With how polluted the modern web has become over the years, I actively
avoid it as much as possible. From mainstream media sites acting like
the gossip magazines from years back. Remember OK magazine? To sites
riddled with ads, tracking, social media buttons, and a plethora of
utter crap. It feels like navigating down a busy main street where all
the hawkers are hassling you too buy their wares. Now bolt-on how every
UX designer has given up on the basics like page accessibility
standards, loading times, and the important one, usability.
It's an utter shambles right now.
When using a browser, I find it far too easy to get caught in a "YouTube
loop" or see something at the corner of your eye that you feel the urge
to spend the next 30 minutes researching. Before you know it, 3 AM
rolls around and your reading a Wikipedia article on some random
bollocks. This is why I avoid using a browser as much as possible and
this is how I achieve it for about 90% of my daily internet usage.
NEWS
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Do you need to be reminded every day that Covid has killed X amount of
people, that some political party leader fucked a dead pig? Nope, you
don't! What you should be doing is focusing on what news is important to
YOU. For me, this comes in the form of the latest tech news and
information from my local government. The obvious way to do this is via
RSS feeds.
I am sure everyone has heard of newsboat or similar RSS readers but
there is still the problem that most RSS feeds don't have any content
attached to the feed. Normally it's just a summary of the article, at
best, you still need to open up the browser and view the content. One
RSS reader that seems to have slipped under the radar is one called
sfeed by Suckless. With this tool I can have this setup.
sfeed ---> fdm ---> rdrview ---> mutt
sfeed, this RSS reader allows you to output feeds into various formats,
one of them is the mbox. From there I use fdm which is a mail filtering
and fetching program, think a better procmail. Using a custom script in
fdm I can pass the feed URL to rdrview. rdrview fetches the URL and
outputs the page to basic html, using lynx -dump to convert this to
a pure plain text article.
Finally, once the page has been fetched and processed fdm pushes it to
Maildir, filtered by the feedname ready for reading in Mutt. The result
is a full copy of the article in a mailbox ready to read in plain text.
All of the code for this is in my dotfiles if you need to take a look at
the sfeed, fdm, mutt configuration's.
Within the same configuration for fdm I fetch my email which also has
mailing lists subscriptions of things I should know about. Since
switching over to FreeBSD fully a lot of discussions are carried out on
various mailing lists. Have a look and see if the tools, news, forums
you are apart of have mailing lists. It's another good method of
"offline" content.
MEDIA CONTENT
-------------
This one is quite easy to avoid. We all have our favourite channels and
check daily to see if anything has been uploaded by them. Only to find
3 hours after checking your still on YouTube but watching a video of
someone reacting to the latest James Bond trailer while shouting "Make
sure you hit the thumbs up and subscribe!" *cue shitty gif of a bell*
throughout the video.
The method I was using for this until recently was using a python
application called ytcc by woefe over on GitHub. In a nutshell it's
a front-end to youtube-dl for managing your subscriptions on YouTube.
Simply enter the channel's name and whenever they upload a new video, it
will download this ready to view locally. Simple, YouTube crap avoided.
As I mentioned though I no longer do this, I have my a shell script that
does something similar that directly uses youtube-dl. The reason
I changed to this is I can download more than just YouTube videos, I can
add other things such as LBRY. I can also customise youtube-dl output
and options in greater detail.
Finally on media content, podcast. Simply use a tool like castget or if
you are a newsboat fan use the built-in podboat feature.
BROWSING
--------
There is no avoiding using a browser completely. When I do have to use
one I fire up Qutebrowser, now since my rant about QuteBrowser and
privacy in 003.txt things have changed for the better. Qutebrowser now
has ABS ad-blocking enabled as well as fixing issues with referrers not
working. My qutebrowser blocks nearly everything along with a decent VPN
your good to go and get off as soon as you can.
Checkout my dotfiles for a better understanding of how all this fits
together. I will assume everyone reading this is fairly technical!
