Doomscrolling Research Overview and LFCS studying

Are we? Are we communicating through the miracle of the internet? Is it working? Hello. It's It's been a little while. Uh, let me I'm just going to shuffle things about on my desk so I can see your messages and things. How How is everybody doing? It's I missed last week, I think, because I'm moving to Mondays, which is, you know, it's a big shift.

Basically, uh, for those of you who don't know, I work Monday to Wednesday these days. Um, and so I was like, okay, I would like to free up my Thursday and Friday completely because that lets me do whatever the heck I want, wherever the heck I want, which is still a lot of the time just working. But there's like this feeling I get when uh when I know that the day is mine entirely with nothing scheduled. [snorts] So yeah, let's see if if everything's working. Streams, I'm live now. Am I getting an announcement in the chat? Let's see if that works. Hopefully. Who's out there? Who do I have hanging out? No, I don't want to set a membersonly stream. Hello. Hello. How are you doing? JD Penner, how's it going? I I imagine this stream is might be a little bit quiet and a little bit more intimate than usual uh with a number of people cuz I've set a new time. I've been a little bit MIA lately. You [snorts] know, I've I've needed a little bit of time to recharge cuz you know, it's it's it's a really surprising thing when you go from like 2,000 subscribers to 22,000 in the course of like one month. That's a weird thing to have happen to you. >> [laughter] >> I'm great. Excellent. Excellent. Good to hear.

Um, yes. I don't know. We're We've I I don't know what I'm up to today. I mean, I have some ideas. I want to talk about some of the research that I've been reading because I have been reading a lot lately. I I cracked open the good old [sighs] the iPad, which is what I use to read. Hey withd I'm I'm reading this paper. Um um it's smartphone addiction is increasing across the world. A meta analysis of 24 countries, right? Really cool. I I've been like diving more and more into actually like the modern literature. Eva Renox, is that how I pronounce your name? Let me know. Hello. Hello. Welcome. Dr. Strange Love like like the is Dr. Strange Love like the um uh what's his name? Kubri the Kubric movie. Wait, hold on. Stay right there. Like like like this [laughter] cuz I've I've got a steelbook of Doctor Strange Love. I haven't watched it yet. It's my cousin's steelbook. Um, looking forward to it because I was planning we were trying to finish Kubri's like filmography. Is that what you call it? [snorts] At some point. Awesome. Okay. Well, now I know it's a good movie. Now I know for sure. [laughter]

Um, okay. Yeah. Anyways, as I was saying, we're looking at uh really good. Okay. Nice. Hello. Hello. How's it going? So, the Yes, this paper. Let me maybe maybe instead of my face and like a zoomed out view of this, we'll do uh we'll do a little desk view and see how that goes. Let's go. This guy. This one. No, no, no. This one. Okay, cool. So, here here's the stats for the stream. And then let's go ahead and do this. And I think I want to go over to here. Uh I'm just going to pop this off that screen for a second so you don't see my my info and then we're going to talk a little bit today. Basically what I want to do is is chat about research a little bit and then get into some some Linuxy stuff because I have also been studying for the Linux foundations certified systems administrator something something. So, we're going to be going over some of that together. But where is this paper? Is it this one? No, it's under It's not interventions. Is it just smartphone addiction? Yes. Cross 41 countries? No. No. This one. Okay, cool. Hey, Nick. How's it going? Welcome. Welcome.

Okay. So, um, Jay Olsson was was somebody that I I worked with at uft. And this person over here, Dasha, is somebody uh is one of my my girlfriend's friends also at uft. So, I was very surprised uh to see these to see this author on there. Um, not surprised in like there's no way she would do this research. Surprised because it's just like, oh, wow, friendly face. Anyways, the research is bleak. [laughter] the research is really something. Um, and I'm I'm kind of I'm kind of I'm I'm quite concerned. Okay, so let me let me lay out what I've been noticing. For those of you who don't know, who've never done like academic research, um, Zotterero is a is an application to manage your library of research papers and stuff stuff that you're reading and referencing, right? Um, and so usually the process looks like you go on Google Scholar and then you just search something like smartphone addiction, right? And then and then you get really annoying things like papers called is is smartphone addiction really an addiction which is just wild to me. Um, apparently behavioral addictions don't matter. Okay. [laughter and snorts] Anyways, you go looking for these and you get these long papers, right? like this [sighs and gasps] like this. I haven't read through this one yet. I'm looking forward to it. But basically what I've been finding is like really crazy stuff. Like if we just look at um this paper here, this is a meta analysis of 24 countries. Huh. Maybe they found papers across either they found papers published in 24 countries or on research participants from 24 separate countries or they ran a really big ass study. We focused on adolescence. We conducted a meta analysis of studies published between 2014 and 2020 that use the smartphone addiction scale. Cool. Um, and what they found since they so we found we focused on adolescence and young adults since they tend to have the highest screen time and smartphone ownership rates across 24 countries, 83 samples and 33,000 almost 34,000 participants. We demonstrate that problematic smartphone use is increasing across the world from China, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia um and then Germany and France as well. So this is like pretty crazy. Zotterero is goated. It is indeed. So we're seeing like smartphone addiction, problematic smartphone use is on the rise uh across country and then it is on the rise uh across uh sex age and uh and country as well which is pretty wild. We're seeing we're so in general smartphone addiction on the rise big big big big time. Um, and then we're seeing some really crazy stuff like what are the pairs I've gone through. Um, we're looking at establishing the relationship between loneliness and internet or smartphone addiction meaning in life uh as well as smartphone addiction. Um, social isolation in smartphone addiction. Social media use and perceived social isolation. social isolation. Uh more isol social media use crowding out real life [snorts] um social interactions. Um, yeah, there's a lot [snorts] there there's there's there's a lot of stuff happening here and it's it's like it's pretty it's pretty bleak. [laughter] It is. And like when we look at this research, hello. Hello. Really enjoyed your most recent video. Keep up the great work. Thank you. Is it BM Rolo? Is that how I how I pronounce that? Thank you.

Um, yeah, it's it's looking like it's looking like the attention economy has tendrils into like every aspect of our well-being. Like, it is [sighs] shocking to me how many things have are being impacted. Now this is mediated by the idea like okay well if if we can say that social or social media overuse let's start with that uh crowds out inerson real like real life connections to people right so you spend if you feel that you're your social needs are met through text then you're less likely to seek out social connection in quote unquote the real world right and I'm going to I think I may stop softening these Um I think it's not unreasonable to make it to to declare some sort of difference there. Anyways, um if you're doing that then it makes sense that your social isolation is increasing. And there's papers that actually show that um there is next to no positive benefit to to your well-being through social media connection. Um save for if you're doing like video calls with loved ones. that is very different from like the kind of text based uh soft touch stuff with like likes and comments and things. Uh if you're replacing real world connection with that, then it checks out that you're going to be increasing your perceived social isolation. Um so it's a play on my name. Ah, cool. All right, BMOL it is. Um and so this makes sense. And then obviously social isolation has very strong ties to depression to anxiety um and then to meaning of life meaning in life rather right so I'm actually seeing studies that demonstrate that people with higher meaning like higher sense of their meaning in life are less percept uh less susceptible to problematic smartphone use uh whereas hey plus how's it going and uh loix arts I think tell me how to pronounce your name loi xarts maybe Um, I will I will get to to that shortly. Um, so if all of that's happening, it makes sense, right? Because these are like things that feed back on each other. If you're experiencing social anxiety, then it would make sense that you socially isolate yourself a little bit because you're afraid of entering social situations, which makes you feel more socially isolated, which may depress you, right? All of these things sort of work in tandem and it's it's really like it it's it's scary for me to see, but there's a lot of really positive stuff, too. So, I don't want to just come in here and be a doomsayer. It's like I've been streaming for 12 minutes and all I've said is, "Hi, welcome everyone. Everything's terrible." Um, there's some really good news and I want to talk about that as well. But first, let's let's look through some of these comments.

So, does the study cover short form con uh short form text content like like X? Usually, when they're referring to something like smartphone addiction or uh problematic smartphone use, it really like those measures are mostly self-report and about broad screen time. So, it's uh a little bit more rare to see studies that break down the specific apps. When you look at social media use, X would be included. So that would very often be things like Facebook, uh Google, uh Google+ if anyone uses that. Twitter, I'm not going to call it X. I'm just not. [laughter] Uh Twitter, um Instagram, Tik Tok, all of those things would sort of get lumped into one thing. So yeah. Um I Nick says, I find even Discord does not help isolation either. It feels like it does, but overall it made things worse. Yes, I generally agree with that there. I think I think there is room for some nuance there. I think generally voice and video calls probably lead to a little bit more um foster that sense of connection a little bit more. I've been noticing as I've been calling friends and family more often that that has a pretty positive effect. So, I think there's some nuance, but yes, generally like textbased communication does not seem to foster that sense of connection. Uh, Mag you love, is that it? I started my declutter about two months ago and now apparently making two to three hour calls with people is a norm and it feels so much better. Yes. Yes. I I find like because you have less like because you need to entertain yourself somehow. It's very common to just like it be it can become a very positive habit to just call up a friend and that's pretty awesome. Um like what I thought was depression was loneliness and has largely gone away for me. That's fantastic. Okay, Rodox says, "Turns out I might be able to do my thesis on attention in regards to cyber security awareness and sensory overload. Without you, I wouldn't be able to get this idea. Can't wait to get started." Ah, that's fantastic. I'm I'm so excited to hear more about that. Um, BM Rollo says, "That's awesome. What's the approach for that?" Okay. And then [snorts] we have uh Loi Xarts. Wasn't the new study with 100,000 participants based on specific social media apps that have short form content? That's why I asked the short form text question. I don't know if I've seen that study. Um, if you have the name or like a link for it, I would love to read that paper. I I may have missed that.

