This article started with some tools/ideas I picked up on this month but there is a theme: phone addiction. Just like every other 20 something year old, I’ve struggled with phone addiction. This month, I took a big swing with the scythe and reduced my addiction levels from knee height to ankle height. There’s some other learnings as well which are adjacent about voice to text with LLMs, writing tools, and of course what I’ve been watching on TV. Enjoy!
Tools that have stuck
Grayscale everywhere
After enabling grayscale mode my iPhone screen became less appealing and more utilitarian. The colors no longer grab my attention and I found myself picking up my phone less frequently. It’s like turning your phone into a tool rather than entertainment.
- To enable grayscale on an iPhone, navigate to Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Color Filters, then turn on the switch for Color Filters and select Grayscale
I have been using grayscale mode on my phone and now on my laptop. Currently, I’m writing this article in grayscale. It helps to make my technology feel more like a tool and less like a game.
On both Mac and iPhone you can add it to your control center to make it easy to turn on/off.
Untrap YouTube and SocialFocus
These are two extensions by the same developer to make social media useful again. For YouTube my homepage only shows three videos as recommendations and when I click a video there is no recommendation sidebar. On Instagram I no longer can go through the explore page. They have a ton of settings and customizations depending on your needs. I no longer need to block things with screen time because I can remove the elements that led to my “rotting”.
Karakeep for bookmarks
After acquiring a Dell T330 a few months ago, I’ve been exploring new self-hosted apps monthly. I still need to do a full writeup of all the things I run but this month the biggest one was Karakeep.
Not only does it have autotagging capabilities but it also runs just about everywhere and was a great way to consolidate all the bookmarks I’ve built up over the year.
Ideas I want to explore on more
Voice to text with Whisper
After some research about LLM automatic speech recording (ASR), what I concluded was that there aren’t many local, OSS, free, and easy to use software that run on my M2 MacBook Pro. But in the meantime I found MacWhisper which is the closest I can get. I’ve sustained a wrist injury, actually two wrist injuries, one for each hand, and it’s been difficult to type this weekend. Period. Although I do find myself saying the word “period” to the transcriber, which I’m not sure if I actually need to do.
(The above was transcribed and edited using MacWhisper)
Mini Essays
This video inspired me to start writing mini essays. I think mini essays will be a great combination of my usual phone call rants with friends and my daily journaling. I’ve used the Artist’s Way method of morning notes before and mini essays give a similar vibe to me but with a more concentrated output.
Tracking phone pickup cues
Keeping in line with this post I stumbled across this video and plan on implementing its idea about writing down phone cues this week. Very curious to see what I write down because I know I have a relatively high amount of pickups based on past Apple screen time metrics.
What I’ve been watching
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Mobland (UK Mafia Drama)
- Gritty, violent, and full of fun. If you love Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen then you will enjoy this. Tom Hardy and Pierce Brosnan make this show a fun Sunday night watch. Also the intro song is sick Fontaines D.C. - Starburster
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The Pitt (HBO medical drama)
- This medical drama has got me hooked. Each episode has me wanting to watch the next and I love the variety of storylines. You might get annoyed with one character but they quickly then switch to another for you to chew on before swapping again. Plus it’s from HBO so the graphics are amazing with unrestricted visuals and dialog.
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Barry (HBO hitman comedy drama)
- I’m not sure if I would recommend this show. It has two very fun first two seasons but then it fizzled out for me. That said I think it’s a great show if you like to skip through things that bore you. Go straight to the badass and extremely dramatic scenes while skipping the “accomplished actors playing unaccomplished wannabe actors” parts.
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Solo Leveling (Korean anime)
- I’m not much of an anime guy these days but this was a really fun show with an overpowered main character. If you like video games and One Punch Man you’ll probably like this.
Cool little things
- Scored a cheap used Yamaha RX-V363 receiver at a yard sale. This will bring my living room audio setup from the 90s to the late 2000s!
- Traveled San Francisco and had San Tung dry fried chicken wings. 11/10 would recommend.
- I started reusing Obsidian and paper notes. Still trying to figure out what tooling goes where but realized I would learn that faster by doing more for now and then optimizing later.
I also released a new photography app that I made with Cursor. It’s on my Github and while I did publish it to a website it’s not fully production ready.
Overall a pretty fun month and I’m most proud of myself for really pushing through on using things that make my phone less addicting. I think that’s going to have big payoffs moving forward. Hope to have more next month! :)