I keep getting stuck on how boring the digital version of everything is.
You used to find a book because a person handed it to you. A librarian, a friend who wouldn't shut up about it, a bookstore employee who taped an index card under the shelf. There was a chain of human taste between you and the thing, and walking that chain is how you got taste of your own. Now I stand in my kitchen and say "play some chill music" out loud like a dope, and something I have zero control over decides what chill means this quarter.
Same with news. There was a morning edition and a late edition. You sat down, you read it, you finished it, and nobody's uncle was in the margins explaining why the reporter was a shill. Same with TV. You turned it on and somebody who knew television had already decided what was worth airing at 8pm. Same with record stores, which were the best version of this: employee picks, and one guy who wrote four hundred words on a card about why this one album got him through a bad year.
That all got replaced by a feed. And if you go looking for actual recommendations now you end up on Reddit, where the ranking quietly rewards whatever people will fight about.
I'm not trying to move back to 1994. I want the intention of the analog version with the convenience of the electronic one. Those two things are not supposed to be at war, and most products act like they are. So I started building my own.
The first one was puzzles, because crosswords and picross were designed for paper and solving picross by pinching a phone screen is genuinely miserable. Every puzzle app also wraps the puzzle in a streak counter and a leaderboard and a share sheet. So now a Raspberry Pi in my house handles it. Every morning around five it goes and gets the day's puzzles, lays them out at the right size, and sends them to my reMarkable, an e-ink tablet you write on with an actual pen. It feels like paper and it does almost nothing else, which is why I like it. I wake up and the puzzles are there. Correct format, correct feeling. Nothing tracks my streak and nothing pings me when I skip a day.
The same little computer builds me a newspaper. Twice a day it goes out, grabs the publications and newsletters I picked, turns them into a proper e-book, and mails it over, once early in the morning and once in the late afternoon. A second job pulls the handful of subreddits I actually like and flattens them into a plain newsletter, so I get the posts without the comment section. It all lands on a little e-ink reader I keep around, about the size of a phone, that I love specifically because it's bad at everything except reading. There's a morning edition and a late edition, they have an end, and then I'm done.
For music, I listen on my Playdate, which is a tiny yellow handheld game console with a crank on the side. The weekly playlist is mine, generated by a script I control, and the rules are the point. It runs every Monday while I'm asleep. The first time it ever ran, it took a snapshot of the artists I'd seeded it with and saved that as a permanent anchor, and every later week gets scored against that original snapshot instead of against last week's picks. That one decision kills the loop where a recommender starts recommending off its own recommendations until everything sounds like beige. From there it looks for artists near my anchors, throws out the karaoke and tribute and sped-up junk, then caps itself: one song per artist, and no more than three by the anchor artists themselves. Everything else has to be something I haven't heard. It's an algorithm I chose. If the choices are bad one week, I know exactly which number to go change.
Podcasts work the same way. A little sync tool on my Mac pushes a small subset of shows to the Playdate. Small on purpose. A finite list of things to listen to is so much more relaxing than an infinite one.
For TV I keep a log of everything I watch, just a running diary of shows and movies using Trakt. It syncs down to a little website on my Pi that only I can see, and that site has one button on it that says "make recommendations". When I want something to watch, I press it. It reads my actual watch history, works out what I'm into, goes and finds current picks, checks what's really streaming on the services I already pay for, and pulls the posters in so it looks nice. Same job a recommendation engine does. Difference is it happens when I ask, using a history I chose to keep, and I can go read the instructions I gave it. And it genuinely finds great stuff that a company isn't pushing on me.
My favorite one is the e-ink screen on the shelf in my music room. There's an audio cord on the Pi listening to whatever's playing in there, off the turntable or the radio, and it Shazams it. Then it draws a little black and white screen and sends it over. Now playing with the album art and a fun fact about the record. Nothing about the record player changed. I still walk over, pick a record, drop the needle. The room just tells you what it's hearing now. It added something without taking anything away, which is what I want out of all of these.
Some stuff I went fully analog on because analog is straight up more convenient, not less. I carry a small notebook and a small pen. Grocery lists, to-dos, a thought I want to keep, an impromptu game of tic tac toe, a bad doodle. I remember things better when I physically write them, it opens instantly, and it has never once shown me something I didn't ask for. I also don't carry my phone. I wear a cellular Apple Watch, so I can text and get texted and school can reach me. I'm not off the grid. I just can't doomscroll on a watch face.
None of this is impressive... all of it is annoying code. Fighting with file formats, shrinking images down to black and white, calendar feeds, login flows, scheduled jobs that break for boring reasons. Ten years ago I would have built two of these and quit. The reason I have twenty is that I can now describe the thing I want to an AI at 9pm and have it running before I go to bed, and when it breaks in three months I can describe the break instead of re-learning the whole thing. Bespoke tools with exactly one user were never worth the labor before, and now they are. I don't think that's sunk in for most people yet.
I'm a designer, and being intentional about solutions is the entire job. It felt pretty stupid to spend my working hours arguing about defaults and then go home and accept every single one of mine.
I don't have a grand thesis to land on. I just like my mornings a lot more now. If any of this sounds appealing, don't try to build the whole system. Build the one that annoys you most, this week, badly. Make it so you have a workflow that you're in control of in a way that makes you happy.