Um, oh yeah. So, today we're going to chat a little bit about some of this stuff and then I'm going to be working on u studying for my Linux Foundation certified systems administrator test. I found like a set of resources and we're just going to go through that in the latter hour of this stream. Um, so should be fun. should be a lot of fun. Uh for the first like 30 minutes to 45 minutes, we'll be talking about this and then I'll probably we'll go back and forth. I'll I'll stay engaged if you all have questions that are attentiony. But I do want to do a little Linuxy stuff because I've been like off my Linux game lately and and a number of the people hanging out in the community have been pinging me like, "Hey, can we do a little bit more tech?" And I'm like, "Yes, we can. I should." Hey Tim, how's it going? >> [snorts] >> Uh what do we got here? So survey based research on employee understanding security alert fatigue. Security alert fatigue is a really cool angle. Uh authentication friction impact on productivity. Empirical data on user acceptance. Optimal security usability balance. That sounds like a really cool area of research. Very nice. Sanji TPS says, "Love the love the last video. Digital declutter is something I was working on myself. I didn't call it that though. You mentioned self-hosting made me realize I haven't coded for fun in years. Hoping the cognitive clarity or whatever helps me get back into it. That's awesome. Well, we we love we love doing home lobby stuff here, so you are among the right folks. Um, do you have any projects in mind? I would love to hear about what kinds of things you're looking to build. Um, okay. A loi exart says the study is called feeds, feelings, and focus, a systematic review and metaanalysis examining the cognitive and mental health coralates of short form video use. Well, that that is worth keeping. Hey Dixie, how's it going? Just checking in. All good. We are doing pretty good. Okay, I'm just going to grab grab that paper for sure. Do I not have my Zotterero stuff here? Okay, I'm going to drop this in science. Uh, and definitely take a look at that study soon. Sanji says, "Want to dip my toe back into C. Been doing Java and Python CRUD enterprise apps for so long. Cheers from Brazil, says Pedro. Hello. Hello. Welcome, welcome. Um, I haven't written C since grade 11. I think I was 16 the last time I wrote C. Um, it was one of my first computer science classes. I also I haven't written Java since since my first co-op either. I have been doing Python pretty much every day, though. Um, yeah, I've I've heard surprisingly good things about C. I say that because like generally I mean C in my mind C is Microsoft's Java and I'm like that doesn't sound like something I'm excited to dive into, [laughter] but that's pretty cool. Um, I would love to hear more about your projects. I mean, I have heard very good things about C# like to much to my surprise. So, I would like to hear like what you like about it, what you're interested in building with it. That would be cool. Plus says, "Enjoyed some offline life thanks to a Netgear switch. [snorts] Shouldn't have trusted them again." I see. I didn't realize Netgear. Do we have a posit a negative opinion of Netgear here? Is that a thing? Um, I don't know how much Netgear stuff I own. Probably not a ton. I also had some offline time on Sunday, which was good because I needed it to finish editing my video. [laughter] I I had another little one of those like brownouts, but luckily static leases came into play and my services were okay. Um, I do need I do need to fix my main Proxmox server to boot up automatically um whenever it's powered, like whenever there's a power outage. So, I need to jump into its biosc. So, I'm going to I'm going to give my best shot at your name and you tell me how to pronounce it correctly. Is it magulof? I'm not sure. Let me know. I want to get it right. Um [snorts] maybe it's because I'm not from North America, so I have access to transit, but because of declutter, I've been having amazing conversation with strangers in trains. Really? Yes. So, um, while in general Canada's public transit is significantly better than many of the states in the United States, it's still not awesome. Nowhere near Europe. Um, and in general, we have a culture of like not talking to people in transit, right? Like, it's a very individualistic like I'm just going where I'm going, don't bother me kind of thing. But I I would love I like I'm a fan of small talk. I like making a joke with the cashier or like I like when like um when like a server at a restaurant is like you know cracking jokes or or telling us about their day that I find really pleasant. Uh so I would love I would love interactions like that. Sounds like I'm getting insane, but it's great. No, it sounds like you're doing something awesome. What do we got here? Dixie says, "Installed Adgard Home on my server a couple of weeks ago. Tried and failed to have in a Docker container." ah docker container. While I was screwing around with it, I opened up port 53 on my router. I checked on my Adgard dashboard and it was having around 10 million DNS queries every 24 hours. Was that bad? Yeah, that's that's probably not good. That's probably not good. Definitely uh shut that down. But I I mean maybe do some if you have Windows machines and stuff like that, do a do a strong search for viruses and things. um take a look through your config files. Uh maybe plus if you have some advice for somebody who may have had a bit of a security event would be useful.

But yeah, so lots lots has been going on. Lots has been going on. I'm glad to have finally put out another video um because it it I took about two weeks off that it was three weeks between this video and my previous one. Um, I've been feeling a little bit tired, but I'm I'm excited to make this week's video. I'm not sure what I'm going to make it on yet. There's a couple of ideas. Um, I'm hoping to interview some researchers and bring them into videos about like smartphone interventions. I have not gotten a response yet, so we'll see. Um, but because I'm hoping, right, like I'm not emailing from my old uft email, so maybe I won't get a response, but it would be really awesome if I could reach out to some of these researchers and bring sort of like connect this audience, this community with some people who are like, you know, on the ground doing doing research. I think that would be super exciting. Um, yeah. What else? What else is? So, anyways, that that's all to say because I want to do I finally want to do the video on how I dumb down my smartphone. But the way I dumb down my smartphone is based on a set of interventions by a researcher that were published and you know validated to pretty great success. Actually, I'll show you all just really quickly what that paper is. Um, so if we pop over here and then back over here then look at interventions. We've got this um this intervention 10-step behavioral intervention to reduce screen time. I put this in the Discord. Um but even just looking at the the abstract, there's really really promising positive stuff here. So two studies, which is nice. It's always nice when a when a paper is published when you're getting, you know, not just one study, but you're getting two or three that replicate the same results. They had two studies here with a reasonable uh population size or sample size uh 51 and 70. And they found that this intervention caused larger or sorry caused found reductions in screen time, problematic smartphone use and depressive symptoms after just two weeks of intervention. That's insane. Like that's really positive. And then um intervention reduced screen time by 1 hour per day and returned pro problematic smartphone use scores to normal levels for at least 6 weeks. Six weeks of benefit for two weeks of intervention and then you look at the intervention and it's really quite minimal, right? So, it's like it's, you know, disable non non-essential notifications, keep your phone on silent, uh, disable Touch ID and Face ID so that you have to enter a password, which makes it more annoying to open your phone, uh, keep your phone on silent, turn down your phone's brightness and set it to grayscale, hide social media or uninstall, blah blah blah blah. So, a set of really minimal interventions, nudges, right? Um, in the space of interventions, nudges, uh, let's put me back over here. Let's go back to my face. In the space of interventions, there's like interventions, which take quite a bit of time. Nudges are ways that you can shape your environment in subtle ways to just be to make it more likely that you'll take some one behavior instead of another. This can be as simple as like, I place apples at eye level on my shelf and put the cookies on the highest shelf. This actually makes meaningful difference for your food choices, right? That's a nudge. And we can do nudge-based interventions for our smartphone use.

All right, let's take a look at what people have been saying. Um, Polish people also hate transit talk, but I just decide to be that guy and it's always great. [laughter] The pronunciation is about right. Okay, cool. It's not a real world anyway. A real word anyway. I see. All right. How many devices do you have? Even with my Windows 11 work notebook, which is like 70% of DNS requests, it's about 60,000 in 24 hours with about 15 devices. Huh. Okay. Mhm. Nice bag. Oh, I is that that must be from the other camera. This is my girlfriend's bag. 10 million is a lot. Did you have logs enabled? Recently found out if you block all Samsung domains. recent Tyizen tries to reconnect three times per second. Same for Samsung sound bars, but one TV plus one soundbar is 1 million. Okay. Yeah, we need to I've been on this attention kick for a while and I probably will be for some time, but clearly there's a need to explore a little further on this channel and in this community like data hygiene and and data privacy stuff because people don't know that Samsung soundbars are sending out that many queries. Like that's nuts. I didn't know that, right? Like there should not be that much data flowing out of your home. I would love to do an audit like um if like if we could as a community start reporting on what devices are sending out what data, doing these analyses on devices, that would be really cool.

Okay. How is your day structured? Mine? Well, um, on work days, so that's Monday to Wednesday, I basically I wake up, uh, usually around 7 and then I do like I I'll make my coffee, I do a little meditation, I journal for a bit, and then I log into work at about 8. Um, I usually from that point do like half an hour of planning about what I'm going to do and what needs to be done. Then I do two to three hours of coding. That's like my big contribution for the day. Um, and then take lunch, do some learning. Very often I'll I'll like spend some time learning about a technology we use, learning about AWS, learning about Linux. Um, because I think it's really important to constantly be like developing your skills and that's valid use of of work time as far as because like it makes me a better employee. And then I'll do I'll like and then usually some code review and stuff like that. That usually brings me to about 4. Um I I take breaks every now and then, you know, grab a coffee, go for a short walk if I need to think through a problem, stuff like that. My lunch is about an hour and then after that I do a lot of reading and vibing and stuff. That that's my general day. I leave my evenings fairly unstructured. I I like to have a very structured morning. Um, probably the most structured thing I do is like my my journaling meditation routine. Uh, because I'm a very anxious [laughter] very anxious person. Um, and so the journaling like I do gratitude journaling and I do um I do just like mindfulness meditation and that makes a really big difference for me. Um, and I find when I don't do it I I I'm much more susceptible to stress. So I kind of have to do that. I need to work back in some exercise. Okay.

Um, what else are we doing? What else are we doing today? I don't know. I feel like it's been a while since I've had a chance to chat with you all. How How have you all been? Let's grab this. Throw this over here. That's why I started to poke around because my hard drive was full. Hm. Also, thoughts on this new Monday time slot. I I'm I think I'm I prefer it, but I want to make sure it works for people. Oh, I'm getting sound. What the heck? Oh, my last video is playing. Okay, so yeah, there's that. What What else What else are we up to currently stressful for me? your your just your overall experience has been stressful lately. Fair. Fair. It's I feel like in a in the wherever you live, is this also the sort of like holiday season for you? Because I I recognize that that can be pretty stressful for quite a few people. Um, what do we want to do? I'm going to start diving through some more of this. Let's jump back over here. So anyways, I think my next video is going to be looking through some of this. Great time in Sweden. 22:30 right now. Ah, is what? Um, I feel bad. I have to jump back to like AM PM. Canada is such a mishmash of American and and European um what do what do I want to call them? Not traditions, but that too. Uh, like systems. Like we use the metric system for most things and then I'm like yeah but I'm 5 foot 11 and it's like why are we not just using the metric system for everything here in Canada? I find it frustrating. 10:30. Yeah. Can't find time for my side projects. I help my family business 5 5 a.m. till night. I work on my master's degree. Need to find time for the gym and don't have much free time. Damn, that is a lot. That is a lot of work. Um damn. Cheers from Argentina. Hello. Hello. Welcome. Doing incredibly well. Finished a slower day of work, but feeling great since I've achieved a nice config on my phone for better focus. Nice. Awesome. Tired mentally and physically. Yeah, I mean, given what you're talking about, that is a that is a big workload and I I don't think you can be blamed for feeling that way. That's that's quite a bit.

