Single-purpose devices

I always had a special interest for retro-looking technology. 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. I feel like I'm not old enough to feel nostalgic for this kind of stuff, I never actually had a walkman, or a gameboy, but I really like their simplicity. Sometimes having too many options can be overwelming, specially if you are a neurodivergent.

I like how each one of them only does one thing: I bring my retro handheld when I want to play old videogames, my mp3 player when I want to listen to my favorite albums, and I bring my eReader when I want to spend some time with my books. It's not like I actually need any of these, but I like collecting them as a hobby.

No advertisements, no internet connection requirement, no monthly subscription, no big tech scraping your data for LLM training. You really feel like these products are yours, this is something that feel like it's missing from modern tech.

Snowsky Echo Mini

It has been a while since I decided to stop using Spotify, their CEO Daniel EK recently made a €600 million investment in AI for military usage, there's no f*cking way that Im giving them any of my money. But I still needed a way to listen to my favorite artists, I thought getting an actual music player could be a good idea. After some research I found a really cute one called Snowsky Echo Mini, its design reminds of a portable cassete player. The device itself is really nice! It comes with bluetooth connection, 3.5+4.4mm outputs, USB-C support and a microSD card expansion. It also has a screen to display embedded album covers.

Spotify has a huge catalog of music, but it doesn't have everything. I remember using a cli tool to download stuff when I needed short clips for my youtube videos, luckly it can also extract audios too. I dont have that much space on my SD card and I dont understand much about audio formats. Apparently MP3 files have a high compatibility but the format is old and crunchy, FLAC sound good but weight too much. M4A seemed like a good middle-ground between sound quality and disk space, while also having pretty good support for metadata.

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, drag and drop the files and it will automatically embed the metadata and album cover (so cool). After inserting the SD card back into the device I could finally listen to EPIC: The Musical on my way to college again!

XTEink X4

This year I also decided to start reading more, books are food for your brain, and there's a lot of cool stories that I never got to know. I tried bringing a copy of Jurassic Park in my backpack for a few weeks, but unfortunately it ended up making my back pain worse. As much as I love physical books I dont have the money nor the strength to carry them around. But I do have a spare MicroSD card.

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 optimizer. Transfering the books was actually quite easy, the new firmware has a hotspot mode for loading files. So far the experience has been great and I'm already 5 chapters into Project Hailmary.

I always had the possibility of reading books on my phone, the problem was that I never felt like I was actually imersed in the story, there's always a imaginary goblin on my shoulder telling me to open Tiktok or maybe checking if there's any notifications, one missclick I'll probably forget what I was supposed to be doing.

When going out I usually just bring my MP3 player. Since I'm already wearing noise-canceling headphones then I might as well listen to some tunes. I feel like social media really f*cked up my mental health over the last years, but I'ts never too late to start taking care of yourself.