sparked a conversation with purely online. These are conversations that make it possible to really get to know a person better and they are quintessentially what I love about the internet. So this, if anything, is what I want to have more of.
And well, that is pretty much it.
I hope you don’t analyze every single stat I share on this blog too much, but to give you an idea, the month I posted about how I use my phone too much (July 2025), I used Signal alone for almost 48 hours.
Obviously not every single chat I’ve had is the most thought-provoking thing ever, but it’s still something I get joy out of, there is real people on the other side of the screen, after all. I have reached out to many people in the past, and continue to try and do so today, and it has been a pretty fun and engaging experience.
The thing is, I can’t do what Jana does, I can’t just use my computer instead, because most of my phone usage happens at work! I already have a bunch of screens in front of me with work stuff—I simply keep on chatting alongside doing other tasks at hand.
Of course, talking with people and staying focused on real life is still a goal of mine, and I try to leave my phone aside during those moments. There’s a part of me that tells me I should focus more during work hours too—guess I feel a bit guilty—but honestly, work is not something I do out of love but necessity, and if I can get away with doing non-work stuff at work while still fulfilling all of my tasks and getting paid, I’m going to do it.
In the end, even if it’s not “productive” or whatever, I think I’ll just accept I’m the kind of person with 7 hours of screentime a day, and as long as I’m not missing out on the good parts of life (a.k.a. not work), then it’s all fine by me.
]]>Sometimes people don’t try shiny new things just because you care about some specific feature, or even because it’s actually fun at all. Sometimes you just want that feeling again. The first time you try a new pair of glasses and you see the world isn’t blurry anymore. The first time you turned on a brand new device and saw how smooth the screen was. The first time you created an account for that upcoming social media platform revolutionizing the way you interact with others.
That feeling of always being on the vanguard, using the latest and greatest.
I know for sure that I fall for this in some aspects, I always enjoy testing beta apps on my phone, I’ve started to pre-order games and merchandising more often, I’ll definitely buy that upcoming Lego Game Boy as soon as it shows up—I can only avoid consumerism for so long.
I even use Arch on my laptop, for crying out loud.
I end up obsessed with trying the one thing everyone keeps talking about, and realize after a while, that it’s not that different from what was before, that it doesn’t spark the same wonder that [insert other previous thing here] did the first time. The smell of the brand new book wore off, and it’s not coming back.
Writing this reminds me of Jack Baty’s thoughts about what else does he have to say after more than two decades blogging. And after I checked that post again, I realized he also wrote some similar thoughts on his 25th blogging anniversary, which was a sobering outlook on his blogging journey.
That post is more about writing and blogging, and my previous post referred to tools and software. But I guess this applies to everything in between.
I don’t think us humans have ever experienced so many new inventions in such a short time frame since we started wandering on this planet.
However, the same goes for the amount of rehashing of products, concepts and ideas that aren’t really very different from what was already there.
There’s nothing new under the sun.
If you haven’t checked Axxuy’s blog, many of his recent posts have been about typewriters and fountain pens. Going analog seems to be making a comeback in recent years, at least among some of the people and friends on my online circles. But I it’s something that has always been out there.
Something cool that I see from the people invested into these “old school” methods, is that they recognize it’s all about doing what works, seeing them as a tool and not as some revolutionary discovery, it’s just going back to basics and sharing how it works for them.
An equivalent to the “techbro” archetype doesn’t seem to be that common, although I guess there are those who just get into it to be part of some trend, or to belong. That’s not always bad though.
I like to think that good people just living life are the norm, that’s probably true even in more mainstream communities, but the bigger they get, the amount of people thinking they’re better and belittling others, grows accordingly. Niches seem to be more shielded from this issue, which is nice.
Of course, anything that can be sold will be, even those trying to look at the past can get targeted. Dumb phones worth 800 dollars and overpriced typewriter-style gadgets with subpar features. It’s a little much for me, but I still sympathize with the ideas.
Funny coincidence, today is my 4th month running Arch Linux on my computer, and after the first couple of weeks setting things up, I have been using it in pretty much the same way as I was using my previous Linux install. There have been some issues here and there, but nothing I’ve been unable to fix, and I think I’ll keep using my setup for many more years, until I get a new device or some outside force makes me.
