the shape of mogery to come -- 2024 september 29

This is a status update! I want to do these more often when I'm cooking up a lot of things at the same time and don't have much to immediately post. So... let's get right into it!

new phone, who dis?

I have acquired one of the stupidest, coolest phones ever. It's a Kyocera Digno KY-42C Keitai, and it's amazing. It's an actual flipphone with a hardware numpad, D-Pad, and call buttons, as well as 3 shortcut keys that are configurable in the settings. It also runs Android 10, and while it has no app store by default, you can get up to some shenanigans by sideloading some apps.

I immediately put F-Droid on it, and then Traditional T9 to alleviate some typing issues. I currently use the predictive typing mode, where you only have to press each key once per letter, and it uses a word dictionary to figure out what you're trying to write. It works surprisingly well for Hungarian, since it's an agglutinative language, so it doesn't have a lot of short words that can be confused with each other (e.g. to Budapest = Budapestre). English can get weird, but I'll get used to it.

I've also set up a Matrix homeserver with a bunch of mautrix bridges to bridge messaging platforms that I actually care about, like a couple of Discord channels with friends, Instagram, Messenger, iMessage, and such. I made a horrid Nix config to deploy that, but it could actually be made pretty nice if I spent some time touching it up. Then I put Schildichat on the phone (it's the only Matrix app that works even remotely decently with the hardware keypad -- and it still has its issues), and I use it to communicate over non-SMS platforms.

(I decided to do this instead of using Beeper directly because Beeper has always been very flaky for me, and I could add iMessage support easily this way. One of my co-workers told me that he would pay a considerable amount monthly to have this as a hosted service -- I might end up doing that at some point. Let me know if you would be interested in something like that.)

My old phone has still been taking up a good bit of my life -- I've had the excuse to carry it around since I haven't been able to swap the SIM card yet. (I have an eSIM and the flipphone doesn't support that.) I'm going to pop into my carrier's store on Monday and finally get rid of the smartphone...

work work work work work work

I've been super busy at work. We have (finally!) decided to pause shipping new features for a bit and just work on reducing our tech debt. I'm currently rewriting some of the core parts of our codebase, and there's a lot of DevOps stuff to be done this week as well. That's going to take up... most of my time, to be honest.

...a book?

I've been fantasizing about writing the book, titled "That Damn Phone". It would be about my experience/guide about taking my life back from a phone/social media addiction.

Hopefully I'll have some time soon to write an outline for that. On that note, staying off of social media has done me great! I haven't opened Twitter (other than to retweet some company stuff, with a very strict override timer on LeechBlock) in... god knows how long. I still struggle with YouTube though, and damn it, I'm going to miss Cohost.

some great posts i've read

Here are some great blog posts I've read in the past little while:

some great music i've listened to

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