Series: Do One Thing Page 1 of 3

I recently made a gamble on a little handheld wifi radio, the Ocean Digital WR-26F, which you can see in this video below.

I have always had a soft-spot for little hand-held radios of this basic form factor. I have an old non-wifi Grundig one in a box somewhere I have yet to locate that I used to carry around with me and scan frequencies wherever I was.

I should preface this by admitting that getting into wifi radio is totally an “old guy hobby,” but I accept that, given that my quaranteenth birthday just passed.

Anyway, I guess I never understood before actually trying it though the gap filled somehow by having this little physical wifi radio device, instead of listening to internet radio stations via other devices, like a cell phone (I don’t have one), or on desktop (I’ve done it in the past and it’s not the best experience), and on a Sonos (which I’ve done a lot of and don’t like that much).

I ran some experiential sound tests using a brand new Sonos Move 2 that I was looking to add to my system with an old Play:1. I compared Spotify, Apple Music with lossless activated, and Tidal.

Somehow this little device just sounds “better.” I sent the Sonos back.

There are many weird UX things about this Ocean Digital handheld unit, but overall I’m loving it because it is so focused and limited in its functionality. If you look at it, you wouldn’t necessarily be mistaken in saying that it looks like a “router with a speaker” on it. Which is, in effect, pretty much what it is.

Once you set it up with your Wifi network’s password, you’re off to the races wherever you have coverage. Which for me is both inside the house and pretty far outside the house. I can, for example, stick it inside my pocket and walk my dog provided we don’t go too far.

What I’ve re-discovered in it is some of this old wonder I used to have (nostalgia, to be sure) when I was younger, exploring radio frequencies from around the world. This box also sounds like a “radio,” without too much of (to my ears) that overly tinny digital quality of compression you seem to get when you hear internet radio broadcasts on “better” quality speakers. To be clear, something about the goodness of this little handheld wifi radio is that the speaker is sort of shitty? I would critique in a synaesthesia kind of way, that the overall sound feel is a little too “blue” to my tastes (I like a little warmer sound of FM and crackle and pop of AM), but I am pretty complainy about sound quality, and I just overall like it. It sounds fun by itself, and it sounds decent in headphones, and when you plug it out to a larger audio system as an input, it sounds even better quality.

I wouldn’t say all available stations are equal in terms of their overall sound quality (but that’s an issue of internet radio in general), but I would say that the limitations of the device are what make it so perfectly functional despite its areas for improvement.

Anyway, I’ve been using this device lately as a replacement for time spent (maybe purposelessly at times, admittedly) surfing the internet. Now I can surf the internet with my ears in a darkened room. It brings back the magic feeling of radio, but also the magic promise of the internet, as a means to connect to the things you love, that amaze or move you, instead of this vehicle to have an endless stream of products and opinions foisted on you for purchase or adoption.

I can listen with my eyes closed, floating in a sort of weightless sea of listening, scanning, hearing, finding voices, sounds, snippets, waves, vibrations. They move you through your ears in ways waves text and image transmitted via screen to your eyeholes does not. It feels more direct, this listening, more authentic. I like simply this mode of only listening, where in that sea and that space, I don’t need my voice, my reactions, my emojis to be sent back to the system. I exist in a moment of listening more purely in music, and sound for its own sake, the shape of things – more purely than I do when I open up Spotify and have to hunt and search with my eyes through countless menus and options and texts that I have to cipher out, but which always no matter what I do or what I choose or how much of something I listen to, the algorithm turns always back into endless recommendations for things its already forced me to listen to for death, for years.

Fuck the algorithm. I finally free free of it. Music is in the heart as an organ. The algorithm is whether I tune in or tune away, how loud the volume is, how charged the battery is. Who is listening, how they’re feeling, the mood of the moment.

Spotify – and it’s not only them, its the rest – always wants to manufacture a moment it perhaps as an algorithm meaningfully believes favors my likes and interest and past behavior patterns. But it doesn’t understand that importance of space, of spice, of serendipity, of scanning, of searching, of looking and listening with your eyes closed in the dark. Of finding something late at night from a far away place and liking it in an in-the-moment interaction completely free of the Artificial Hypespace(tm) features of always-present-always-watching social media rules of interaction and validation. Instead, it’s like the thing goes in through the ears, right to the heart. You like it or hate it. You tolerate it or move on, going back to other places and pastures you know.

