I have three Kindles. One of them is a very old Kindle Fire 8 that I’d largely forgotten about. I charged it up today and discovered it still had an active subscription to THE WIRE magazine on it. This came as a surprise. I’ve been getting sloppy. I’ve stripped a few of the remaining apps off the device and am turning it into another dedicated reader rather than a multimedia tablet, and disabling any ability it might have to reach the web.
The other two are Kindle Paperwhites. One is so old that I have to charge the battery every couple of weeks, I have to reboot it once a month to clear the lag, and it can barely even reach the Kindle store. It lives in the bedroom, and I read from it before sleep every night. The other one is in the living room, and it hasn’t been picked up enough.
The battery is dying on my iPhone 8 and opening Chrome on it zaps 20% of its charge within a few minutes. The next time the phone company call me up to offer me a subsidised replacement, I’m probably going to have to take them up on it.
I have an old iPad 2 on a stand in the office that plays podcasts and is capable of literally nothing else.
(Correction: I discovered today that the old Panic Status Board app still sort of works!)
I only filled two Moleskine notebooks last year because I was composing on to the screen a lot and synthesising multiple documents to get the outcomes I needed.
Usually, the space between Xmas and New Year is the time I take to think about the coming year’s practise. I didn’t get that space this year because of family medical challenges. But right now I’m in the zone on DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT between us having cast all the roles and the point where all the paperwork gets done and we lock our recording dates. So I’m taking this time to think about the rest of the year. (January 22, actually, and I’ve also written and scheduled many of the posts appearing here this week.) I want to go deeper into what you might call Attenuated Digital.
My only active online presences are this place and my free weekly newsletter. I fully intend to keep it that way. No social media. no boards, no nothing. I want to read more and strictly control what comes in, and make the most of what I have.
I’m big into recycling stuff to use in the kitchen and garden. Recycling requires you be aware of what you already have and be aware of what’s coming into the house. You can’t just slip up and say “well, whoops, I haven’t read THE WIRE in two years but it turns out I had a subscription that wasn’t showing up anywhere else.” I’m interested in limited practical use cases for devices that turn down their temptation and heat – for example, I was fascinated when people turned old Kindles into glanceable information radiators. I’m wondering if, when my iPhone gets retired, I couldn’t convince it to be an always-on display showing the Breaking News app and clipping it to the side of my office monitor. (I do still have a bit of a news habit, that I’m slowly training myself back out of, but the idea of a headline dripfeed that bypasses social media has a pleasant sound.)
This year: recycling, going further “offline,” gardening inside and outdoors.
Jotter posts! For not fully baked writing and trying to get my thinking out in front of me so I can see it properly.
Previously: Going Analogue, Returning To Digital