Um, what do I want to go through? I've been thinking about. So, for those of you who don't know, let's let's jump over here. Just gonna sign in off screen just in case. Is it this one? Use pass key. Boom. Um, my friend Nick and I have been working on this guy, the 30-day cohorts app. Um, do I have a version of this? Yes, I think I do. which is basically what we're trying to do is scaffold a series of interventions um throughout the 30-day cohort like program um by just giving you a bunch of like forms and and and reflection pieces to uh to sort of work through. So, if we hop over, it's it's very much a work in progress, but we're hoping we can get this done by January. We moved at first we thought we could hit December. That was ambitious. [laughter] Um, is it just this should work. I think I've got this on just local host. Is it 8,000? No, I think I've got this on 3,000. No. Yellow. Is it not quite up yet? H. Let's take a look. Yes. Honestly, um if you like as much as it would be I wish I could do something to you know help with the workload and situation you're sort of under but definitely at the very least reflecting on the positive things you're doing can be helpful. I know that can often feel like a non-answer when you're extremely stressed but um hopefully that's helpful. Teased a co-orker from the US for not using metric SI units. Not. Now he's using Kel Kelvin when we talk about temperatures. Your friend is funny. That's That's such a fun way to deal with that. [laughter] Okay. What? I think it's just Is it just that this variable is missing? Let's do a get pull. What? I don't remember altering these. What am I going to do? I think I'm just going to stash and then pull. I'm already up to date. Okay, cool. Um, then let's do this off screen a little bit. Just make sure that my N I mean this shouldn't matter, but I want to make sure [laughter] not [snorts] the demo effect. Yeah, truly. I mean, I think anyone who's uh been a part of this stream for a while knows that they're not they're not coming here to get a polished experience. Like the meme, I haven't done a lot of like of home labbing for for a while, right? We haven't done the sort of live home lab stuff that I that I started [snorts] the stream with. And we'll get back to it because it's it's always so much fun. Um but it hasn't been kind of my focus lately. Anyways, anybody who's who's been around for that knows that it usually takes me two probably three tries of installing something to get it running. So, [clears throat] yeah. Have you tried turning it off and on again? I did indeed. All right. So, not this. Let's see if it's 8,000. Ha. Okay, cool. So, we're building this out and it's all it's going to be is a dashboard and some forms and some like readings on a schedule to scaffold your experience with the 30-day digital declutter. So, if I if I think my my account should still be okay, we don't have cohorts yet. So, let's let's take a quick look. I think I can do this and then we can set one up. Uh, now for those of you sort of participating if if you plan to. Obviously you're not going to have to do anything in the admin panel. That'll that'll be all us. Uh, let's add a cohort test um unpaid two. the we're planning on releasing the first cohort as an as like u zero payment, but you know, if you would like to, it's sort of like donation based or something like that to fund the servers that we're going to need and all of that jazz. Um, and then in the future it'll be paid for, but if people have like sort of justifiable financial circumstances, we'll slip them a code to run for free. Anyways, what's the date today? It's the 24th. Let's go ahead and start this today and then we'll run run this till December 24th. This is active. This is not going to be paid. No max seats. And we're going to save. So now we should have test unpaid too. Ha. Okay. So we can join this cohort. And then there's an entry survey which needs to be needs to be worked on. This entry survey by the way is going to be based on a number of like valid psychometrics. So for example, if we look over here at the smartphone addiction scale there there is a lot of research that goes into um how to properly assess things to ensure that you're actually assessing what you think you're assessing. And so using these questionnaires that are validated helps a lot. This is the SAS SV, the smartphone addiction scale, short version. It's uh 10 questions or so, I think. And it works. It's basically uh the research standard these days. Um, so you can basic I guess these are the questions. Where is the actual do they have it in the appendix? I guess I guess it's just this guy. Yeah. So, we ask, you know, have you I think it's it's disagree to agree. Missing planned work due to smartphone use. Having a hard time concentrating in class while doing assignments. Um, feeling pain in the wrists or at the back of the neck while using a smartphone. Interesting. Oh. So, it's a set of like standardized questions that you can ask. And so, we're going to build these in so that we we're like basing our work on science. Um, we're also going to measure things like, um, what the heck, let's go here, generalized anxiety. This is one of the things I'm thinking about. The GAD 7 is a seven question um, seven question survey that is the sort of research standard for assessing your feelings of anxiety. Same thing. There's one for depression. And we're going to be assessing all of these things so that once you go through the 30-day cohort, we can actually do some statistical analysis and say, do we see measurable, statistically significant differences between the why is Steam OS launching? I hit I hit all the buttons. Are we seeing actual statistically significant differences between um your problematic smartphone use at the start using the SASS SV as well as your feelings of depression and anxiety and maybe some other metrics from the start of the of the thing to the end of the thing? Um, this could be really cool. So I'm I'm hoping we can make like valid contributions here and partner up with researchers. Could be super fun. Let's game. Let's game. Yeah. So, that's kind of that's kind of where I'm headed. Um, Nick in the chat, Nick B is is uh the other developer on this. We're sort of partnered up um on this work, I guess. And yeah, I don't know. It's it's it's been fun. Let's fill some of this out. And then we should see today's tasks. Profile. No. Ah, we'll have to fix this up. But yeah, also some really cool stuff because obviously in this community we highly value your privacy. Um, you can do all of the reminders are opt in, not opt out for obvious reasons. Um, we have metrics that you can see. Your metrics, anything that we gather, you can see. However, we do caution you not to like overly engage with your own metrics because gamification can be an intentiony thing. And of course, you can export your data and delete your account, which means not like deactivating your account and setting your information in our database to deactivated. It means deleting your data. So, that should be good. When will it be available? I'm hoping January. I'm hoping. It's It's a lot of development work to do. Um, so but as soon as it's ready, I'll I'll I will be pushing. Um, privacy, what are you trying to hide? [laughter] Yes. So hopefully it works. Hopefully it works. I mean, that's that's a that's a silly thing to say. I know that I can't say I know. I have very strong evidence that if we use existing interventions that we know already work based on past studies, there is a very high likelihood that this will help. Right? So that that's I I can't pitch you anything better than that. I know that this worked incredibly well on me. We have a lot of research on interventions, existing interventions, and I'm going to be continuing to read those those papers and studies, staying up to date on that so that we can build the best possible thing we can. Hopefully partnering with real researchers who can also pitch us ideas about how we can intervene and help people the best as best we can. That's that's my game. It's what we're working on. Uh what do we what do we got here? deactivated and deleted Facebook and Instagram. Feeling much better already. That is a huge improvement. Um, just removing those is likely to to cause a decrease of screen like phone screen time of at least an hour. Um, the higher you're starting the the more you're going to dip, but that's yeah, that that's going to be awesome. Uh a random a random stranger. I have exam in two days, but I'm racing Hyperland. What is wrong with me? First- time Hyperland user. I've been there. I've been there. It's just super fun. I love customizing things. Um, what do we got? You have a Discord server? Yes, I do. Let me uh let me drop the link. Let me drop the link. Uh, so we're going to go invite people. Grab this and then drop that there. Screen time down 40% last week already. That's awesome. Congrats, ZFS gang. Hell yeah. Uh I my my NAS is all ZFS-based, which is good. Joining now. Hell yeah. Welcome. Welcome. I'm giving this name a shot. Die Dieut Dieuter. Yeah. No, I'm going to need your help on that one. I do my best to practice pronouncing everybody's name uh the the way they would like. So do not hesitate to give me like a phonetic pronunciation and I will I will give it a shot. What else we got here? As a general idea, a DMZ where most of your land isn't would uh would add a nice layer to prevent small errors from being public problems. My dad has been talking about DMZs a lot. Um that's we're we're both going to be moving to OpenSense. Actually, hold on. I still haven't implemented this thing. I've got this great little great little router device uh from a company called Protectly. And I'm I I still need to set it up, but it's it's comes with Open Sense pre-installed. It's got an N150 processor in it and really nice heat sinky guys going on. Uh, so I'm really looking forward to to configuring this. Um, I just haven't had time. I think maybe maybe my dad and I because we have very similar devices. Maybe we'll do this over the winter holidays because we both have some time off on Christmas. So, this could be good. Um, what else we got in here? What else? Tried to quit all at once and try baby steps. Both failed for me. It's incredibly difficult, which is why we're spending like uh when I say we, I mean we as a community, but then Nick and I building the web app uh and and stuff like that, why we're spending so much time studying and reading the research and hopefully connecting with researchers soon on like figuring out how to help people do this because it it's it's in insanely difficult. It really is. The hardest part is isn't like the first week. It's it's always the sixth week and the seventh week, right? Because those interventions start to fail. So, yeah, I will be going on an exchange for a few months and leaving my community for a while. I wonder how that will affect my ability to stay off the shitty things in media. Seems like a hard one. Yes, that that I imagine will will be quite difficult unless you can find a way to like meet some people that you enjoy hanging out with in person there or and supplementing that time with like making phone calls and video calls back to your loved ones at home. I think that'll help a lot. FreeBSD gang says, "Little bro, [laughter] I I'm looking forward to having something FreeBSD based in my system again." Um, sorry, network, right? Because I I ran free FreeBSD for a while. I I love the the unity of BSD systems, but I haven't had the time to run one, so I'm looking forward to that. Uh, Alone, Alone, Alexandros, hello, welcome, welcome. Okay, so BM Rollo, you have some experience with these protectly routers. That is good to know. Plus says, installed OpenSense on VS vs vere today. Did the beginner's error of downloading the image BZ 2, but tbh they really hide the ISO. Ah, wasn't allowed to name the VM? Really? It did. Oh, is it is this um is this something you were doing at work or is this like within your own network? Alone. Alexandro says, "Good thing about Mac OS is that screen time app sucks, so it's always wrong." Is it really? I didn't realize that. I've turned my spare laptop into a file sharing server since I use more than four to five systems. Just sharing files are dumb are a dumb idea, I think. What are other use cases? Well, first off, I think there's some really cool stuff, right? I think file sharing is a great place to start. Um, then getting into getting into just like dockerizing stuff. I like Adguard because ads suck and it feels nice to have fewer ads, right? So, Adguard's like kind of a nice thing to just start with. Um, and then if you have space on like a .naz or even up to two terabytes is enough to start, you can start doing jellyfin stuff. Uh, and that's a lot of fun. It's sick. Ultimately, I hope to move my lab, my home lab to FreeBSD with Jails instead of Docker. I was reading about jails. Apparently, jails were out like quite a while before Docker. Um, but I guess it makes sense, right? Cuz like the Croup thing was in the in the atmosphere for a while. like people were thinking about isolation through crgroups um for a while. Is it croups? I think so. And so it makes sense that multiple instantiations of that concept came out, right? Uh I don't really care as much for screen time. I just want to be more intentional with the content I'm consuming, not just mindlessly doom scrolling for hours a day. Yes, I agree. Um so I I talk about screen time. This comes up a lot, right? They're like, "Well, is all screen time is equal?" And I think in general the the intuitive answer is no, right? Not all screen time is equal. If your screen time on your phone is 2 hours because you had a long video call with your grandma, that's that's a lovely that's a lovely two hours, right? Nobody's like you wasted your time calling your grandma. If they do, that person's an [ __ ] [laughter] But uh two hours spent on TikTok is obviously not beneficial. Um, but screen time still makes for a reasonable metric that correlates with problematic smartphone use, right? It's really difficult to spend 6 hours on your phone, all six hours of which are valuable. Um, there comes a point where you're like, "Yeah, this is we're clearly past a point where all of this can be useful." But yes, yeah, not all screen time is equal. Adgard home for the win. Hell yeah. This was for work running libvert and proxmox at home. Yes. So you made the switch over to Proxmox. I I remember when we were when we you know earlier on in the streaming days you were talking about exploring Proxmox and how you were running primarily primarily libvert. When did you make the switch again? I forget. We'll give OpenStack a try when memory gets is OpenStack is is OpenStack the one that's like kind of like an AWS like self-hosted AWS type of thing. Is that what I'm thinking of? What else we got? I tried declutter four weeks ago, but I bounced back. How do I get back to it? Um, how [snorts] do you get back to it? It's a really good question. Well, first off, [sighs and gasps] Omar's lock [clears throat] screen keeps launching. Um, first off, I recommend I've got this like form signup sheet. So, we we'll be running we'll be running a scaffolded thing soon. Um, and that's going to be very helpful, I think. I think. However, so you can um submit that Google form and I will like email out when we run the supported scaffolded uh digital declutter. However, if you want to run one, let's say over the holidays, maybe it might be a good idea to start with something small. Um, so I recommend just some of the nudges. For example, setting your phone to black and white can be is a surprisingly effective thing. Turning off your notifications except for like vital things because you can make it so that your phone only notifies you if like your five favorite people text you or call you, whereas like Facebook can't send you notifications. That can be super helpful. Um, so maybe some of these like small tips might help. What do we got? Personally, I use Google Docs a lot. I I was thinking if there was any way to use the app and store the files on my server. However, as an Obsidian user, I have already put my vault on the server. Uh you might then be interested in ah man, I forget what it was. There was um it's not next cloud cuz that's not I haven't heard great things, but there's an open-source I wish I had it on the tip of my tongue. I will I will think about that. Adding to the previous question, I haven't actually tried digital decluttering. Only watch the videos. Fair enough. Well, then maybe you maybe you'll find a lot of value in the the upcoming January uh