Most of my dotfiles have barely changed, just correcting a directory paths in scripts, or changing some parameter because a program got updated. Changes made simply to keep things working as they are.
Yesterday I said that most significant changes I do, are when a program/tool/thing is going in a direction I dislike—but I must confess that’s not always a big deal for me anymore.
I went to Zen Browser for a while because of Mozilla’s behavior, I absolutely loved my time with it. But I returned to Firefox again, just because it still works well for me—and also Activity Watch didn’t work on Zen for some reason. I just don’t care anymore about Firefox’s management decisions, I’ll just keep using it, unless they replace the search bar with an AI chat prompt or something hedious like that. I still have Zen installed though and I check it sometimes, it seems to be going well from what I’ve seen recently. But it’s just a tool, not something I actively use. There goes another confession of mine.
Well, this post kind of went all over the place, it’s almost like the title is way too open-ended. I don’t know if I am referring to writing or software or the back and forth of trends. I guess I could have split it into separate articles, in a different reality.
In the end, maybe I’m just lazy, too lazy to switch from Jekyll, too lazy to try a different browser, too lazy to disturb how my current setup is working. I am very good at procrastination after all.
But I’m also good at switching things up when I feel like it, I still haven’t made my /changelog page but this month has seen quite a lot of improvements to this site’s structure, I decided to change my font family to something monospace, and I’ve even made more buttons, updated pages, and all of that.
I’m simply focusing on other things, on other changes, maybe it’s just my hobby cycle spinning around yet again.
Maybe the thrill keeps going, it’s just triggered by different things at this time.
]]>Honestly, more power to you, it is absolutely fine to be interested in trying new things, start something from scratch or turning everything upside down, just because you can.
Or, you know, maybe don’t?
I should mention this post was inspired by Ava who wrote a great article about just sticking with what you already have, so go give it a read! I think it helped me form some of the thoughts I share here.
As for me, well, I am always a work in progress, I guess. While stagnating forever is not ideal in many situations, there are some things where it’s perfectly fine to not try to fix what isn’t broken.
I’ve been only blogging for a little more than four years now, since I started in 2021. It’s not much compared to those who’ve been doing it for literal decades, but it’s not nothing either.
So far, I’ve managed to be happy with what I have. Jekyll to generate my site, Neovim to edit my files, and some shellscripts to automate stuff have been plenty for my needs.
Jekyll is one of the more traditional static site generators around, popularized because of its integration with GitHub pages and other hosting services, and because it’s simply really good at what it does.
It’s not the only option of course, and people adopt and switch around from one place to another. There are other SSGs like Hugo, Eleventy, Pelican, or Zola, and even CMS software like Kirby. There are also blogging platforms that take away the hosting and maintenance and let you just write, such as Bearblog, Pika or Pagecord, for example.
Despite everything, I’m still really satisfied with what Jekyll offers me. It has been a gratifying journey where I’ve created plenty of bash scripts, templates, key bindings, liquid snippets and even plugins to organize stuff exactly how I want it to. And once it was all setup, my blogging workflow has remained virtually unchanged, only with some small additions here and there.
Don’t get me wrong, there have been some hiccups here and there, when it comes to installing Ruby and running Jekyll locally, and when dealing with the Jekyll or Ruby version not matching the one set in the hosting service I use—it was usually my fault to be honest.
In the end, it’s still all leading to the same result. A static website built by uploading files to a GitHub repository.
If anything, some of my automation scripts are less used nowadays, because I have been editing my posts from my phone instead of my laptop, so all my fancy flourishes get skipped, but hey, the post gets published and that’s good enough for me.
I’ve felt the urge to switch things up from time to time, but if I ever feel that boredom creeping in, I am more than satisfied by creating a new website theme, cleaning up my existing stylesheet, or adding new pages. I think the moment I want to do something that cannot be achieved with Jekyll’s feature-set or a bash script, will be when I finally try something else, but that bar has not been reached so far, to be honest.
