Ditching the Cellphone

Friday, I started off the month by canceling my cellular service. It has been a long time coming. It'll be interesting to see how this goes.

Now that I'm not on an on-call rotation, I don't absolutely need to have a cellphone. It is a luxury, one that I no longer want nor can afford. Being a hermit, I don't even use it all that much, certainly not enough to justify paying for a line every month. The truth is that while I find smartphones useful and at times indispensable, I don't like them very much, and I never have. I hate the touch screens, the locked-down software, the trend toward non-replaceable batteries and removal of 3.5 mm audio jacks, and so forth. So I decided to cancel my service and return my phone once its lease had been paid. That happened to be this month. Our carrier sent us a text message telling us to either pay $177 and keep the phone, or return it by the 3rd of October, and I did the latter. We'll be saving about $50 per month now.

My family thinks I'm crazy. My girlfriend Deedra asked, "What if you decide to go out in the middle of the night to get beer and get lost on your way home?" A few years back, I decided to walk to the store while very drunk. I got turned around in a parking lot and started walking down the wrong street. I must have walked several blocks before realizing that, uh, we aren't in Kansas anymore. I used the GPS on my phone to find my way home. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. I managed for more than 3 decades without a smartphone, so it's not exactly a necessity.

I do still have an Android tablet with a cracked screen that someone gave me because they didn't want it. It works fine with wi-fi. I also have an external Bluetooth GPS receiver. There's the possibility that I could use an application with onboard maps for navigation. What I would really love to find is a command-line program for Linux that can display current street address, travel directions, and points of interest. A portable Linux device loaded with openstreetmap data, a program of that sort, and an external GPS receiver could be an interesting way to live.