run of the cohorts because I think it'll be good. Um, I will be making some videos in the meantime to prep the audience, prep the community, start equipping them with some of the things that might help. Um, but yes, start small. Turn off your notifications. Either uninstall or hide social media apps and then set your phone to black and white. Those three things can make a very big difference. Try starting there.

Um, what do we got? As a person who failed many times, try and fail different things until it works, but never quit trying. Yes, I also agree with that. Remember, like in my last video, I talked about this. It took me five years to get to the point where I'm at now. So I want to show, yes, cloud is not great. [laughter] Um, I want to show this so that people understand that this is this is real, right? Like I'm not, I'm not lying here. How do I? Okay, hold on. Okay, maybe we can do it like this. I'm gonna pop over here. This. Okay. So, there we go. That's my, that's my screen time. It's 12 minutes. 12 minutes a week or sorry, a day. Um, but prior to that, prior to my like 50-day declutter that I sort of made my YouTube about, right? My YouTube video about, it was it was at about 2 hours. Um, and I brought it down from six. So, big difference. Um, but it took it took all those years to get there. It takes time and practice.

Uh, open office I think might have been might have been the one. Arone will fix that. Libra office sync thing. I love sync thing. Sync thing rocks. Um, switch to proxmock went proxmox went smoothly. Only two setups. Okay. So, it's not just me, you know. It, it like greatly comforts me to know that it also took you two shots. [laughter] First one was ZFS on SSD but got afraid of right amplification, back to XT4. PBS is great. Okay, what's PBS? I should have shown the 12 minutes of screen time in the last video because I got some people being like, "Oh, so you didn't actually do this." And I was like, "What? What do you mean?" So, in my next video, I'll definitely be like, "No, I I did this. I I really did."

Um, so yeah, completely cutting off doesn't feel like the right choice. What do we got? Deleted Twitter today. Only lasted five days there, but like there is some value in checking Blue Sky from time to time, and I really do appreciate when I talk to people in Discord. Yes. So, I mean, obviously, I'm not saying quit all internet communication because I'm here, right? I I run a Discord. I I run this YouTube channel. Um, I I highly value what we do as a community, but there are there are healthy patterns of use and negative patterns of use. And I think we're it can be very surprising how, um, how much we think is like healthy patterns of use turn out not to be. Like I've never been a Twitter user or a Blue Sky user. So, take my opinion with a grain of salt. But I think like a lot of people use Twitter for example to stay up to date on news. I think in general, stay the the goal of staying up to date on news is a good one, but it can be better served by slower forms of media. Right? You might be better off getting a newsletter weekly about the things you're interested in and spending your Saturday morning reading 30 minutes of newsletter as opposed to like checking in on Blue Sky or or on Twitter, which can often be very like shallow takes that are emotionally charged because it's part of the attention economy. Now, that's that's my broad generalization. I'm not saying that you don't have any meaningful way to engage with Blue Sky, right? You may be doing something that I'm not aware of that you find really valuable. Um, still there are ways to sort of like change the way we interact. For example, with your smartphone on you at all times, it's really easy to create some sort of like behavioral patterns of just checking, just constantly checking. Whereas, if you take it off your phone and engage with Blue Sky through your through your desktop computer, you're much less likely to have some sort of like behavior that interrupts your life form. So, there are ways that we can sort of like still gain access to things we care about while avoiding some of the behavioral patterns that we don't like.

Proxmox backup server. Ah, okay. Okay. Gotcha. I've heard really good things about Proxmox backup server. I just haven't set it up yet. Maybe I should. I I should definitely do that. I should definitely do that. Um, also really curious about your ZFS um, write amplification stuff because like I've been in a number of situations where I've tried a new file system and and wished that I was on XT4 because not because not necessarily because there's a a feature that I miss or I miss the way XT4 works, but because I have an intuition about how XT4 works. I grew up on Windows and there are like just basic patterns like when I delete a file I expect there to be hard drive space opened up whereas on ButterFS that's not the case. If you delete files, you still have snapshots with those files in them. You're not actually clearing up hard drive space. Then you have to do a defrag and then you get you have to clear the snapshots, defrag, and then you get hard drive space. I made this mistake and my hard drive filled up and my computer was unusable for a bit and I had to do a bunch of learning. Um, I often miss my intuition about I think they're journaling, journaling file systems. Um, as you can tell my file system knowledge is weak. Um, and so I often miss being on XT4. So I'm I'm curious about this one this one thing about right amplifications. Was it that ZFS was just doing way more writes than XT4 would have?

Uh, what do we got? My screen time is 1 to 1.5 hours and it feels like nothing. That, I mean, that's that's pretty low. Like you're probably not engaging with problematic smartphone use very much at all, right? Like if you were to take one of these surveys, it's in my mind, grain of salt always. Um, very unlikely that you're suffering from problematic smartphone use at that level. Right now. You could have screen time on other devices and that might be problematic. Or it may not be problematic, but you may enjoy using that time on other things more. That's what I found, right? Like at the 1 to 2 hour range that I was in, I'm probably not exhibiting too many features of problematic smartphone use. However, when I freed up that time, I found I enjoyed my time more. So, just because something isn't problematic or an addiction doesn't mean that we can't live in a way that's that we prefer, right? We can't have a different lifestyle that we like better. That's the way I like to think about it.

Um, what do we got? So, if I'm listening to a clip about Linux with my phone in my pocket, that's no problem. Yes, that that's another problem with screen time, right? Because like you're still being inundated with information while you're listening to podcasts. And again, I love podcasts. They rock. Um, but we do have to consider, do you do you have sufficient time to sit with your thoughts? That's a very important and healthy thing to do. Um, and if we're using podcasts to sort of like crowd out our thinking, our own thoughts, that can be problematic.

What do we got? I also really love having an RSS feed. I have put Bear Blog in there. Really cool blogging site and I read random posts sometimes. It's quite nice. No algorithm, just random people yapping. That does sound nice. Plus one on using social media via a browser. Yeah, huge improvement. Also, when you're in the browser, there are extensions that you can use to change the interface and remove addictive UI elements. Um, especially with block zapping to remove crap like shorts, trending pages, etc. Yes, you get it. You get it. Um, nice to read when waiting for stuff. Yes, I agree. Um, for a while I kept a like books on my phone as well, so I could just like whoop I I'll just do a quick read. Um, I work from home these days though, so I don't have a lot of opportunity for that to matter and I just uh I keep my book with me. I'm currently I'm currently reading Frankenstein and loving it. This book rocks. So anyways, I'll have to take out uh take a look at Bear Blog though. That sounds sounds cool.

Copy on write file systems have no RAID hole, but the trade-off is a write log. And this write log is one right more than in place. Not a problem on conventional hard drives, but SSDs don't like it. Oh, hey Jake. Uh, I used Twitter via a browser on my phone for the past like four-ish years. Better experience than the app. I recently closed the Twitter tab and felt so much better for the past month. Hell yeah. It's it's like it's it is astonishing what happens. Um, Jake, by the way, I'm going to give you a call sometime just to catch up cuz I'm doing calls now with friends and I would I I miss you. Um, and having a RAID write hole on SSDs is a luxury problem.

Okay. Extensions. Extensions. Huh. I should install Firefox on my phone. Nice. This guy understands it. We logged in. You know, other browsers don't get extensions. Yeah. Yeah. With the whole Chrome um what is it? Manifest v3 thing. I have no idea what's going on with all that, but I am definitely making a move back to Firefox. I moved to Chrome because of the availability of extensions. So, I'm on Chromium. Chromium is also the default on Omari. Um, and then on my MacBook, I use Safari because I I like defaults. Whenever possible, I like to use defaults. But yeah, I want to move to a hardened Firefox. Um, maybe make a video on hardening Firefox and like using different search engines and stuff like that just for like data hygiene would be really fun. Um, love that and miss you too. Excellent. Good. Okay, then we'll definitely call.

Um, I think you mentioned Philosophize This. When you declutter, you can finally read those books he talks about. I finally read "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and had a great time. Yes, exactly. When Philosophize This did an episode on Frankenstein and I thought, damn, that sounds really cool. And so I actually got to read it. I also read "The Myth of Sisyphus" and and and loved that. Um, I've been a fan of like Albert Camus's. The podcasts he did on Albert Camus as well as Dostoevsky. I'm realizing that I have like existentialist vibes. Um, and so it was really nice to read those. Yeah, very curious how Ladybird will progress. Yes, me too. Try Zen. What is Zen? Oh, Zen the browser. Um, I did try it once. I was I was lukewarm on it. Maybe I'll give it another shot. I'm actually rocking Safari on my Mac because I got tired of browser wars. Yeah. Yeah, I'm I'm I'm on Safari on on Mac as well.