I like radio. I always have. I have a now probably expired Technician Class amateur radio license in the US, and an I think active for life one in Canada at whatever they call the general level. I’ve never succeeded really at transmitting. I got on a local net one time via a copper J-pole that I built off instructions from YouTube, but that was the extent of my success. I think one time I was at least able to hear via a further away spot a repeater and my friend speaking via handheld Baofeng once. They couldn’t hear me over there though, and I haven’t messed around much with TX since then.

This wifi radio take all the complexity out of all that though, and just brings me direct to the center of the magic of radio, married to much of the best of the internet as well, with all the fluff and crappiness of social media more or less stripped away (though you can find some crappy web radio stations if that’s what you’re into; tangent – for some reason, idk why exactly, I find all the Alex Jones Infowars all the more offensive when I hear it in the wild landscape of web radio (it showed up in a Regional – Popular menu here).

The experience has me grasping for whether there are other technological ways, devices, whatever, that could sort of “tame the beast” of the internet of today, and give you the best/benefits of it, while simultaneously just sort of ignoring or actively excluding the now actively malefic influence of social media and the advertising industrial complex. I like the idea of tools where the kinds of interactions you don’t want to have online are simply just not possible, and you never have to worry about them. You can control and redirect your attention in better/happier/fitter/more/productive ways of your choosing, rather than a (societal) algorithm choosing them for you.

It’s a complex subject. I have highly conflicted feelings about technology and its impacts on human lived experience. On the one hand, I am a conscientious objector and life-long refuser of smart phone technology (I have a 2012 emergencies only flip phone in my car). On the other hand, I’ve self-published 120 AI-assisted books. So I’m probably at a pretty weird place in the spectrum of “right relationship to technology” things goes.

My position is that our current approach to technology is probably not the best one, and seems to have some highly negative somewhat deterministic outcomes. Which, while we can and should mitigate, will always yield dystopian outcomes at whatever scale of ubiquity/normality they achieve in the socio-technical assemblage (where the common should not always be taken as an indicator of the good), so long as the whole thing is operating under a system where human and environmental well-being are not the highest priorities.

Anyway, I started in one place writing this, and ended up in very much another, several others (and flipped through many web radio stations on my handheld while writing it). And that I think reflects also on the “radio-ness” of blogging as a medium. I can be a DJ of texts and associations. I can run and ramble, and mix together elements, and the reader listener can listen or not listen. We don’t have to talk about it. We don’t have to fight. We don’t have to throw angry emojis back and forth. We can just listen or not. You don’t have to follow me. You don’t have to like me on social media. I’m not on it. I’m only on anti-social media, because I know I’m my better me when I’m listening deeply. I can hear more, I can see more clearly with my eyes closed.

Getting into wifi radio systems has given me a new understanding and appreciation of what I actually want out of technologies. I want technologies that Do One Thing, or as I’m calling it DOT.

I don’t want to multitask. I don’t want a million apps to flip through and figure out if any of them actually does the thing I want or if I have to sign up or pay some monthly fee or get into bullshit in-app purchases. That’s all dead to me. I just want technology that does one thing, and does it well. Or one narrow slice of things that are all tightly related and which support each other.

I don’t want a lot of options and choices and settings and updates. I want technologies that do one thing. DOT. And well. DOT+DIW.

In the world of wifi radio, I now have a handheld Ocean Digital and a fixed Sangean WFR-32. Here is a video overview of the Sangean:

It can be difficult to find good information and reviews about some of these Chinese wifi radio systems like this.

I will say that the system is a bit weird to get used to. There’s an app for iOS (works on iPad, which is not always the case) that seems to be the easiest way to add stations to it, though you can do it through a sub-menu. There’s also this, which I still don’t understand, and it can accept signals from Spotify (at least through Spotify Connect, I’m not sure if you can easily search songs in it), Tidal, Qobuz, others.

Anyway, each time you limit functionality like this, you introduce weird quirks into a device and its functioning. We’ve been trained I guess by marketing to think that more functions, more options, more possibilities, more tools jammed into a device is always better. But is it really?

If you own a Swiss Army Knife, when is the last time you used anything but the actual knife blade in it? I saw someone say somewhere (original reference lost), that sometimes you need the chef’s knife. The thing that does one thing, and does it well. It cuts.

Mailbug seems to me like another example of this which I remain intrigued by, though my use case and requirements are a bit different. I don’t own one (yet) for that reason, but the possibilities – in fact, the lack of possibilities – is something I keep coming back to in my thoughts.

