Single-responsability

I always had a special interest for games with low-poly graphics, and retro aesthetics in general. My Ghostty terminal has a sutil crt shader applied to it, that certainly doesnt make my code run any better but it sure does looks cute as hell when im writing it. I feel like I'm not old enough to feel nostalgic about these things, I never actually had stuff like a music player, or a Nintendo 3DS, but I really like how they look. I also think its really nice that each one of them only does one thing, sometimes less is more.

Whenever I have to take a bus I need to use noise-canceling headphones to avoid autistic burnout; the sounds outside give me really bad headache. My playlists help me get distracted while waiting, but that usually bites a chunk of my battery-life and bandwith. Also, what If I didn't want to bring my phone with at all? The thought of getting an actual music player sounded really fun! No advertisements, no internet connection, no monthly subscription and no big tech scraping your data for LLM training. I dont want to pay for everything.

Music Player: Snowsky Echo Mini

After some research, I found a really cute one on aliexpress called Snowsky Echo Mini, its design reminds of a portable cassete player. The device itself is really cute and high-quality for the price. It comes with bluetooth support, 3.5+4.4mm outputs, USB-C plug and a microSD card expansion, the buttons feel clicky and nice to press. Now I just need the music files.

Spotify has a huge catalog of music, but it's not the only option. I remember using a cli tool to arquive some clips for my youtube videos, luckly it can also extract audio from them. I dont understand much about audio formats. Apparently, MP3 files have a high compatibility but the format is old and doesn't sound that good, FLAC sounds really nice but requires too much space. M4A seemed like a good middle-ground between sound quality and disk space, while also having good support for embedded metadata. I need it in order to organize my new library.

yt-dlp -t sleep \
    -x --audio-format m4a --audio-quality 0 \
    -o "%(album)s/%(track_number,playlist_index)s %(title)s.%(ext)s" \
    $argv[1]

I still needed to add the tags for artist name and album title, for that I used the autotagger feature from MusicBrainz Picard. Just pick an album from their database (MusicBrainZ), drag and drop the files and it will automatically embbed the metadata and album cover, dont forget to save. After inserting the SD card back into the device I could finally listen to EPIC: The Musical on my way to college again!

E-Reader: XTEink X4

I tried bringing a copy of Jurassic Park in my backpack for a few weeks, unfortunately it ended up making my back pain worse. Also, since when did books become that expensive1? As much as I love physical books I dont have the money nor the strength on my back to carry them around. But I do have a spare MicroSD card and access to the internet!

I bought an eReader I called XTEink X4, this thing is smaller than my phone, I bet it could even fit inside my wallet if I tried. The screen uses that cool e-ink thing that Kindles have, so battery life wont be a problem. I flashed my spare SD card with a custom firmware called Crosspoint, it has a lot of quality-of-life changes, including a EPUB (e-book file format) optimizer. The battery percentage takes ages to drop, I can now read as much as I want.

"Anti-brainrot"

I always had the possibility of doing al of that on my phone, but there's always a little gremlin on my brain telling me to open social media or maybe checking if there's any important notifications; one missclick I'll probably forget what I was supposed to be doing.

So far the experience has been great, just dont go too far. Im doing this because I want to spend less time on my phone and less money on subscriptions. Its really easy to just buy a ton of "anti-brainrot" devices that promise to improve your live and save you from doomscrolling.

Please be intentional with the media you consume and the money you spend. Take care.