The daily newspaper

I've been weaning myself off all kinds of social media and compulsive RSS reader checking. Facebook was the first to go, because yeah, it's hard to ignore all the levels on which it sucks. Then Twitter followed, and it actually surprised me how little I missed it, as I thought that it provided me with a lot of value while I was using it. I made some half-hearted attempts to use Mastodon. But as my abandonment of Twitter was as much rooted in my behaviour when using it as the toxicity of the service, I didn't feel like replacing it with something similar with a different governance model.

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For me, gemini and smolnet taps into something, if not a zeitgeist then at least a me-geist of conservation of energy, resources, time, and attention. To be a bit dramatic I would say that our future departs on us being able to do more with less. But the trend in services and hardware upgrade cycles point in the other direction: we are doing less with more. There is exactly one thing that prevents me from being productive on "old" 64-bit hardware with 4GB or less RAM: the web.

I'm wandering off topic. The newspaper. Just as I don't want to replace Twitter with an equally attention-sucking federated service, I don't want to replace compulsive RSS checking with compulsive gemfeed checking. I want my news delivered on a predictable, boring, schedule. At six o'clock every morning all the new posts from the last 30 hours go off to the printing press; no amount of refreshing gives me new things to discover, it's a static product.

Now a short infomercial for a piece of used hardware: the reMarkable tablet. The second iteration of the device has just hit the market, so there are loads of affordable used v1:s on the market. It's a slim e-paper Linux device that gives you root access out of the box, what's not to love?

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So, to cut to the chase: an always-on Raspberry Pi runs a cron job every morning that uses my project gemini-paper to generate a PDF and then pushes it to the reMarkable. That, or radio (swedish P1 rules), is the only news I consume; I'm happier that way.

Gemini Paper