I’ve been researching a lot the wave of emerging e-ink external monitors compatible with Mac, and that has been interesting to see where things stand. As it currently is, the technology is severely limited by its refresh rate, which is nowhere near the ‘normal’ monitors people use. So you can end up with artifacting in some circumstances, ghosting, etc. It’s difficult to find these in Canada from any brand, and there appear to be only three main series I see often referenced: Dasung Paperlike, Onyx Boox Mira, Philips E Ink Business Monitor 13.3.

I think I have a lead on a Mira in Canada that I am waiting on, so I’ll show a video about that device:

I often already run my Mac screen in black and white but for the amount I’m on it as a writer and whateverer, it doesn’t solve the eyestrain issue like e-ink potentially does, and which other people who have adopted this monitor technology (and smartphone e-ink tech is picking up as well). Here’s one such video that I appreciated:

I like this idea of limitations as being (sometimes) beneficial, of cutting down the distraction and the “flicker” so to speak of modern screen-ified life. I don’t expect yet another device to bring me ultimate happiness, but I’m going through a time of great winnowing down what may ultimate best relationship with technology is. And I think it’s this: do one thing. DOT.

There are probably other words for technologies like this: calm technologies, anti-addictive devices, single-tasking?

My old school 90s AlphaSmart Neo 2 keyboard is one of my favorite technologies, and it is extremely DOT. You can type on it, there are 8 buttons up top for files. 2 AA batteries that last forever, with a small LCD screen. The feel is so good. You’re just typing. You’re just writing. You can get lost in it. No notifications, no distractions, no bullshit. Does one thing, does it well.

For me, this isn’t just a short term “digital detox,” this feels like a sea change, a fundamental shift in understanding and experiential improvement. This is a break from how I approached technology previously. The ability to do just one thing in the end gives you the space to do (or not do) everything else unencumbered.

I won’t go on and on about it here, but I’m not in favor of letting kids play with cell phones. I don’t have one myself for good reason – I think they are just too addictive, and the only way to avoid it is to just not have one. I understand in the real world, compromises must be made, and one of those I made recently was in finding and purchasing this interesting example of does one thing (DOT) technologies that I wrote about recently.

It’s a lowly SD card reader for a hunting trail cam made by Wildgame Innovations. It’s called the Trail Pad Swipe, and it looks like there’s a larger version called the Trail Pad Tablet that is maybe along the same lines. It’s intended use seems to be enabling you to check images in the field from the SD card in a trail camera (which I do have one for fun & wildlife observation, btw, so this is always a possible fallback use, even if one I don’t engage with as an activity much lately – I gotta get one set up again this winter!).

The things I want out of a device like this for my intended use case is actually to reduce the functionality of the Almighty Cell Phone™, and the like… cold sleek fetishistic neo-brutalist beauty of the object itself. I want a device, in other words, that is shittier, and less “sticky” behaviorally than a cell phone.

And that is not. Fucking. Riddled. With. Ads. And. Trash. Holy. Shit.

So what is the “DOT” that an SD card reader does? It reads SD cards. It does not surf the internet, connect to wifi, let you check your email, send you notifications, draw you down endless corridors of social media, apps, and other bullshit and train you from a young age to obey the hegemony that says that all of those things are necessary and normal components of life at any age (hint: they are not), let alone in childhood.

Anyway, people can do what they want, what I am doing is finding an alternative that does one thing, while taking advantage of the benefits that supervised use of digital devices might bring educationally.

Based on my experience, it seems that you can put JPG images and AVI files onto an SD card from your laptop pretty easily – though I had a lot of trouble getting AVI file outputs from other video codecs using a Mac. That’s unresolved, but I was able to download some AVIs and tested them on the device. They played no problem, which is great news. It also has a headphone jack for listening. I’d prefer a speaker too, but will accept it given the challenge of finding anything at all that fits in this product space.

A basically more rough replacement for a cell phone or small tablet that does “nothing” except read two file formats on SD cards is not exactly on everybody’s shopping list. But one thing I’ve thought a lot about is that why, as consumers, are we all forced to use the same shopping list either? Why can’t we easily, for example, order up the components we want in the configuration we want, and like… some AI factory in outer space assembles them and sends it to me via parachute at a very reasonable price?

That’s a future I would actually be okay with, because it would mean that I would still have some measure of control over devices and their functioning, and I could pick from the available options to find one that suits me. Even if that meant choosing to live in such a way that none of them suited me. Choosing to live without them. That’s another obvious solution down this road, but I’m not entirely there yet, so it’s better to shape it in a direction I can live with.