So, yeah, I think that the fun for me is in a couple things:
Just writing! - When everything is fine and good, I can just dedicate myself to writing, it doesn’t matter if it’s in my phone, or my own laptop with my fancy setup, or some other computer device, as long as I just write Markdown I don’t really care that much. Just publish the post to my website and trust I didn’t mess up a link or something. I can always fix it later anyway.
Working within limitations. - I have managed to achieve everything I’ve wanted thus far with my website. And sure there are things I haven’t bothered to try yet, like a search bar or a guestbook page. But I know there are ways to get them, I just need to take the time to set everything up, or not! It is my website after all.
In my experience, that’s what everything boils down to. Everyone sets their own bar wherever they want. Some find it easy to move to something else as soon as things get boring, or too difficult. Others just want to try new things, like how a Linux user keeps distro-hopping for years only to end up on Debian (or maybe Arch) in the end. And others, are up to the challenge, and are willing to stick with their choice and get familiar with it.
Obviously, there are some legitimate reasons to change platforms. Right now I’m pretty annoyed by the fact that my site is still primarily hosted on GitHub. I know of Codeberg and some other alternatives, but I haven’t gotten around to making the change, and I am not sure if Vercel, my current hosting provider even supports building my site from something other than GitHub.
In the end, I’ve been happy with my setup for many years, for the most part, and I barely have to think about it nowadays, I’m just focusing on creating new pages and redesigning existing stuff, but I have no urge to do any drastic changes. I actually kind of dread it, given the amount of templates/plugins/features that for better or worse lock me down to Jekyll, but at the same time, if it’s not an issue, I don’t need to worry about it!
We’ll see how everything goes.
]]>I’ve already written plenty of posts about it and how significant it is for me, how a friend just gifted me his PSP on my 12th birthday and changed my life forever, and similar stories.
However, I knew about the PSP long before I got one, since a couple of friends or family members had them, giving me a chance to experience glimpses of its greatness. In this post, I decided to write down some of them, not just for your pleasure, but for my future self as well.
I think the oldest memory I can recall about the PSP would be from one of my cousins. He is much older than me, and he had a PSP. It was either a 2000 or a 3000, I clearly remember he put it on one of those clear plastic cases, making the device a little harder to hold for my kid hands, that didn’t stop me though.
I remember he let me borrow it sometimes, and I would play some sort of Crash game—I think it was Crash: Mind over Mutant—having some fun with the platforming and not much else. I really have a hard time remembering this one, I don’t think it was a very good game, but kid me didn’t mind that much, I never bothered to revisit it, either way.
However, the other game my cousin had—or the other game he let me play—was, and still is, a gem of the PSP. It was Motorstorm: Arctic’s Edge. An absolutely exhilarating racing game that featured a huge variety of vehicles, incredible graphics, and a sense of velocity that I really, really liked.
I remember not even playing to win, I would just try to go as fast as possible and let myself jump from huge ramps, because the slow-motion and camera angle shifted to be more cinematic and I thought it was just super cool when I pulled off stunts, or to crash and get thrown around, even out of bounds, when playing as a biker.
All the vehicles looked super cool, like something out of Mad Max—I hadn’t watched Mad Max at that age—the soundtrack during races was rock and alternative music. It just was full of style and rule of cool. I played that game for hours during that vacation visiting family. I remember completing a bunch of tracks, and unlocking quite a few vehicles during that short week.
And then it was time to go back home and be bored again… I got over it soon enough, at least, and now I can play Arctic’s Edge on my PSP whenever I want! Although I prefer Ridge Racer nowadays.
I have a glimpse of a memory, where a friend of mine— or maybe a cousin—was playing one of the FIFA games on the PSP—I think it was FIFA 06 or 07. I did like soccer videogames back then, but I was never a huge fan, and I never got good at any of them, to be honest.
Either way, I didn’t get to play this time, I could only watch him run around and score goals, you know, what FIFA is known for.
What is cool about this, is that he connected the PSP to the TV, and instead of being bunched together around a tiny screen, we got to see the match in glorious CRT scanlined perfection. I can’t recall much about this event, where I was, or who I was with, but seeing the PSP be capable of external display output was just wild to me.
