I’ve decided I’m going to spend my free time using making a ground up point and click adventure game with my kids. We spent about two hours on it this weekend and my girls (six and ten) were howling with laughter. It’s cool to see my oldest drawing up plans for what she wants each room of the game to look like, and what she wants to be able to do. All very exciting and new. GitHub copilot makes making it almost trivial, just spun up vite with typescript, created a canvas element, and off to the races.
I did a similar experiment quitting YouTube and reddit for a month last year. By the end of the month I didn't feel like I missed it much and thought that it wasn't a problem for me anymore. Unfortunately, with time my usage started to ramp up again.
If your usage ramps up, and you catch yourself scrolling for the sake of distraction, then don't beat yourself up, just repeat the process. I'm sure I'll need a reminder too.
The benefit of having a chronological feed that consists entirely of plain text headlines cannot be overstated. I can feel a tangible difference in how I engage with news and information that’s presented without the usual “tricks of the trade”. I am going to setup accounts on my system for friends and family, but I wish there were a more straightforward mechanism for doing this, and I fear that Cloudflare, Discord, and actions from the big players in this game will take actions to prevent this kind of separation of content from its platform, but for now this is working well.
There is a positive effect to quitting without too many crutches or aids. Not so much that you learn how to do it, but that you realise that it can be done, it's not that bad and it will make your life better.
2. As the wifi credentials are part of the code, and its set up as a station, this is only going to work at home without port forwards? Leads me back to point 1 sort of. Its an ultraportable lightweight DNS server you need to recompile to move.
Its a cool implementation it just sort of comes off as a solution seeking a problem.
The advantage is that it is really, really cheap and low power.
They are cheap enough that I keep a supply of ESP boards just in case I want to throw something together.
The only one that I wish could be deleted is YouTube (because of YT Shorts), which comes with every Android. For now, I've restricted my usage using the App Timers feature.
WhatsApp Statuses sadly cannot be disabled. I wish I could fully delete WhatsApp for good[0]. Telegram Statuses feel wholesome. I admit I have a pet peeve with how Meta engineered WhatsApp after purchase.
I'm not feeling any withdrawal symptoms of any sort. If everything continues to be like this, I'm looking forward to finishing 2025 like this. I've been looking at dumb phones, E-Ink ones seem promising, but not yet quite there. Maybe also drop in a dumb Casio watch.
I did not delete my social media accounts, as I don't want anyone grabbing my public handles and wreaking havoc. I will always reserve these, even for leaving them empty.
I'm fine with HN being my social media.
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Also, some apps cannot be disabled depending on the vendor. e.g.: Weather (which launches random notifications from time to time), Radio, etc.
+ Adblock + Sponsorblock + Return dislike button + lots more
This is wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomscrolling
"Doomscrolling or doomsurfing is the act of spending an excessive amount of time reading large quantities of news, particularly negative news, on the web and social media."
In other words, doomscrolling is about scrolling the bad news, specifically. Like covid-19 or war.
"Doomscrolling can also be defined as the excessive consumption of short-form videos or social media content for an excessive period of time without stopping."If you look at the definitions on Urban Dictionary[1], the ones from 2020/2021 are in the same vein as what you've described and what Wikipedia says, but more recent 2024/2025 definitions generalise the concept and lose the "negative news" element.
Always fascinating how language evolves and how quickly the meaning of words can change.
[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=doomscrollin...
Yes, wikipedia is wrong, it happens.
Policies work great for encyclopedic content. But it turns out that finding a source for a new term does more to cement an early meaning of the word than help people understand its evolution.
Maybe try urban dictionary?
Think about a time when the internet or your battery went out, wasn't that a relief actually?
So just serving 99% of requests, taking 1 minute breaks, or degrading quality after 1 hour of peak usage, all work for me.
The author cites it as performance reasons, but at this scale, even the uplink to cloudflare, would be negligible, no?
I don't think the performance would matter much with some basic caching (or even just OS-level caching), but there is limited memory in an ESP so maybe that is it. I have never noticed issues with DoT and DoH which are theoretically much heavier protocols.
* Fetches block lists every 6 hours
* Gets DNS requests over DoH then serves as DNS over the VPN.
* A single Go binary, so it's exceptionally easy to run.
It was super interesting to play around and get working as a side project, and as a plus debugging deadlocks in a DNS application is always fun /s