dontblink

My transition to digital minimalism has been slow: I slowly transitioned to not having a computer at home and I got an Hisense A9 (e ink smartphone) and added some tweaks and tricks to make it even more minimal, but the more I go on, the more I feel it's still not enough!

I work in an office and spend a whole lot of time alone, in front of a computer. Porn, social medias, etc made my life worse in every possible way, since they were always my crutch for my PTSD.. I tried to make my work PC as minimal as possible as well, but it's not enough!

What triggered me is that now you can even lose time and get into surveillance capitalism even more on WhatsApp as well! since they added channels, I don't even wanna use WhatsApp anymore. I realized how, as a current state of things, the main internet (the main spaces which everyone is on) is just wrong, at least for me, and it's getting worse and worse and worse. Corporates pushing information that makes us sick, I feel like this is ruining life for many people, they are stealing our freedom.

But the more I go on, the more I feel the need to just completely disconnect in every possible way. Digital devices have many different bias on their own, even without the surveillance capitalism nightmare added on top: you can get it if you ever read program or be programmed by douglas rushkoff, these bias are just bound to digital devices and to the internet themselves. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's a choice you make when you use them, you are using some devices with certain biases.

Maybe that's because I have PTSD (currently on therapy and meds for it), maybe that's because I did some acid when I was younger, maybe that's because I crave human contact so much and I never got enough of it, maybe that's because these medias with their bias + the shit of surveillance capitalism but I want to live my life and see people face to face, every day, not just for a month or two, I want my life to be biased towards this.

And if I'm alone, let me be alone! Without relying on porn, or on socials, I want to spend my alone time outside with my animals, getting relaxed under the sun and playing my guitar.

I want get out of my house with a phone that can just call and my ereader, maybe some music but that's it. If I really wanna be with someone, I'm gonna call and be there with my voice, or with my physical self.

I really only need a GPS, some way to stream music + Bluetooth, an e reader, maybe add some way to backup my contacts to avoid losing them and that's basically it. Please suggest some alternatives for this stuff if you have them.

I can know about events from friends or by asking around, I know it will be harder but it can be done, I don't need to work alone on a computer all day, I can get another job, hell I don't even need a banking app! Just pay me with cash! Or I can charge cards to an ATM! I don't need online shopping, I can go to a shop!!

I don't care about photos, I can have a physical notebook/calendar for my appointments (now they also do e ink notebooks), buying bus or events tickets can be harder, but I'm sure there is some workaround for that as well.

I'm asking myself if my sexual health, my ability to bind with people, my overall calm, my ability to focus, my ability to have longer term goals, to sustain harder tasks etc is worth the cost of losing some news, having a harder time to buy something or to lose an event or two and keeping my current job..

I feel like people are so much into digital life that I feel like an outsider and even kinda crazy thinking this all stuff, but I can't be the only one who is just fed up with this and it's just one step away from throwing his smartphone into the trash bin and never looking back.

I want to be free!

Hi! I've been working with Hugo for a while and I also created a free MIT licensed theme with it!. I love the flexibility and the ease of use.

But I'll have to wok on a bit more complicated project than a simple showcase website/blog. The content to be published on it is not a lot, but it would be definitely better if I could:

• Get/Post some content with API to avoid posting multiple times the same articles on different platforms, getting modifications as well.
• Send posts digests via email / Download PDF post digests.
• Post on social medias (?)
• Parse some content from CSV files / I don't know anything about databases.

Now I know that I can do something like this with a little systemd service I might write on my own and something like Zapier + RSS feed + Mailchimp. Also I could leverage Hugo modules and the .GetRemote / transform.unmarshal command, to get content from remote sources.

Now I'm not really a lot more than an amateur developer, I was thinking a headless CMS could pheraps do this stuff and more in a better way (?). I'm not a webdev and I know only really really basic JavaScript, I can use Bootstrap for frontend confidently and add SCSS to it. I know a bit of Rust too.

Would it be worth to take the time learning how headless CMS's work? I don't really want to go back managing Wordpress plugins, updates ecc.

Do you think I'm going out of a static site generator purpose with this kind of project?

I used to use stocard to store the fidelty cards from several shops in one place, but now it's apparently closing and they want me to download another app which has 700 features I don't care about and that wants me to make an account and accept cookies..

Is there any Foss app that does simply this?