I can live with SD cards, because I can decide what goes onto them. In my research for do one thing technologies here, I came across a device whose name I now forget (Yoto), but you can buy (proprietary) credit-card sized branded audio recordings of popular books (that I already own in print). But you can also buy blanks and make your own. I guess that’s cool, but I could also now with this SD card reader buy any random cheap SD cards, and now load the entire Wikiart image data set on it (or a similar large image set of the natural sciences), and we’re off to the races.

The only “flaw” I’ve seen in this device is that while it does allow the swipe action (and a shitty slow zoom) for going picture to picture on the photo galleries, it doesn’t allow for flipping the device on its side to view portrait-orientation pictures correctly. Instead, it squishes them to fit in the landscape-orientation view screen. Also, I don’t think there’s a way in the video player to pick back up where you left off, or fast forward or rewind videos, but I also need to look at it again more closely.

It’s funny though: it’s “bad” in one way that it can’t do all of those things, but in another way, what I want to find and share is the limits of technology, and figuring out experientially what are the good and bad parts of it (along with its outcomes), and which ones, in which configurations do we actually want to have in our lives. That, to me, is ultimately the point of all of this, and one of the biggest things we need to figure out individually and collectively in our lives.

As part of my quest towards DOT technology, I’ve been trying to find an easy to install text-based web browser. But it is a challenge to find one on Mac that isn’t terminal based or require a lot of tinkering and 3 hours spent installing Python dependencies or whatever.

While I continue searching for one that “just works when you install it” (like any normal standalone Mac app), I have been enjoying a Firefox extension for the time being called Image Video Block.

I’ve been wondering if this is a form of iconoclasm, the breaking of the icons or images (with long historical precedent). The refusal to be governed and held sway by images being fired at high velocities and high brightnesses into your brain constantly, and the subtle continuous violence that tends to do to your thinking, without you being always constantly aware of it.

I disabled in that extension images, video, “media” (whatever that means), Flash, SVG’s and canvas (I think that’s a reference to HTML5). It’s weird to get used to a little at first, but interestingly also…. it’s NOT that weird to get used to. Some little buttons might be missing on certain sights, but browsing the web without all the junky image garbage seems liberating, refreshing. And, of course, you can allow-list certain domains, like I did for Wikipedia (where it now is slightly shocking to see images show up, after browsing around mostly without any elsewhere).

There’s a rant I want to go on about computers, cell phones, screens greedily gobbling up one’s “visual cone” (leading to obsessive and repetitive behaviors) but I’m still working out my thoughts on that. But breaking the images, dulling down all the shiny surfaces, turn off the colors, radically reducing functionality and intentionally adopting limits with technology seems to me right now like a Narrow Road to Happiness™. Probably won’t work for everyone not willing to let go of a lot of the things technology promises as “good” (but which are actually bad – like always-on notifications), but it works for me, right here, right now.

Speaking of DOT:

Reading that starts as soon as the page loads, without you first having to carefully click past a pop-up window which actively tries to mislead you into “consenting” to something nobody actually wants or needs, and which continues right to the end of the page without being interrupted by another pop-up begging you to subscribe to a newsletter. Gemini pages are downloaded once and rendered once, and then they stay that way for as long as you care to look at them. Nothing changes in response to you scrolling around or time passing.

Source: Gemini FAQ

Agree the modern web is an endless sea of pushy trash.

I do still use images a bit for shopping or ideation purposes especially, but for much of the rest of the web I’m happy to say good riddance to images. I can safely say that I am not missing much for the most part.

Not only that, but it is happening again and again lately that when I go image-less, I check my few RSS sources or websites I still like (vanishingly few and far between these days), click around a couple things… and then somehow the interest in continuing with that kind of pointless browsing just sort of dries up and goes away pretty quickly. Dissipates. Instead of that like ceaseless chasing of your eyes gobbling up images and your brain and emotions getting pushed around by them.

Browsing the web like this (in a trickle or ‘garden hose’ mode – instead of firehose) is… boring? And that is exactly what I want. A web that forces me out of it, that leaves little place for my projections. Where my activity is not constrained by artificial screen time measures, but simply by the fact that it just doesn’t look that good visually. It’s not “sticky” and I can just then go do other things offline.

