Beginnings and Minimal Tech
So this is what my first blog-post will be, huh? I used to have a website where I showed my photography, sadly that turned out to be too much effort for me to enjoy. So now I am instead here. And so far I really enjoy it, having quickly made myself a silly favicon that represents my passion for colour and light.
I have a personal dislike for social media, the only one I really used regularly since teenage-times was Reddit. But I felt like Reddit really was not good for me mentally either, so I decided to drop it. I switched to some fediverse-stuff, but just found that all of these social media concepts (excluding Pixelix) just do not do it for me. It was nice reading stuff on BlueSky, but I would rather read a proper book or an interesting article instead. That way the time would feel better-spent.
Awareness
Eventually I also grew aware, like so many nowadays, that I use my phone more than I would really like to. That also played a part in why I wanted to cut-down on social media, but I also found the behaviour of being on my phone too much was reinforced by my Smartwatch. Having set it up to give me notifications was convenient, but also made me check my phone way too quickly. Could I have simply disabled the notifications? Of course, but that would require long-term discipline. And I wanted to make sure: So I sold the Smartwatch and got myself a good old regular analogue watch, a Tissot PRC 100 Solar to be specific. And I do not regret the choice whatsoever, even the tiny part of not having to worry about charging it is nice.
The only thing missing was the health-measurements. They are genuinely useful, especially since I have underlying health conditions. So instead I got myself one of these smart rings, and turns out: good idea, too. I never wore a ring before, but by now I am used to it and it is much less of a distraction than a smartwatch.
But then, after having gotten rid of Reddit and other stuff (with only Pixelix really left) I found that I missed reading the news. I have a personal disdain for browser bookmark management, so I decided: dust off reliable RSS and simply do it that way. And, of course, that was another great choice. Building your own feed with the things you really care about. For convenience I used Inoreader, because that way I could also access it at work.
The Writerdeck
Writing is something I enjoy. Obviously, I guess, since I have a blog now. But creative writing is something that has been difficult for me for the past half a decade, being in something resembling a writers block. I also keep my journal digitally, but my laptop and desktop have a lot of distractions on them. These things combined made it kind of difficult to actually write.
During random research I eventually stumbled upon the term "Writerdeck". Summarized: It is a device which sole purpose is to write. It can take many different forms, you can buy it, you can make it yourself... Per-definition pen and paper are a writerdeck, too. I liked the idea a lot, especially since I am someone who enjoys having dedicated tech in general (I even own multiple radios to listen to music with), so I looked up what was commercially available. The results there were not particularly satisfying, with cool hardware being made a no-go for me due to needless subscriptions. No, thank you, I do not want to pay for cloud-sync separately if I have perfectly functional cloud-storage that I already pay for. Therefore it was decided I would make one myself.
I found that there was an old project of a writerdeck-linux-distro. I took that as my baseline and got myself an old ThinkPad T470 and installed it on there. It was nice, but I found it lacking and did not enjoy using tilde as a default text editor. So I got wordgrinder installed, and as seems to be customary for Linux (to my computer scientist shame I only ever dabbled with it in university and to breathe life into an old laptop for an acquaintance once), configured things for half a day. Setting up dictionaries for looking up words, translation, a basic spellchecker, being able to show the battery percentage and syncing my writing via my cloud-storage. Doing all of that was a lot of fun and I am really, really happy with the results of my writerdeck.
And, in a move that is very unlike me, I put stickers on it. I am usually a fan of keeping my equipment pristine and minimal, but with my deck it feels different. That device is now deeply personal to me, so it felt right to make it fully mine. I find myself writing a lot more now that I have it, especially since the hurdle is a lot lower. I boot the deck and it jumps to wordgrinder, I open the file that I want to write and bam, done. Not like with my proper laptop or desktop (which are great, too!) where I need to login and have a ton of other stuff available.
Conclusions
I like having minimal, dedicated stuff. I guess that is why I also like the thought of having a blog like this. I feel like this entry is way too long already, but alas. Have a cookie if you made it this far and enjoy a photo of my writerdeck with its silly stickers!