I have been using KDE for a while, while I like many features I am looking for suggestions to the default email client:

Kmail - completely unusable for me and the only one which could maybe be integrated with kontacts, it could not receive mails from IMAP or pop or would receive only sometimes

Geary - good but too minimal, I need at least some kind of contact list and mailing lists feature, maybe this integrates with gnome contacts? I couldn't find anything in settings

Let's say I want to build a GPS module for my car, which is only a GPS, doesn't hold anything else. Or a recipe tablet for my kitchen which only hold a recipe app.

Is this kind of purposes common? What would be the best way to do this kind of stuff? How do I choose the hardware? How do I "lockdown" certain aspects I don't need about software?

These kind of devices could be convenient because, by only holding what's needed, they would use less resources, they would be completely distraction free and they would be suitable to be used by non tech savy user which would need to use only one or two programs without messing with the system in any way.

I know KDE ha some kind of multi app kiosk settings, GNOME also can achieve something similar tho it's more confusing.. There are some kiosk distros which only give you a browser. But I don't see anything that can be set up, customized, and locked like that.

But would that be the best way of achieving something like that? I mean to use a GPS I don't need a terminal, nor video codecs, nor a browser.. Maybe I can add the possibility to send Osmand google maps links.. Or I can decide to make it hold Spotify too to make it a radio as well.. But a full distro would be wasted!

But how do I prevent every other use except the intended ones? Is there an easy way to achieve a "one purpose device" using Linux? Should I simply use whichever distro I like and uninstall everything which is not needed (I see use case for arch)?

I feel like we have the total freedom of Linux distros on one side, and companies using managed devices on the other by setting complicated policies, but I don't know any options in between!

Maybe the focus here is the desktop environment more than distros! Are there desktop environment purposed to give the user a set of limited apps, or a single app (which isn't only a browser)?

Is there a way to require a user to wait a certain time instead of asking for a password every time he wants to execute a command as root or access the root / or another user account?

After my last break up I can't seem to get out from this depression relapse..

I reduced media use drastically, like almost to zero, I am swimming 3-4 times a week, doing yoga 1-2 times a week, going to work every morning with my bike, doing only cold showers, being in the sun, being in nature, playing my guitar, being around people as much as I can, being around my little dog and my cats, eating super super healthy, not doing any drug, not drinking, not smoking, reading self help books..

I'm doing everything, everything that can possibly be done without meds probably, but my mind feels so down and so "lazy", last night I was sleeping on the ground because I had scabies and got cured, I had my bed changed and didn't want to sleep in my bed without having a shower first, but it felt too hard to have a shower..

I've been wearing the same clothes for 3 weeks because it feels so hard to change myself and to wash them.

Even tho I'm really putting effort into all this stuff, I feel like I have zero energy and my mood is like 90% of the times terrible, and 8% of the times acceptable and 2% kinda OK(?)

I'm used to most of the stuff I said in the beginning, it's just what I do in my life is most of the time, except I would increase media consumption from times to times. How the hell can I be depressed?

I feel like this time I'm doing everything right, and in fact at least I don't feel like I want to kill myself all the time like it happened in the past.. But you know, it feels like great effort isn't really paying back..

I feel like I'm pushing and pushing and pushing but I don't get anything back, if I miss the pool one time, it's just a mood drop..

I feel super weak, I also have some bad "blood sugar drops", or at least that's what my family says, and I'm also considering I might be having some deficiency or nutrition related issue at this point.

My therapist is insisting like a lot to put me on antidepressants, but they made me feel terrible in the past. Microdosing is the only thing that worked decently but I got tinnitus from it (which now is gone), but my therapist doesn't even want to consider it, and I felt actually good last summer and at the beginning of my relationship without any drug at all, which made me think I finally won, but I didn't.

No substance come without a price to pay and I don't want to feel so bad again with antidepressants.

What to do?

I remember the old great times of barinsta.. Is there any app now? Or at least website.. ...That works decently?

I like notion a lot, especially for its databases function, it's much more powerful than stuff like excel, but being proprietary I'm scared of the buyers lock in / notion disallowing exports in the future and all the cons that come from using a proprietary software. Also managing integrations is probably harder than with an app that you own I think..

Is database in notion just a normal database like mysql? How easy/intuitive would be making the switch? Is it worth it?

We would use it for a very small organization, mostly for registering invoices, documents, lists of contacts with several informations.

I need to query results and to sort / filter database as I want, there's also the idea of trying integrating it with a website in the future maybe..

I like how practical notion is, but I don't like that it's proprietary and notion could potentially modify its terms of use whenever it wants.

After the last updates the apps started lagging lagging like hell, is there any frontend app? (Preferably Foss)

I've seen there's an app on FDroid but it does not really work anymore, are there alternative ways?

(Interested for mobile/Android mostly)