There’s this other time where my family and I got invited by some friends to have dinner. Their house was just so cool to me, one of those every kid wishes to live in—and adult gamers too, to be honest—The kids there, who were maybe 2 or 3 years older than me, had a Wii! I had plenty of fun playing Mario Kart Wii, I really liked that one track with a section where you jump around in mushrooms. It’s still around on MK8 Deluxe!
But most importantly, they had not one, but two PSPs. Because of that, I was able to experience local multiplayer games, portably!
This is something that was possible already on Nintendo handhelds since the original Game Boy, the Advance and of course, the DS, which was all the rage at the time. But I hadn’t been anywhere where two of those would connect to play.
What multiplayer title did I play? Killzone Liberation.
What even is that? would be a fair question. First, I didn’t know about Monster Hunter yet, so I had no idea of what I was missing out on the multiplayer department. Second, Killzone Liberation is actually rather good! The original title for PS2 was an FPS, however—unlike most titles that tried and failed to adapt FPS controls to a handheld without dual sticks—Liberation went for an isometric top-down perspective, where walking and aiming is all done by the same stick, and the rest of the controls are designed around it, making the gameplay actually kind of great, once you get used to it.
We played some multiplayer on both PSPs and it was super fun. I think I never got to win a round, but throwing around grenades above walls and covers, and trying to hide from danger was fun enough to me. Simply seeing the soldiers moving around and thinking “the other kid is controlling it from his PSP” was kind of mind-blowing to me.
I don’t know if I played something else that day, but I clearly remember this being my first local multiplayer handheld experience, and it was great.
Before getting the PSP gifted to me, that friend let me play it from time to time, or sometimes I just watched him doing so. He didn’t own that many physical games, and with a Memory Stick of just 4 GB of storage, he didn’t really have many ISOs downloaded either.
However, he had Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories, one of those cool games that were just absolutely mind-blowing to me. Something that looked and played like GTA: San Andreas—a game that was everywhere on arcade machines with Xbox controllers attached to them1. Something like that running on a tiny little handheld like the PSP and being actually fun, featuring voice acting, good animation and a lot of mayhem and destruction thanks to cheat codes. It’s amazing that it ran at all.
And then there was Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. I think this was probably the game that solidified my love for Star Wars as a franchise. It was simply fantastic and bombastic and full of very cool moments, I only saw glimpses of it but I was obsessed. Years later, when the PSP was finally mine, I played it again and fell for it completely, I even read the novelization because it was just such a cool piece of lore for me—later ruined by Disney a year or so later but anyway. To this day, it’s the only Star Wars novel I’ve read and I wouldn’t have done so without the PSP game.
Well, that was another nice trip down memory lane! I guess I’ve been way too inspired by Marisabel’s Blaugust theme of Nostalgia. Can’t be helped. 🤷♂️
In any case, the PSP is as great a handheld today as it was in 2012, so if you have one laying around somewhere, make sure to give it a go! You can do a lot of stuff with it still. Like, play music, emulate games from the GBA and SNES and of course backups of your own games. Just mod it already, it only takes like two minutes…
Arcade gaming places weren’t common in Mexico—at least by the time I was born—but most tienditas de la esquina (small local family-owned stores present in every neighborhood) tend to have these sort of Xbox/Xbox360 machines in an arcade-like cabinet, filled with cracked games and stuff. Simply awesome for any kid with a few pesos to spare. ↩
I am something of a big cousin to them, and noticed they were pretty glued to their phones. This is something I see more and more often, and I’m not the only one. Out of nowhere, I decided to ask them how much they used their phone per day.
So, we go to the Digital Wellbeing section in the settings, and, yeah…
Some of them had above three hours of Instagram, at least. None of them are even 15 yet! When I think about the time they spend at school or sleeping, three hours is a lot of their remaining free time, going to waste. And that’s just Instagram, some have TikTok too. Wattpad also showed up, but I guess that at least requires reading comprehension, so I wasn’t too worried about it.
I admit, I did a bit of a scene about it, and recommended them to at least set up time limits, for their own good. But what else can I do? The problems lie beyond all of that. I just feel like an old man yelling at clouds, and no arguments actually settle in their minds, at least not yet.
