=============================================================================== blog.notryan.com/004.txt Tue, 14 Apr 2020 Ryan Jacobs 19:00:00 -0700 3 Months w/o a Smartphone . . . . . . . . . . . . . =============================================================================== It's been a while since I've posted. (Aside, I'm convinced that there must be some *Law of Blogs*, that states all blogs must write that particular sentence at some point.) I did it. I successfully went without a smartphone for over three months. I owe a significant part of that success to shipping my phone back up to Sacramento, where my parents live. The experience wasn't too bad. Here's what I learned from using my Nokia 3110 full-time for a few months: * I *can* watch YouTube. But it's annoying and low quality. * I can read Hacker News... but it's annoying and slow. * Gmail in HTML mode works great. I would go as far as to argue that * it's more usable and snappy than the JS-bloated version. * Battery life was awesome. I charged my phone about twice a week. * Felt less distracted. * I still could Google anything I wanted, but it was *just tedious enough* to prevent me from getting sucked into "research binges" Notable problems: * Ordering Uber/Lyft rides sucked. I found an online service called GoGoGrandparent that allowed me to call, and they would order a rideshare on my behalf and charge a percentage fee. * Not having iMessage sucked, but... I caved in and purchased a mid-2010 Mac Mini and setup VNC so that I could remote in and use my group chats when necessary. I wrote some Node.js code to shutter messages back and forth to my dumb phone -- which I will post about later. Honestly, not too bad, considering MacOS stores its messages in a SQLite database. I used Twilio's API to relay the messages.