It definitely has taken a few days for my brain to get used to browsing without images. Something in me rebelled at first, and was always reaching for the toggle. Now its easy to see that your stock photo image of the sky isn’t adding anything to my life, and I don’t need to allow all those intrusions into my personal thoughts and emotions like that anymore. Unless there’s some good reason.

The upshot of all this is now, when the web work of the day is done, I’m more and more having this feeling of like, okay, just close the computer. Go read a book. Because the web without images is revealed as a sort of emperor with no clothes: a really badly edited and disorganized book. It makes you realize, fuck, it’s better to go read a book. Fuck all this noise.

I wrote recently about blocking images and videos on the web, trying to reduce the web to a trickle. It was weird and rocky at first, establishing that new way of internetting but I think I’ve fallen into the swing of it finally, and just wanted to mark down some notes about it.

I haven’t had a lot of time to explore it lately, but I’ve been interested in gemini:// protocol for this because stylistically it’s more or less what I want. It’s just that there’s not a terribly large amount of content on it yet (possibly never will be, but who knows). And what I want is to basically be able to “geminize” websites which are not actually on the protocol, reducing them to their bare text components, like in Firefox Reader View, and eliminating images and videos, except places I want or need them: Google Image Search, Amazon, Youtube, my blog, a handful of other sites – and that’s it. Everywhere else I’m categorically blocking images and videos. And it’s going just fine, as I prep for switching over to an e-ink screen as well.

One thing that’s interesting about Gemini is that it it is not that it does not handle images. It actually does, but you cannot it seems put them in line with text in an HTML or Markdownish way. You instead see them as image links, which you can go and click through to to view. I don’t understand it well technically yet, but I ended up kind of emulating that with my Firefox setup to counter-balance the Image Video Block extension, which either is on or off for a domain, and which if you want to just temporarily view images, and then ban the domain again, it ends up with a lot of clicking and its annoying.

Instead what I do now is use another extension called Incognito This Tab for any site that I don’t want to add to my permanent allow-list but want to temporarily “exfiltrate” image data from into my eyeballs. It works great, isn’t a ton of extra clicking, and lets me keep images at arms distance instead of all up in my face constantly. I can go to them on my terms, instead of having random streams of images constantly trying to manipualte me in some direction or another.

I’ve been blocking images and videos in my web browser lately. Not everything, but I’d say well over 60%. Experimenting with the right balance of what to allow and what to reject. My brain feels like it is reclaiming lost territory from not being incessantly exposed to just a stream of endless visual trash. It’s given me this sinking feeling, that all images are propaganda.

If we look at it etymologically, image comes from Latin imago for copy, imitation, or likeness. And propaganda, also from Latin, for extend, spread, increase. A copy that spreads. An imitation which increases.

Increases what? Itself, I guess we could say memetically speaking, but I’m not sure I buy all that, at least not in solo. What it propagates is not merely itself but an information complex, embedded socio-cultural assumptions, political situations, historical moments, on and on. Through the choice of what is depicted, what is not depicted, who is doing (or pretending to be doing) the depicting, or not doing (or pretending to not be doing, through false attribution or claims of origin, for example).

Every image evokes a splash of emotional response, of mental and sensorial connections, chains of references and associations. A constant triggering in all directions. That’s why being on the internet today feels so much like being a passenger in the sidecar of a richocheting pinball strapped to an atomic bomb in a brutalist arcade machine owned by a malevolent gnostic demiurge who sent his only son to our planet to buy Twitter, so that he could look at all our DMs trying to find nudes so he could decide which of our species he wants to impregnate.

I guess this is just to say, I’m good without all that noise.

I also understand that language, perhaps all communication and signalling, in some sense is an attempt at propagation of something. So why draw the line at text? Because I like it. It feels right to me. It feels like something I can evaluate at a human scale without constant bombardment, constant flashing lights and notifications drawing you ever farther down and out in the Cone of Light.

I’m aware too that extracting oneself from the clutches of the Cone of Light industrial complex is a fraught and perilous voyage full of steps forward, and backward, and sideways – an intricate dance with many partners coming and going. And few obvious viable long-term solutions at first glance…

It’s sure that the Cone of Light seeks to propagate itself, and it is wildly successful in doing so. From its perspective, the contents of the images it flashes before our eyebrains are only of consequence insofar as they propagate the existence and ascendancy of the Cone of Light.

Anyway, just working this out in real time out loud. It’s a feeling, but it’s growing. I can see it rising out of the mist in the moonlight.