I don't see evidence of the boards being modified by a 3rd party
per se (other than a poor soldering job when compared with the rest of the
board).
The most obvious modification appears to be passive capacitors (1206), wire,
and globs of solder.
It would be more probable that the supplier made a mistake or wished to
improve the circuit and did a hack job instead of iterating the PCB,
which would be a more expensive operation for the supplier.
^ This is exactly what I started doing three years ago and love it. No more tiny rectangle screens stealing my attention; no more endless scrolling, notifications, tiny keyboards, or app stores; no more feeding the data monsters or being forced to upgrade when things fall out of support. Tons more time to think more deeply about things. Still very well connected via email, www, and VoIP, and I do have a work phone, but it's only used for work-related calls and SMS.
I opened an account with voip.ms after ditching my smartphone last year
and was pleasantly surprised with the reliability and interoperability.
Works decently well with Linphone, ATA devices, forwarding to a dumb
phone, land line, etc. With it you can also receive SMS messages (and
reply to them) by email.
Email has increasingly become my preferred method of communication over
the past few years.
As the popularity of other instant messaging platforms ebb and flow,
email has remained one of the few ubiquitous methods for discourse,
messaging, and notification.
In addition to its ubiquity, I like that email enables slow thinking /
maintaining focus and doesn't require an always-on internet connection.
I also like that it's decentralized; though some of the bigger players
have certainly gained enough users to control the ecosystem a bit,
Fastmail, ProtonMail, Posteo, Gandi, and others, as well as self-hosting
are all available.
In terms of client software, mu4e has been absolutely fantastic for
searching, and indexing (via mu), threading, marking, replies, etc.
making email work even better. mutt was also a favorite MUA for many
years before my journey into Emacs.
For responding to SMS messages via email, voip.ms gets the job done as a
SMS/email gateway, helping to consolidate the majority of my
asynchronous messages into the same platform.
i3 has been a favorite window manager for a number of years, though I
recently started using EXWM and greatly enjoy the translation layer
(simulation-keys) that allows Emacs key bindings to be used in other
applications.
I assumed same thing. The question is why would they put a traffic limit on it? Seems like it goes against the hope for the website of generating readers... though I guess if he's paying for all the servers himself it makes sense to block at a certain point.
> Cloudflare's business has never involved selling user data or targeted advertising
The cloudfare site calls googletagmanager.com, marketo.com, linkedin.com, and bizible.com. Do any of these sell user data or support targeted advertising?
Productivity increased greatly for me after ditching my smartphone for a dumb phone and using a bullet journal when I'm away from the computer. That plus a disciplined regimen of daily planning, execution, and migrating tasks to the next day if not finished; learned from "Time Management for System Administrators" by Tom Limoncelli.
It's less any one element of the concept than the fact that it's immensely negligence-tolerant. Sort of like quitting smoking: you can do it a thousand times, but it's so easy to pick up again.
That and the notion of an index, which is IMO key to the whole concept, moreso than the bullet notations and other organisation.
After resumability and index: spreads. Basically, an idea hits you, take a two or four-page section, title it, add it to the index, and collect thoughts on That Thing there.
One early spread I did (and still maintain) is "How to organize BuJo" (or words to that effect). Pages wanted, management ideas, etc. List things you might want to manage, figure out how to do that, and then ... Just Do It.
I make a practice of starting from the front and back of the journal, with more-fixed references (frequently-called numbers / email, reference information, hours of operation, Significant Other details (dates, measures, etc.) in the back, whilst various projects tend to hit where they occur to me in the course of a year.
(And yes, I've been starting a new journal each year, a bit of housecleaning / stop-lossing.)
The manual overhead (numbering pages, adding month overviews, etc.) is slightly tedious, but also a practice-of-presence and/or awareness that helps focus the mind and encourage review.
The Bullet Journal site itself is pretty good (https://bulletjournal.com). There are numerous very artsy BuJo videos on YouTube. I tend to discourage those -- BuJo is a functional tool, but also a personal tool, and the notion of competitive BuJo strikes me a bit like competitive yoga: spectacularly missing the point. If your muse says "glitter-gun and washi-paper All The Things", then great. But if not, a well-used but non-artistic BuJo beats the pants off one that would feature well on Instagram or Pinterest.
The most obvious modification appears to be passive capacitors (1206), wire, and globs of solder.
It would be more probable that the supplier made a mistake or wished to improve the circuit and did a hack job instead of iterating the PCB, which would be a more expensive operation for the supplier.