At least during the talking and dinner, we all stayed away from touching our phones, so that’s pretty alright, compared to some cases I’ve read about in blogposts from teachers and other people who work with kids.
And of course, I have my own set of problems, y’all can see my phone usage every month. Here’s a sneak peek of some apps I used last week:
Obviously, it’s not all a waste, it’s not just mindless scrolling, Tubular in particular is mostly background noise when doing other things. But, I am still seeking something! It may not be big social media, it may not be quick domapine hits and algorithmic feeds. But it’s definitely a bit of a problem.
I mentioned trying SmallWebJuly on my weeknotes, and this was definitely of a wake up call to actually commit to this even more. I do follow a lot of the Small Web, just not on my phone. Most of my RSS feed reading is done on my computer, or at my work computer, since I like to read some blog posts during dead times.
Regardless, I have disabled all notifications on Tusky (my Mastodon client) now, and I will only open the app when I feel like it. Same goes for Discord. I should dedicate that time to reading on my Kobo as well! Since I can keep track of that!
I started writing this yesterday, and as of today, I’ve definitely felt the urge to check my phone again multiple times, and sometimes I did. At least it’s not because of notifications though, so I’ll call that a win.
Well, enough rambling for today I guess. How are you guys doing when it comes to phone usage?
In other news, I’ve somehow managed to write 99 blogposts already, and tomorrow I might be done with #100DaysToOffload for the fourth time. Kind of great!
]]>Ever since then, I have had the itch to get some more new furniture and keep making my room look a little bit more mine.
Recently, my parents went to a pretty big city in my state, and during their visit, they went into an IKEA store. I have heard of IKEA in the past, but I hadn’t really considered them. But since my parents were there already, I asked them to look for something for me!
They didn’t dissapoint.
They sent me some píctures, and I chose a couple of things.
A cabinet, to store some things I had on some old boxes, and a new desk, for my computer!
My old desk, was one of the old style ones from the 2000s or so, with a slide-out section for the keyboard and a shelf above the monitor, as well as sections under it for the machine itself and whatever other things you may want to place there. My parents got it out of nowhere during my early years at university, when I only had an old desktop computer. It worked fine, if a bit wobbly, since the whole thing was just plywood. One of the worst mistakes done to it, was placing a printer on the top shelf, which weighed quite a lot. In the end, it was even more wobbly, and I ended up removing the top shelf section and using it like that, more stable as long as you didn’t push it from the sides.
Enough backstory. I bought those two things from IKEA, first we assembled the cabinet, which took the most time, and replaced a modular metal wire storage rack—which I passed down to my sister. The next day we assembled the desk, pretty easy and painless to me.
I won’t mention the cabinet much, it is what it is—an IKEA BRIMNES cabinet. Here’s a picture of it though, although it’s a bit of a mess inside, like all cabinets are.
The desk is also just a desk, although it is still the space I will use the most from now on. As it houses my computer, my gateway to the internet, the place where I’ll write, read and interface with the world from the comfort of my bedroom.
The dimensions are 100x45 cm, slightly less usable suface, because of the rails on the sides, but still plenty for me. I would have liked a bit more depth, but it’s good enough.
The shelf under it is a bit meh, it’s only 7cm high, and what looks like a “drawer” in the photo, is actually just a sliding door. That means that things stored all they way in are hard to reach. I put some card games and notebooks, and my handhelds when I’m not using them too. Not much space for anything else.
The space on top I decorated with a mousepad, a pencil holder, a lamp for aesthetics and some other peripherals.
To make space for the keyboard, I used the rail on the back to raise my laptop. I initially bought a stand for it but I think this works better, since it can get even further to the back, which allows more space for my palms to rest.
I had heard some things about IKEA, both good and bad, but in my experience both the desk and the cabinet were quite easy to build with the help of my sister. She’s really into LEGOs so it was like the adult version of that. I had a nice time as well, nothing that complicated happened, but I wonder how we would fare building something bigger later on. For now, this is good enough.
I wasn’t really planning on buying a new keyboard, I have never been interested on mechanical keyboards before, and while my desk is much bigger than my previous one, I didn’t really think I had the space for it anyway.
However, I made the mistake of just looking it up, and I saw one for very cheap, and with colors I really liked, so I had no choice but to cave in and get it anyway.