>> [sighs and gasps] >> Brave bypasses the Manifest v3 stuff. I might be wrong though. I I do use so I keep um Brave on my Mac as well because Safari sometimes just doesn't work. They just don't build stuff to work on Safari very often. So yeah, I'm also using Chrome on my phone because most mobile browsers browsers kind of suck. Oh wow, 40 concurrent viewers. The gang is all here. How's it going team? Um, Brave on mobile is pretty solid. Takes a bit to configure, simplify, but worth the setup time. Yeah, so this is this is one of those like things I I've done that's just like wacko levels of uh dumb down my phone. So Brave for the hub. [laughter] [gasps]

Um, so it turns out I'm going to switch cameras here. We're going to go this guy. I will get a better desk view soon. I have a camera dedicated to it. Um, actually, would you all bear with me for a second? I if I take about 5 minutes, I think I might be able to get a desk view running. Uh, and I'll just keep yapping as I do it. Maybe we'll give that a shot. Uh, let's take a look. What do we got? Now that you're reading more, I recommend looking into a Kobo. I do. I do have a Kobo actually. Um, cuz I'm I mean, I wanted to be off of I wanted to be out of Kindle. Um, and I I gave my Kindle to my mom. So I'm on Kobo. I want to do the Kobo um what's it called? Calibre. Calibre web. The Kobo Calibre web thing. Cuz that looks super cool. Very like data privacy. Very I own my media type of thing. So very much in line with this community self-hosty. I'm um that's going to be exciting. But I I just I love physical books. Like they just they feel good. I love turning a page. Um, but Oh, actually here. This is my Kobo. Love this thing. Um, what do I got? Yes. Have backup Chromium browser seems to be useful. I used to always rock Safari on work machines because as a web app dev, no one else used Safari and Safari specific bugs would sneak in all the time that no one else would catch. Yeah, if I were a better person, I would I would do my development on the Windows machine at work so that I could catch all the Windows errors. Um, but I'm I don't I'm not going to be a martyr. I'm not going to use Windows just to find those those bugs. But yeah, I hear you.

Uh, Andre Sanu says, "Hey, I'm new." Hello. Hello, welcome. We love new people here. How are you doing? We are uh we're just chatting about a mix of home lab and attention stuff and data privacy and it's been a really good time. I I I've been a little bit away from the community for a while and and I'm I'm having a great time catching back up with everybody. What else we got? The fact that mobile browsers don't have extensions is such a scam. Yes, that's some [ __ ] [laughter] And they're they're like not as easy to use at the very least. Uh, extensions do suck on Safari generally. Would you please soon make a video about your minimal iPhone setup? Yes, I'm I'm really trying hoping to make that either this week or next depending on cuz I really want to get an interview with this particular researcher and I'm hoping I can hear from him soon. Um, cuz yeah, that would that would be super exciting. Uh, we'll see. We'll see. Yes, that they work as well as League of Legends on Wine, huh? Or at least I didn't make them work. H Oh, wine. Ah, yes. League of Legends does not work well on wine. What a shame.

Physical books rip, especially from a library. Makes the book feel more meaningful. Yes, I love I love my physical books. They do they just like I like having them in my bookshelf. I've been thinking about This is a weird thought. So bear with me for a second, but um a lot of my research when I was doing research and I I feel the need to say this every time. I don't have a PhD. I dropped out. Okay? So like do not associate me with doctoral levels of of knowledge. But when I was doing my research, a lot of it had to do with nudges, right? We talked a little bit earlier about how you can shape your environment to be conducive to different kinds of behaviors like having the healthy foods at eye level and putting the cookies on the top of the shelf leads to an actually statistically significant difference in how much time you spend eating apples versus cookies. Kind of insane, right? And so I've been conceptualizing physical media as a nudge to think about the kinds of things that you like thinking about. So when you only have streaming services like Netflix for example, you don't have an environment filled with the media that you love, right? Because there's nothing to put on your shelves. There's no movies on your shelves that like, oh, I remember that time I watched this movie with my loved ones. Or like, oh, I you see Frankenstein on your shelf and you're like, ah, yes, the the terrors of romanticism, right? Like all of these things. I've been thinking about physical media in your environment as a nudge to make you continue thinking about things you find interesting and how not having those things in your space might change the way you think or or make your thoughts feel less interesting to you or or less your own. I haven't developed the thought very much yet, but I think it'll be I think it'll be part of a YouTube video I make when I get into like when I talk about Jellyfin. Should be kind of kind of fun.

The more I read about philosophy, the attention economy, etc., the more I feel like I have to get involved in politics. Do you? Oh, this is So, one of my weird traits being in the space is I tend not to engage in politics um or or political discussion very much. Um that's not because I don't believe politics matter. It's because I think I'm not shaped well for it. Like, I don't think I have the right mindset for it. And instead I like to focus primarily on the things I can do to help the individual or the local or like a small community. Uh which is why the cohorts and why the YouTube videos the way that they are. And then my hope is that by helping those people I'm also empowering them to take on some if they're so inclined some sort of political stance and and do it that way or and then the other thing is maybe by connecting people to research uh we can improve the research which will be useful in some sort of legislative action like a belief of mine is that it's nuts that we allow knowing full well that there are UIUX patterns that are addictive by design on purpose and political action to address. I don't know if I'm the guy for that, but I hope that maybe I inspire the guy for that or the person rather would be a much better way to phrase that. I don't know if I'm the person for that and I don't think and I but I hope that maybe the person for that becomes a member of this community and I can help them. That's the way I think about it. Um I I'm also very concerned about like political discussion in online spaces tends to be like highly inflammatory and attention capturing and so I disengage from it on in spaces like Twitter because I don't think a lot of productive stuff can happen in that space. Whereas if I do become politically engaged at some point, it'll be in person somehow. It'll be at the very least organized through video calls. Um making legislative action like organizing actively, not through like not through social media. That's my take. But it's a very like not well thought out take yet, right? This is a very fledgling stance here.

Um, I can't keep minimal home screens for long enough because I because God I love Material You icons. [laughter] Added my intro to the Discord. Thank you for the invite. Like, oh, welcome. I'm glad you're here. Uh, finally caught a live stream while it's live. Welcome. Welcome. A random stranger says, "You kind of look like Tens." I get that a lot. I get that a lot. Ten. I think Tens is Southeast Asian. I'm I'm half Filipino, so I'm like part Southeast Asian, so maybe there's some of that. And yeah, I I've got that same kind of like roundish baby face. [laughter] So yeah. Um, plus one on politics are also relatively dividing and time consuming to catch up and form on. Yeah. Plus says, "I have to admit as soon as the stream's over, I'll probably install the Indiana Jones Order of Giants DLC in a Proton bottle and spend way too much time playing it." If you're having fun, have at it. I I heard the Indiana Jones game was actually pretty good despite being like a huge performance hog. Um, and being like very Nvidia favored, but I might be wrong about that. Uh, Valorant won't run there. They actively detect it and use anti-cheat as an excuse, but in the end we use Linux because it doesn't allow such rootkits. Yeah, I'm glad to have been able to quit League of Legends. Um, that's a big change in my life, which it sounds like silly, right? But like, yeah, quitting League has been really big. I do um I might want to start like Discord board game nights or something with some of my friends cuz I do see them in person, but there are times where I'm just like I just want to call them and catch up as a group. Uh, it's like my my group of childhood friends. Uh, we used to play games online a lot. Now we hang out in person more often, but it would be nice to to be able to just pull up on like a Sunday night. Play play an play an hour of like the Settlers of Catan online game could be fun. Something like that.

Has the new Steam hardware been mentioned yet? No. I can't believe we haven't talked about that. The new Steam hardware looks awesome. I know. I know it's probably going to be kind of underpowered and it's probably going to be a thousand USD, but I'm still really excited about a Steam box console like thing. I'm really excited about it. Uh, cuz I think it's going to be really important for Linux adoption. I think there's just going to be I mean the Steam Deck already has been, right? But I think there's just going to be a lot more people who have a Linux machine because they bought a Steam box and they're like, "Well, but it's also a computer, so I use it for work." And now like open-source development is incentivized to make better UIUX, uh, more accessible UI, all of that. Yeah, TTS Board Game Night was a co classic indeed. I'm aware that Valorant doesn't run in Linux anymore. I was trying to play an acquired game, Expedition 33. I have the same problem with Valorant. I only use Windows because of it and I wish I could just get rid of it completely. Also because Arch hates me and Nvidia GPUs. [laughter] Yes. Um, okay. So, I'm running Arch with an Nvidia GPU and that's been working really smoothly. I would take a look at like Nobara, for example. Handles Nvidia really nicely. Um, but yes, Valorant, anything Riot shaped is just doomed on Linux. So, that's unfortunate. Um, and I I get it, right? Like sometimes you hear these like kind of snarky comments where they're like somebody's like, "Oh, I would love to switch Linux, but it doesn't have League of Legends." And they're like, "Linux is actually just better for not having League of Legends." And it's like, "Okay, kind of." Like, yeah, but also I like this game and I play it with my friends, right? It's not this simple situation. And I'm not switching to Dota. [ __ ] hate Dota. [laughter] But [snorts] yeah, um, it would be amazing if Valve made Linux popular. Yes, it would. It would be super exciting. Super excited for the Steam Frame. A good VR headset that stands alone. That's a standalone Linux box without being tied to Meta. Want to use it on plane rides for watching movies. That does sound like a cool use case. Sounds really fun. Um, Gabe Cube. That's good. U 7600X. good enough for a decent experience. But what I like the most about it is reference implementation of Steam OS on desktop hardware. Yes. Yes. Yes. A reference implementation of Steam OS is going to be really good. I Yeah. The 7600X is not going to be powerful enough for me to have a lot of fun.

Okay, hold on. I'm going to grab some more water cuz I'm I'm I'm my my throat is parched. And then I want to talk I want to talk about my gaming setup cuz now that I get to now that I get to game again, I'm done my 50-day declutter, right? Now that I get to game again, I'm really excited to game, but my gaming setup is super fragile and I I need to fix it. So, I want I want some advice. I want to talk about this um and see where we get cuz I think that there's some something really cool happening.

Subscribed and you're insulting my most played Steam game, these League of Legends players. I don't like Dota. I respect people who like Dota though. You can love your game and I can love mine. I like I take this very general stance of like I'll happily say what I like and don't like, but that doesn't mean that I think that something's bad, right? You I can hate things or dislike things that aren't that are good. And and and often I like things that are bad like League of Legends or like um I love shitty movies like uh Sharknado. Oh, I love the Sharknado series so much and it's a terrible set of movies. So, if I say I don't like something that you like, it's not because I think I have superior taste or I'm putting down your taste. Uh, chances are my taste is actually terrible.

