Technology

It’s on the agenda to get a dedicated audio device this summer. I’ve been building up a collection of FLAC music to prepare. There’s 3 reasons for this.

1. I bought a Remarkable device a few years ago. Yes, they’re over priced compared to a Kindle, but I wanted to avoid Amazon lock-in. As an aside, they’re fairly Linux friendly, you can even ssh into them. Anyway, before that I would read physical books or use a cheap tablet, but the tablet fell out of favor because it was too distracting. Constant notifications, request for updates, etc. I’m so happy with my current ereader. I use it all the time, and when I read, I don’t have any apps trying to grab my attention. I’m hoping an audio player can give me that same experience back for music. I hate mowing the yard and having Siri interrupt my music to tell me about some message.

2. My AirPod pros were nice for the two years they worked. I’d probably grab another pair if I was still in so many Zoom meetings. Eventually though they started making a nasty buzzing noise and are now useless. I want to use my nice pair of headphones I’ve owned for a decade to listen to music.

3. I’m sick of paying a monthly fee to listen to the same 500 songs (if that) over and over. I’m old. I don’t listen to a lot of new music. The new music I do listen to usually comes from an article I read on NPR, not from the algorithms. I want to depend less on streaming services and have more control over what I consume, and how I consume it.

Yeah, I could probably find workarounds to all these problems on my phone by fiddling with notification settings and buying a cheap headphone adapter, but why should I have to? Why do I have to go out of my way to make something as expensive as my phone less distracting and more capable? I’m just choosing to slowly opt-out of that battle.