Finding comfort in simpler tech

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 when im writing code on Neovim. I feel like I'm not old enough to feel nostalgic about this aesthetic, I never actually had a music player, or an retro videogame, but I really like how they look. Also, I think its really nice that each one of them only has a single purpose, sometimes having too many options can be overwelming, specially if you are a neurodivergent.

I like bringing my emulator when I want to play old videogames, my MP3 player when I want to listen to my favorite artists, and I bring my eReader when I want to spend some time reading. No advertisements, no internet connection requirement, no monthly subscription, no big tech scraping your data for LLM training. You can bring them in your pocket, they are yours.

Music Player: 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 destined for military usage, my money will not be funding wars. But I still needed a way to listen to music when traveling, and the thought of getting an actual music player sounded really fun!

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. It also has a screen to display embedded album covers.

Spotify has a huge catalog of music, but it is not our 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 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 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.

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!

I believe there's something special in handpicking your favorite songs and going through all this process of downloading the files and adding the correct tags just because you really like the album, and you want to bring it with you wherever you go.

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. 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 (an e-book file format) optimizer.

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 little gremlin on my brain 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.

So far the experience has been great, it fits nice in your hand, the UX is intuitive and I found a lot of really good books to read. On the day that im writing this, im almost halfway through Project Hailmary (amaze amaze amaze). Im looking forward to try more and more devices and I'll make sure to review them here too.