Okay. Also, I want to show something off. We built this last stream. Is it this one? Is it this one? Is it this one? Oh, it's this one. Okay. Check this out. I I love this thing. If we go >> [laughter] >> Okay, I'll be right back. [snorts] Oh, forgot my cup of water. >> [laughter] [snorts] >> I'm back. Okay. Isn't that thing fun? I love it. Okay. What What do we got here? Um, [snorts and laughter] I've been playing some Dota since League stopped working on Linux, but why is a character's W in Dota stronger than Kun's alt? Yes, Dota's power is wild. Um, I just couldn't get a handle of it. Got a 9070 XT plus 78 7600X3D rig and the 7X600 3D is not the bottleneck. Okay, cool. Yeah, I think I think the Steam the Gabe Cube, we're going to call it the Gabe Cube. A couple of other acronyms I really like. My dad calls WSL, the Windows Subsystem for Linux, Weasel. That needs to stick as part of the community. And honestly, if somebody could generate a little icon for that at Weasel, that would be really funny. So, that that's another one that needs to stick. What's a [sighs] It was another one he mentioned earlier, but uh yeah, what do we got? Just play Stardew Valley and call it a day. Sharknado. I watch all of those with my I love Sharknado. So dumb. So fun. Insane ASCII art. Yes. So, um I didn't build as aquarium. All we did was add the be right back part. Uh, I might mess with it some more. I've never done Perl scripts before. Um, but Perl's kind of fun to mess with. As it was described to me, it's kind of like a slightly more sane bash. Currently on my intentional consumption journey and found that playing games has been a great redirection from doom scrolling habits. I mainly indulge in single player experiences. Yes, I agree. I'm going to make a video on video games and doom scrolling at some point. Um, cuz I do very much think of especially like really good single player games. I think of that as just engaging with a narrative and that's I think good for you. You're doing some problem solving. You're having fun. You're engaging with leisure, you know, like those. I don't think those are bad things and and also there's an entire community around say Dark Souls for example um which which that community really believes and I say it believes not to say that I doubt them but I I haven't explored it myself right so I say believes really believes that they're getting positive mental health outcomes from engaging with Dark Souls I think that's perfectly possible and I would love to read up on it and see if there's been some literature Because yeah, like I I think at the very least playing a single player game that you really like, engaging with it, it might be flow-inducing, which we know is good for the sense of meaning in life and overall well-being. How could that be worse than doom scrolling, right? I think that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Uh, what do we got? So anyways, that's that's my response to you, Jay Cozy. I think I think yeah I think playing single player games can in many situations be much better than doom scrolling.

Purple purple says, "Nathan, do you think that having something like a Steam machine out in family area like living room be more beneficial than a PC in a bedroom? I think this would force me to wait until evenings to play." Um, yes. Depending on your family situation and and your like what your home life is like, it could be really positive for you. Um, cuz one, it could could introduce useful boundaries if you feel like you're playing too much, but also like let's say you have siblings or something. Um, somebody might sit on the couch and watch you play and you might turn that isolating uh that something that might be isolating into something that's like social and that might be really nice. Uh, Zenute says, "I would get mad at my at most recent champions in League, but looks like I get mad at all heroes in Dota 2. Probably because I feel like the items are the most broken thing." Yeah, I feel that. Modern League of Legends champions are just wild. And Dota 2, the item effects are so insane. [snorts] I also see games as a more intentional way to spend time as opposed to YouTube, especially something like a Steam Deck versus a PC. Yes, I in general agree with that. Um, yeah. Yeah. Picking up my Steam Deck or emulation handheld has been so refreshing. I have small moments of victory when I choose to pick up a game versus my phone, which helps. I like that. Hey, Nick. Welcome back. So, when are you setting up the new camera? It feels like you're getting distracted. I am getting distracted. Let's see if we can give this a shot. So, yes, let's try this. So, I'm going to see if I can bring you with me at least a little. I have my synth in the living room, so I will actually use it. Nice. Those videos about Dark Souls and mental health improvement have also appeared on my home feed. Yeah, I'm very interested in it. I think I I mean I think there's something there because there is a sense of Dark Souls is hard, right? And so I could see a very reasonable argument for conquering Dark Souls as a way to develop some sense of self-efficacy if you don't have much to begin with. Um, so it could be really good for you. Been down the rabbit hole. Okay. Been down the rabbit hole. Bought a ThinkPad T14 Gen 2. Installed a marching then on my phone. Installed the before launcher. Ditched the PC for ROG Ally. I'm much more present with my family and myself. I love that. That's awesome. Rookie coach AFL. Nice. Juan says, "Just subbed to say that a ton of people are thinking of Steam Machine as a PC, but it's more consoles, so FSR at six will look great." Nice. I'm planning to put a sketchbook beside my work laptop instead of my phone so that I reach to draw instead of to check notice while when feeling frustrated. Yes, this is very much in line with like the Nudge literature and I think there's a there's a pretty decent chance that could be successful.

>> Okay, I hope this cable is long enough. We'll find out shortly. All right. Just playing with focus here now. This might work. This might work. Let's try test bench. [laughter] Okay, so we have desk view. It's out of focus, though. So, let's see if we can get that that fixed up. Can you all still hear me and everything? We're all good. I I also don't have a dummy battery for this yet, so it's it's something. Spend more time with a handheld with single player games. H [clears throat] Okay, let's see. Why is Whoa. That was not the intention. Okay. Function. What we doing over here? Okay, so you're still just getting you're getting that which is good. This This is out of focus, right? I'm not I'm not tripping. We're good. That's okay. I'm going to move this over here. Yeah, that's Is it that is is it just that the sensors, dude? I use un unin because of you and it disables live stream chat. I had to disable it to type this. Yeah, there's um yeah, there there's some work that needs to be done on some of these extensions. U I'm hoping to maybe that I mean I would love one day to build one ourselves as a team. Um, that satisfies all of the needs we're thinking about. We'll see see how that goes. Okay. How can I get how can I get this thing to focus? Focus cancel. Why are you canceling my focus? I want you to focus. I'm just playing around with this now. Oh, okay. Focus mode. Continuous autofocus. Okay. But we're in focus now, right? Let's go. Okay. What do we got? Um, okay. My friend group and I decide this week that we are no longer going to play Roblox and be more intentional with what games we play together. Roblox feels like it's just devs fighting for your attention now. Interesting. [snorts] Yeah, I often have to turn off my my blockers and stuff momentarily. Uh so like for example if we go desktop we go over here go over to YouTube. So I have uninter often have to do this little pause for 30 minutes fella and then often so I have a I use all of them all at once um to add more friction. So I have like undistracted, unhook, and un unin all at once. And so I'm often kind of like turning them off, turning them on. But it's something. It's something.

Okay, what do we got? You block origin and picking elements to block manually has been the best option for me. That sounds smart. I like that. Don't go off topic in Nathan's stream. This feels out of feels out of focus. Can you lift the book in focus? Tamper Monkey is still my weapon of choice to make websites usable again. I need Oh, I'm using on the wrong camera. I need to take a look at Tamper Monkey. You've brought that up a number of times and I haven't taken the time to look at it yet, which is like, why haven't I done that? Okay, so we have two. Yes, there are two test benches. There we go. Cool. So, let's see if it focuses a little higher up as well. Okay, I think it might not be able to focus that far. So, I can zoom in, but I can't zoom out any further than that. What tiling window manager is that? I've been itching to switch to one, but it's scary to lose my DE niceties. I use Omari like the So, it's it's just Hyprland, but with a bunch of like um with a bunch of additional configuration, and it's it's it's pretty good. It's pretty good. Using minimal is great for Firefox users. Works on YouTube, Instagram, and Amazon. Okay. Yeah, I'm gonna have to curate a list of things for when I switch over um make the full switch to Firefox as well. I I think on the wiki we'll we'll be creating a list for every browser. Is this the start of the read-along? [laughter] That would [snorts] be fun, wouldn't it?

Okay, so I just wanted to show off um some smartphone features. So, here's my phone. Guess we'll keep it down here like that. Yeah, that works. Okay, I'm just going to bring that off. Make sure that I don't have anything wonky here. So, here's my my screen time. I think just a little lower. Yeah. So, it gets out of focus here. And then I'm getting this problem. This will do. This will do for now. I'll I'll need like a better light source at some point, but this will do. Um, so this is this is my screen time for the last while. 21 12 23 I'm at 6. Um, I don't have ChatGPT on my phone anymore. I I think the AI applications are pretty attentiony, by the way. I think there's something worth being concerned about in that regard. Especially the AI applications that are like trying to be your friend. I think that's that's quite concerning to me. Ah, manual focus. Holy cannoli. Okay. So, yeah. Anyways, this uh I also use applications like ScreenZen. So ScreenZen is nice. You can set a group of applications that you want an intervention for. I have it on my messages. So if I go to messages, it hits me with this, right? And then I go through, it gives me a notification. I have to solve some math puzzles. Well, I wait out the timer, but I always do the math. So, and then I can unlock the application. And then I can go to my messages uh up here. I'm not going to do that because I don't want you all to see my texts. Um, some other really cool features. If we go over to settings and then uh is it under here? Content and Privacy Restrictions. If you go to iTunes and App Store Purchases, you can do that. You can disallow uh you can disallow installing apps. You can disallow um in-app purchases and then you can also go down to Allowed Apps and Features. You can see I've turned off Mail and Safari, so I can't use a browser on my phone. I know that seems kind of nuts, but I was finding that I was I was uh scrolling Instagram on Safari in black and white, and so that wasn't what I wanted to be doing. So, there you go. What do we think? It looked It looked not bad, right? Like that I need some better lighting for that, but I think that'll make for a good good video.

Okay, let's take a look. Tamper Monkey is good. Definitely gives you a sense of control back if you want to build your own blocks. Okay, cool. So, I'll definitely maybe we can share some Tamper Monkey configs that people will want to use. That could work really nicely. Focus is fine. Hyprland is great. I've been using i3 and BSP for like five years and switched to Hyprland a while ago and it's so much better. Yeah, I was an i3 user as well. Uh, Hyprland felt nice. Use GNOME at the time, but I love i3. Probably switching to Sway. Exciting. XFCE. Oh, XFCE has a has a warm place in my heart. Uh, because the Debian's the Debian machines we used at at the University of GE were all like Debian XFCE VMs I think. I'm not sure. Or maybe just Yeah, something like that. It was cute though. Friendliness of AI's makes me feel yucky and I want to keep it that way. Yeah. Yeah. They stress me out. They're they're like too personal. I use ScreenZen for shorts and Insta reels. Nice. Yeah, I'll definitely make a video on ScreenZen. I think it's worthwhile. This was a recommendation from um Nick's partner and it was super useful for me. A lot easier to use than OneSack. So, I'm happy about that. Monochrome is best in slot. Rap racking up screen time by looking at screen time. Yeah. [snorts] Um, Debian is goat. I'm I'm a huge Debian fan. All my servers are Debian. All my servers are Debian. I think Plus is also a big Debian fan. I don't I don't think that. I know that. [laughter] Um, anyways, I'm gonna turn off this camera because I don't have a dummy like power source for it yet, but Oh, I set it to record instead. We have proven that it works. It works well here. I had to replace the test bench. Uh, but I haven't used the test bench in a while anyway, so it's not that big a deal. I didn't do any Linux studying today. [laughter] Dang it. You guys are too interesting. And then I don't do any studying. Grok is much more dry and unfriendly lately and it feels better to use because of that. Interesting. I I've been avoiding Grok because of the Mecca Hitler situations. Also, and and this is like I realize not everyone's going to agree with my stance, and I don't need you to. I I avoid anything produced by Elon Musk personally. Um, right down to Teslas. I I hate the fact that they redesigned handles. Like, we know how handles work. Okay, here's a rant. The the the affordances of handles. We know how they work. They're really obvious and they somehow screwed up handles so that anybody who ever tries to get into a Tesla for the first time is like, "What the how do I why does it what do I how do I I want to grab, but it's flat. it just and [snorts] they just mess with like very useful design patterns for no reason and then I just Anyways, that's my rant. Um, why is this over here? Oh, yes, I needed to make sure that the the focus was good. Okay.

