**** Analogue
I've been pushing towards digital, technological solutions to my
problems for most of my life. In the past month or so, I've been a bit
more analogue. It started when I began to feel silly about carrying
around a laptop all the time, constantly worrying about its charge,
leaving it in the sun, having it stolen, forgetting about it, and only
really using it now and then to quickly type something.
I then thought, "Hey, I can leave the laptop at home, and just use my
phone. I can take notes on the phone, I can even ssh back to my
computer, this is a brilliant solution." It wasn't. Phone interfaces
are like trying to squeeze your thoughts out through a straw. I found
it clumsy, frustrating, and plagued by "helpful" features that try to
compensate for the inherent issues in the medium. (like autocorrects
based on large scale statistical models)
This lead to carrying around a bluetooth keyboard as well as the
phone. Now, I was carrying around something almost as large as my
laptop, but with a tiny tiny screen, and it lagged all over the place.
Well, lag can be partially alleviated with mosh, and the screen size
can be partially alleviated with a tablet.
Now, it was phone, tablet, and keyboard. of course, sometimes I
wouldn't have functional wifi, so I would need to tether the tablet to
the phone. Of course, they have this amazing powersaving feature where
they would untether after a couple minutes without being actively
used. I did not forsee how frustrating that would become. Thinking
about what to write, getting a cup of tea, checking something in a
book, even urinating, all resulted in tapping all over two screens
trying to coax them back into a tether.
Then, I tried using a small notepad and a mechanical pencil. Despite
my writing having atrophied over the decades, despite it never having
been particularly legible to begin with, I found something that
worked. for the majority of uses, I was just writing things down
anyway. I needed to spend a bit more time at the end of the day
transferring the notes I had taken to the computer, but I found this
was actually helpful. It was like a review of the day, like a reminder,
it helped collect my thoughts, and sometimes when transcribing the notes
I would think of things that hadn't occured to me at the time.
There may be disadvantages I'm not seeing, and there may be advantages
I haven't noticed yet in all of these ways of working, but at this moment,
pencil and paper seems like a pretty good option.
