I did it for a few months and really enjoyed it. At the end of 3 months, I realized I could achieve nearly the same thing by turning off all notifications except messages and calls and uninstalling all social media. I realized… if I have the willpower to use a dumbphone I have the willpower to keep the distraction off my smartphone. Phone usage is now 100% intentional with the right setup.

I did it for 3 months. I really enjoyed my time doing it and learned a lot about my usage. It was a cheap $50 experiment. After I went back to my smartphone, I uninstalled ALL social media apps. Turned off ALL notifications but left calls and messages as an exception. My smartphone is now essentially a feature phone. It’s not 100% the same since the big screen does lure you in to use it but my usage is still way down and because I don’t have any social media there’s no reason for me to be on my phone around other people. I wholeheartedly recommend trying it for those curious.

Just the type of mod I want!

Dad programming jokes are the finest there is.

It’s so nice to feel like tech isn’t running your life anymore. If I’m in an app doing something, it’s because I made the choice to do it. I still gotta work on that doom scrolling tho, YouTube being the biggest culprit. I think I might try setting some time limits.

Everyone should try disabling ALL notifications and then working their way up to understand which alerts are worth getting interrupted for. Everything you do on your phone ends up becoming more intentional and your battery life goes up too because your screen isn’t constantly getting turned on from the barrage of notifications. To date, I only have 1 notification turned on and it’s when my significant other messages me.

I think it’s done like that on purpose so that their Canes sauce does a lot of the heavy lifting.

There’s this fast food fried chicken chain called Raising Canes, used to serve massive strips. Now the price is 50% more expensive and 50% less chicken. They’re extremely tiny, never going back again… yet all the zombies who love that place are relentlessly spending their money there anyway.

Edit: grammar

Can this work with the “off the shelf” mesh routers.

Akira x Barbie, very cool.

Please tell me ya’ll actually talk to your ducks? Just me? Alright…

Yeah but can it host PiHole?

We have so much computing power at home and the chances you have good reliable Internet at home are better than before. I revived 5 year old PCs and it’s way too much computing power for my self host needs. I’d have to pay $200+ a month for the same compute power in the cloud. Even a Raspberry Pi with 8GB is capable of running quite a bit for fractions of a penny in electricity.

There’s so many services where I’m like, wow what am I even paying for? Email is one where I know exactly what I’m paying for.

Sync is $20 to remove ads no? Where is it $100?

Update: nevermind I see it here for sync ultra

This one triggers the entire spectrum of human emotion.

Does it support syncing photos from your phone? That’s the only thing I need to get off Google Photos, I love how seamless it is.

I didn’t realize how broken SearX was until I switched to SearXNG.

You can secure your tunnels using the Access menu and then adding an application. It should be somewhat straight-forward but you’re basically looking to create an access policy and then adding the rules you want. For example a simple one is to add an allow rule for certain emails. When you enter your email an access code will be sent to you before you can access the application resource. That’s just one of many ways to secure it using their application config and access policies.

If you’re comfortable with using Cloudflare, you can use their zero trust tunneling and setup an application layer that adds auth to those services. I have mine protected by my GitHub login.