Um, a thing that I can't decide on since my biggest problem is watching YouTube. Am I doing something bad right now? Consuming content about not consuming content. You know what I mean? I think about this a lot because I I recognize that there is a certain kind of irony in all this. Um, at the end of the day, at the end of the day, I don't feel particularly bad about the time we spend together on stream. Um, that's different because like I'm the creator, right? Like I'm the person who's sort of like, you know, but I do think that there's a reasonable amount of like you can spend a reasonable amount reinforcing the the belief and the identity that you're forming around wanting to reduce your screen time and your problematic use. And by participating in this community, as long as it's within a reasonable set of boundaries, I don't I think that's probably net beneficial. That's the way that I think about it. But I understand where you're coming from and I think that's a reasonable critique to to raise. Uh, what else we got? They were old Sun Microsystems boxes. Really? That's hilarious. I'm working on slowly getting rid of all the social media for most RSS can work. I'm hoping to replace YouTube with Jellyfin with Pinch Flat to be more intentional when I'm watching random videos. Nice. Uh, are you going to do Advent of Code this year? Oh, I'm thinking about it. I I want to, but I am also like I've been trying to be more careful about like overloading myself with work lately because like in my heart I'm like, "Oh, I would be so much fun to stream even for just an hour a day doing the Advent of Code stuff." But then you're like, "That's an hour a day. That's a lot to take on." And I have other goals of things I I want to learn. If I were to do Advent of Code, it would be either in Bash or Go. Those would be my two choices. Maybe Python. Um, I think it be could be super fun. And I think maybe as a community a little Advent of Code channel in the home lab section could be really fun. Maybe. And I'll make a quick video because I I like Advent. I think it's a good idea. Uh, AI apps being your friend is the ultimate dream of marketing and I already don't like brands trying to replace human warp. Yes, hard agree. Uh, I've been avoiding Elon things all the time, but I hate to admit it, but Grok is actually a good product. Ah, all right. Good to know. I might have to take another look. I saw a thread of Tesla owners sharing techniques for opening their car doors, and it made me feel insane. Yes, that's nuts. It's It's a door. It has a handle. Just use the handle. Plus, I'm the author of a Tamper Monkey script that replaces news about Elon Musk by pics of puppies and the headline, "Don't worry, nothing happened." on Austrian news sites. I love that. I love that. If you if uh if you ever expand that to work on a couple of other other sites um for a broader audience, I would absolutely make like a little comical video about this. I think that would be super fun.

Chris RM1PN says, "Also, hi, new here. Real fan of your recent content." Ah, well, thank you very much. Welcome. You are more than welcome to join us anytime you like. Uh, AI is pushed currently in my company so it can replace writing code. The long-term goal is that Claude writes and the developer thinks. Yes, that seems to be a fairly common stance these days. Um, we can work on the web app on stream possibly might be good for motivation. That could be fun. I I do find though I just spend the entirety of the time interacting with chat. Like when my when when chat was small, when it was like 10 to 12 of us, I could work on home lab.

projects. But these days, like there's so many interesting streams of communication happening that I'm just like responding.

Um, I would never use AI if I were a Yank like you. With GDPR here in the EU, we at least get the illusion of privacy.

Yeah. I mean, so I'm not from the US. I'm from Canada. And we are at least a kind of middle ground between the US and Europe. Like, in general, we're slightly more, slightly more social programs, slightly more privacy respecting, all better public transit, um, public healthcare. But we're definitely not the GDPR. We do not have GDPR levels of privacy respecting, and uh, that's something that needs to change here.

[snorts] Maybe if it takes me away from something else like family, then it's clear to me. But often it's just me wasting time or fleeing the real world.

What exactly are you referring to there, Dixie? Uh, just so I can understand and respond to you, respond to you the way you deserve by hearing you properly.

If they really push chat control in EU, I will try hard to switch to Signal at least in my family environment. Oh, interesting. Those Danes are a bit mad, but realistically, that law is never getting anywhere.

H, hello M. Dooo M Campos. Is that how I pronounce your name? Hello. New here too. Your video on digital declutter was really interesting. I'm going to try a different approach. Reduce and refocus, but not eliminate.

I, I think I think reduce and refocus is a very good strategy, and there's a lot of stuff, um, a lot of ways that you can make that work for you. So, definitely don't think that you have to do it my way to be like accepted in our community. I've taken a pretty extreme stance because it's, like, partly it's fun for me.

Oh, I just wanted to see. Um, but also I've been like reading this literature for a long time. So I'm kind of like lost in the sauce. [laughter] Sorry about consuming content about not consuming content.

Ah, I see. I see. Most nice people is from Canada. [laughter]

Yeah. [snorts] Maybe if it takes me, ah, like, then it's scared to me. But often it's just me wasting time or fleeing the real world.

I see. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's definitely a way that you can. This happens a lot, and I think about this quite a bit, right? It's easy to replace doing the thing that you want to do with consuming content about doing the thing you want to do, or buying things that make you look like you're doing the thing you want to do. My favorite example is like people who want to start running, but instead of just running, they like buy all the running gear and install Strava. And it's like, but you could have just put on your running shoes and gone, right? Sometimes we can trick ourselves out of doing the difficult thing, uh, and still feeling engaged with that thing by creating an appearance of it. Um, so, yeah, that's that's possible. That's correct, indeed. Excellent. Nice.

Aussie EU application is long overdue. [laughter] I'm glad we got the uh, I'm glad we got the second camera up and running. I've been thinking about doing that for a while. Puts me a little bit closer to finally making some videos about my phone.

Aussies joined Eurovision Song Contest last time when it was in Austria. 10 years later in Austria again. Let's get Canada in. I would love to be a European. Oh my god. If we could get GDPR and some of the, like, a little bit more Europe vibes in Canada, I'm all for it. Cuz, well, nobody wants to be close to the States right now. So, [laughter]

[clears throat] Gearhead here. Only thing lack holding me back is lack of funds. Ah, I feel that. [laughter]

As a recovering productivity bro, Nathan likes going all in on things like reading hard books. Yes, it's true. I do like very often like to take the hardest approach to things. Um, I've been working on it though. For example, I played Elden Ring instead of Dark Souls 1 as my introduction to the Souls likes. Isn't that maybe not May? Yeah, baby steps. Baby steps. [snorts]

Um, tell me about bad neighbors. One of mine invaded another country. Oh god. Yeah. The country of EU welcomes your application. Hang tight for a couple of years.

Ever thought about switching to Android with GrapheneOS? Okay. Actually, this is really interesting. So, first off, yes. Um, and if I can source a Pixel for really cheap, then I, I'll give it a try. Um, we'll see. Uh, I want to talk about something soon and I'll get to it. First, I'm going to answer this. Uh, what is your job? I am my my official title is research engineer. I work at, I work at Autodesk. Um, though, you know, standard disclaimers, none of their opinion. None of my opinions are their opinions and all of that stuff. Like this is my stream. Has nothing to do with all of that. Um, but anyways, um, yes, I basically do some software development, uh, and, um, infrastructure and DevOps things for researchers, and it's pretty fun. I like my job a fair amount. I do some, I do some Linux stuff. I do some AWS stuff, and I do some Python software development. Uh, pretty good, pretty good job.

Um, we actually don't have better data privacy laws in Canada versus the US when it comes to ad targeting and personalization. Uh, yeah, there are, but we do have some benefits. So, like my background being in research, right, is if you're doing research at a Canadian institution, you can't put participant data on servers that are on US soil because of how bad the privacy laws are in the US. So, we have that improvement, but I haven't actually read that much on ad targeting. So, Jake, if you have, if you have some sources, I would love to read some about that. It would be fun.

Um, what do we got? He do nerdy stuff. I do indeed. Isn't the US very state dependent? It is. Um, but yeah, it is. The US is weird. I don't understand the US, so I try not to comment on it too much other than I'm glad I live in Canada.

Um, how much do you work? How do you work? Uh, do you work from home? So, yes, I do work from home. Um, I, I was working full-time, like 9 to 5 for the last 5 months, but my contract recently switched to 3 days a week. Um, 3 days a week, eight hours. So, I've got more time than I used to have. And yes, I do, I do pretty much work from home. So, I, I have a fair amount of extra time. Although, then I put it into this. So, a lot, a lot. I usually end up keeping pretty busy no matter how much I'm like working. I'm always working.

Matthew. Oh, Canada. Hell yeah. Um, okay. What was I going to do? Yes. Okay. I'm really excited about this. So, I want to tell you about something that came up recently. I was approached by a company developing a minimal phone, right? And I am very wary of sponsors and things like that. Um, because I, I don't want to, I don't want to like take a, take some money and make a piece of [ __ ] video and pitch you a product that sucks, right? So, I'm usually, I've turned down every sponsor so far to date. Um, this is the first time that I'm actually excited about a product that they're going to be sending. So, um, the product is called the Sleek Phone. And some of the things that like really sent me good vibes were they didn't reach out asking me to give me a phone and review the phone. They reached out because on team they have a guy who's got a PhD in neuroscience and is interested in developing a distractability index to assess how distractable applications are and potentially publish a paper about this. It then came out after, so we met to discuss this, and then the guy was like, "Yeah, you know, just as a heads up, I'm also working on, I'm like, this co-CEO or co-founder or whatever of this thing called the Sleek Phone. That's why we're building the distractability index." I'm like, "Okay, well, I am interested in minimal phones, obviously, right?" U however, I'm like iffy on, um, the way minimal phones have been recently. Like, I would happily review this, the Light Phone, for example, but I don't think it aligns with the way I view dumb phones being useful or minimal phones being useful. It's also like $800 USD, which is kind of nuts to me. It evokes like sort of, um, kind of [snorts] like I don't know [sighs and gasps] that kind of like status symboly minimalism, right? Whereas this is built on Pixel 7s. It feels like the GrapheneOS of minimal phones. And so you can still call an Uber, but it, you know, like it tailor a smaller, um, it tailor a smaller app store and a bunch of other features and things like that. And it's very much what I would have built had I the time and motivation to build something like this, at least from what I've seen. They were also very like straightforward. They're like, "Hey man, you can, you can just completely trash our phone during your review if you want. You don't have to take it. Whatever." Um, and that all strikes me as very positive. They seem very open to real feedback, very open to communication. The device actually seems like it's drawing from science. So, I'm really stoked about this, and they're sending one in December. So, there will probably be a review on this Sleek Phone in the future. I'm gonna drop a link if you're interested. Um, I think I, I have good feelings about this. I and I am thinking about helping them with their, um, with their distractability index. So, I'm, so I'm excited about this. Here you go.