The Machenike K500 is a budget keyboard, plastic body and all. Honestly, I couldn’t care less. I have zero experience in this little world and I don’t know if I really want to get into it any further.
Regardless, it just arrived a few hours ago as of the writing of this piece, and this is the first chunk of text written on it.
They keyboard feels nice to me, I don’t know about lube, or sensitivity, or if the sound it makes is super satisfying. It has a numpad and full arrow keys, and that’s really all I needed. The only key I really miss right now is the Delete key, but I will survive.
The keyboard is also “hot swap” capable, it comes with some Cherry MX Red clones and RGB too. I set it up so only the keys I press light up in white, nothing too fancy. It has some software to setup profiles or customize things further, but it’s proprietary and I don’t really care much.
The layout I got is the standard Latin Spanish one, with an ñ and some different key placements, which are the same as my laptop’s, so I’m used to it. The font is more standard than what I saw on reviews with the US layout, with which was a bit too gamer for my taste. My first impressions are quite positive, I am satisfied with my purchase so far.
Getting to really customize my space how I want is something that I couldn’t really afford when I was a student, it’s one of those nice adult things I get to do with my own money and it’s honestly kind of awesome.
The keyboard I got feels good so far, I’ve never really had issues with thin laptop keyabords, I actually kind of liked them—I admit that I barely used other keyboards but the cheap ones at school. I am liking the feel it has while typing all of this. I hope I don’t get the itch to really get into mechanical keyboards, it’s too expensive, and scary—send help.
In the end, I am really happy with how everything turned out! From assemtly to decorating everything, I had a nice time.
This is day 71 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>Retro Tech Confession
I know many wonderful people who love retro tech and I love to watch those people be passionate about it. However, I discovered recently it is just not for me.
This was an interesting post to discover! It was the first one I found on my FreshRSS instance once I got home from work. In short, Dom talks about his experience not having fun while setting up an old laptop.
Honestly, I can relate! Although in a bit of a different way. I don’t really care that much about old computers, their speed or features, I already had a Windows XP desktop with 512MB of RAM in 2014 for some reason. I don’t particularly want to go even more backwards when that was already a pretty mediocre experience.
I definitely respect just enjoying the idea or the aesthetics of something, without necessarily wanting to get even deeper into the rabbit hole, or other aspects of the hobby. Like going from liking Warhammer 40K books, to buying figurines, or from collecting music vinyls to getting into high quality music players and audio equipment.
I think it is perfectly fine to stay in the surface, avoid going deeper, and enjoy what you do, because even if you don’t go down, you can still go sideways!
Dom mentioned retro-gaming briefly, for example. Readers know I am a complete fanboy of retro handhelds and with devices like the Anbernic RG35XX SP and stuff like its even more retro looking younger brother, the RG34XX, I think that’s a lot of retro for the money, and of course, this is not ancient hardware that takes a minute to boot, it is light, quick to boot, and tiny.
You can play around with it, games all the way up to the PSP and Dreamcast, Ports of light PC games with stuff like PortMaster, install custom firmware for it, run a Linux desktop on it or plenty of other stuff, and it will look as retro as it gets!
YES! This is secretly yet another post of mine trying ot coerce my readers into buying a retro gaming console, just do it already! DO IT.
Ok, sorry for that. Trying to go into a more serious tone again.
Going sideways, right. There is a lot of surface area, a lot of “beginner” stuff that you can do and be happy with, avoiding hiccups and feeling that you “don’t belong.”
It’s not even about things being “for beginners” or that you’re not a “true enthusiast” until you do X or Y, you just got to pick your battles and choose what you really want to get invested in.
Like, I have never even touched a sheet of double-sided tissue foil origami paper in my life, and I’ve enjoyed doing origami for half the time I’ve been alive already! and look at me! perfectly fine and dandy.
I pretty much already covered this topic about how being a “fake fan” isn’t really a thing, so feel free to check that post as well!
Just enjoy what you want to enjoy I guess, you can like retro tech without actually wanting to use it, or set it up, or buy it, if you are into it just because of the looks, so be it!
This is day 55 of #100DaysToOffload
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