Um, only 3 days. Isn't this almost a 50% salary cut? Yes. Yes. Uh, money is quite tight right now. [snorts] Yeah. But you know, you make do. It is what it is. I, I know that I'm very early in my career in the software space, and these things are inevitable. So, I, I would like to make more money, but [snorts] I'm grateful that I have a job. I'm grateful I'm, I'm grateful that I like my job, and I'm hoping that my contract gets extended again or I get to find employment that is also equally enjoyable at some point. Uh, it, I will say AdSense on YouTube has actually made a significant impact, which is kind of nice. So, you know, I, I'm kind of like using this time to build up the YouTube channel and build up maybe some software as a servicey type stuff that might be beneficial. So, you know, we do, we do what we can.

Okay. Um, anybody have good recommendations on getting into reading for pleasure? I never find that I can fully engage in a book for long periods of time, like 30 minutes or more.

I would recommend, ah, this is something I've thought about a lot. I recommend starting small, uh, and accepting that you can read for 5 to 10 minutes, and that's still useful. That's a useful thing to do. Um, by becoming accepting of these like smaller reading times, you can, you start to read more often because you're like, "Well, yeah, I, I can do five minutes. I can do 10 minutes. I can read while I wait for the bus." That I found helps a lot, and you sort of start to build, um, you start to build a sort of reading resilience or endurance, and that helps.

I became a Canadian citizen citizen last year. Very happy I decided not to move to the US a few years ago. Oh, congratulations. Welcome to Canada. [laughter]

I used to work on data privacy and consent management at Unity for their ad network. So, I had to keep up with all the privacy laws of all the countries to code them into our systems. Oh.

Maybe don't start with the philosophical stuff that I'm trying to read and Myth of Sisyphus is so confusing. Yes, agreed. Um, yeah, don't, don't do what I do and dive into like the hardest stuff to read as, as possible. Maybe don't start with Plato unless you're very motivated to do so.

iPhone user here. Is it possible to doable Graphene and Android? I actually don't know. Uh, Graphene is just Android with extra hardening that you can disable per app. Huh.

About minimal phones. I've heard new books, Palma will have cellular features. Sounds promising, although I don't trust them with security updates and long-term support. Yes, I would love if the Sleek Phone people did at some point an e-ink screen. I think that would be incredible. Um, imagine e-ink. Yes, had to read it in French in French classes. It's short, so I liked it.

May I ask how old you are? Yes, I'm 27. I'll be turning 28 in February. I'm still on the beginning. Uh, Kimu hasn't even mentioned Sisyphus. He he doesn't until the end page every day.

Yeah. What do you think about profiting from AdSense while advocating blocking ads? I know you got to make money, but what is your take on it?

It's something I'm somewhat conflicted about, admittedly. Um, but at the end of the day, at the end of the day, if I blocked out every, every possible means of making money and gave away everything for free, I wouldn't be able to do anything valuable because I would be broke and dead. [laughter] So, I think it's a lesser of many evils. And I, I like, it's a very unintrusive way to make a to make some money off of the things that I create. So, I don't feel bad, um, too much. I would like to shift over to providing adless experiences on Patreon and things like that. Um, but then I would have to bring more people over to Patreon, and I haven't really done a push for that yet. So, yeah.

Um, I started to read before bed, reading less than 10 pages a day. Now I itch to read. Nice. That's awesome. Best recommendation? Don't get a book above 200 pages at first. You'll get overwhelmed. Yes. Yes. Um, I started with a lot of short books, and that helped a lot.

What do you think of the Zettelkasten method? I think it's useful if you keep it, if you do it for specific projects. I like Zettelkasten things are useful for me when I'm like writing, when I was writing out my master's thesis. I found that really helpful. Um, I don't like to use, if you've seen my Notion video, you know that I'm not a huge fan of like using a Zettelkasten system for everything you could possibly know. Um, so if it's scoped to a project, I think it's quite good. [sighs]

Make everything e-ink. Yeah, I'm a huge fan of e-ink. Uh, big, like I really want, I mean, maybe not for my gaming screen, but for phones, um, potentially even my laptop. I could see it. I, I'm, I want to play around with e-ink some more.

I recommend White Nights if you have any interest in Dostoevsky. Super short. Interesting. I, yeah, I, so I read Demons, and I read, um, what is it? I forgot the other one that I read. The Underground Man. That's it. Yeah, something like that. Um, big fan. I will be reading Crime and Punishment probably over the Christmas break. Got to go. Have a good rest of your stream. Thanks for dropping by, Jake. I'll catch you. I, I'll give you a call soon.

Uh, for reading, start with something fun and easy and short. Hell yeah.

But with Sleek Phones seems to be just a Pixel 7 with a dumbed-down OS. Yes. Uh, pretty much. But I think we need to like, I think that's extremely valuable. I think giving people an operating system that is stripped down, that avoids a lot of the distracting elements, is an incredible value. So, um, I like, I'm very supportive of that. Yeah.

Mentioning the books, Jen, when I said it was expensive, not the Sleek Phone. Ah, I see. Yeah, I haven't looked too deep into the book stuff. Um, I am interested though.

Um, I use Anytype. There's also Obsidian. Obsidian looks really good. I have a Nebula subscription. Does this only work for big TM creators? I'm not sure. I haven't looked at Nebula yet. Um, I don't know if I'm big enough for them to care, but if I am, then might go down that route. I'm, I'm a little bit like, [sighs] yeah, I don't know how I want to do the whole financial support thing like for people who are interested in supporting the channel and myself financially. Um, I don't know how to handle that yet. I That's why I haven't been pushing Patreon. I don't know what to provide. So, we'll see.

Um, good question about how do you guys handle linked files in Markdown? I'll show you. So, go over here and then just going to go db. You can see I just have a flat directory of Markdown files. And then, uh, even without NeoVim, actually, let's do this with, with just vanilla Vim. You can hover over, uh, text that is the name of a file and hit gf, and it'll bring you to the file. gf for go to file in my head. Then you can do Control O to go back. I goes forward, right? So, you can sort of traverse. I don't have that file. Huh. Don't I have that? Oh, I see. Yes. Anyways, that's generally how I handle it. Um, like that. That's pretty sweet.

By the way, I will be probably shutting down stream relatively shortly, but it's been kind of fun. Uh, bought a Yota Phone in Hong Kong. Loved its e-ink display. Had some problem with Chinese only frequency support. Stopped using it when getting firmware updates from Russia became highly undesirable. Yeah, that that makes sense.

Something like Floatplane would be a great option. You have a tight enough niche to fit right into their lineup. Hm. Okay. Yeah, it's something that I've been thinking about. I just don't know what to do yet exactly. But yeah, Nebula and Floatplane seem interesting. So, we shall see.

Uh, I just got a Kobo recently to get rid of using my phone in bed. Nice. I chose it because it's just Linux under the hood and it's pretty unlocked. Apparently, you can even add custom scripts or UI menu buttons. I didn't know that. That is pretty awesome.

Vim wiki is also cool. I just go with Markdown cuz I, I found I didn't need the Vim wiki features. Uh, but it's cool. So, I need to know the insane Vim bindings. GG. Like a little. Yeah.

Um, are you aware of the Omari DHH controversy because of DHH's blog posts? Do you have a take on it? Yes, I am aware. Um, I try to avoid these discussions. I will say, I will say this much. I don't support DHH's takes. Those are not good takes. They're they're hateful takes. Um, and so that's not good. And I've thought about like if I, that would mean I should not be on Omari. I generally take a separate the art from the artist's stance, and Omari has been pretty good software for me. Um, but I recognize that this is like that is problematic. Um, I recognize that it, that there is something there. Um, that's that's as far as my sort of stance goes on that, and I try to avoid the conversation about it because it derails us into online politics and and sort of hateful things, and I don't generally like that. Yeah, I try, I try to avoid those those topics in general. Not, not to say that, you know, you've done something bad by bringing it up, but yeah. [snorts]

Hey, Nathan. Saw one of your videos recently which made me aware of digital minimalism. Do you have Mastodon or are you interested in the Fediverse?

I am somewhat interested in the Fediverse. Um, I'm not really like a big fan of any Twitter likes, even ones that are like self-hostable and data privacy respecting. U but, but the Fediverse does interest me as a concept. Uh, yeah. Are are people not driving Volkswagen because of who created it? That's kind of my stance on issues like that. Yeah, that that's sort of where I'm at.

I'm a Rails dev. Sucks that I can't really disconnect from him more. Ah, yes. Yes. Ruby on Rails is everywhere. Yeah.

I love to screw around in Linux trying out stuff and learning about it. Playing in Omari and Hyperline is so much fun, but I don't have any reason to use it. Same with NeoVim. I don't code. Well, I mean, if it makes you happy and it's fun, that's a pretty good reason. Um, just learning Linux for the sake of learning Linux is a lot of fun, and it, it helps a lot. I don't, I like, you can make a career out of it. That's for sure. So, yeah.

Anyways, gang, I, I think I am going to call this a stream, but I'm we got a lot of new faces in this stream, and it was a lot of fun. I swear, I swear I'm going to start doing Linuxy things on stream again. I really am. But, um, yeah, it's, it's been, it's been hard. There's just so many cool people to chat with. I think I think I may start doing a secondary stream at some point. I'm not sure. It's hard to devote more time. Um, but yeah, I'll think about that. Anyways, I hope this has been fun for all of you. It's been fun for me. I will catch you all next week. I will do my best to put out a video this week. Uh, I'm going to try to get back to my weekly cadence with, uh, two weeks off during the Christmas break for me. But, uh, yeah, things, I don't know, things are going pretty well.

I do want to just, just quickly, I just want to show you all something. Um, I want to show you some YouTube analytics because I'm grateful to you all for all this. Like, check this out. 6,000 views within a within a single day on this video. Thanks. Thanks, gang. That's that's really nice. Uh, we've just been getting so much support lately, and that makes me feel good, and it makes me want to contribute more. So, thank you all.

Okay, here comes the butt. Yes. I always say bye, and they're like, "Wait, wait, wait. One more thing." We're done. I'll catch you all next week, and I'll try to put out a video this week. So, see you all soon. Have a good, have a good rest of your week. I'm having fun with the Mondays. Yeah. Bye, friends. Oh, Friday. Friday. I keep forgetting this. Kaiju Friday. We get, we pick a different like monster, uh, from the Kaiju series every Friday, and I keep forgetting, but I will try to remember this time. Plus picks them, and they're awesome, and it's fun to learn. So,