A MONTH OFF

Holy cow another month has shot by at breakneck speed

Arriving at the half million hits count was monumental in an insignificant little blogger gets his day in the sun sort of way, but every once in a while I feel the need to have a month off blogging and all social media use.

September is going to be my month off. If I have an urge to write anything profound I'll postpone it’s publication by a month.

What this break will do as much as anything is reveal how addicted I am to looking at crap online.

Like a moth to a flame I keep looking at rubbish on Youtube and Facebook, even though I'm well aware that it’s not doing me any good.

My September challenge is to stop looking at YouTube and Facebook, to stop using Wifi, and to stop doing any blog posts. I want to replace those activities with more productive things (I have quite a list!). Hopefully by October 1 will have established a more productive and efficient approach to my computer and internet use

Bakson

COMPUTER ADDICTION

Computer use is highly addictive. My own digital use is not exactly typical because I've never used phones for any online activities. In fact my phone use only adds up to about 5 minutes a week in total which sounds damn good, but that figure glosses over all my other computer use.

I use my PC (running Linux Mint with a 32" screen) for several hours every day, and also regularly use my laptop (running Linux Mint with a 17" screen), as well as using my 12" Samsung tablet for several more hours most days.

I mention all those screen sizes because I hate small screens and that is another reason I very seldom use phones.

But it's not all random internet or social media addiction. For example I often use my tablet as a writing pad, using an S-Pen with the app MyScript converting my hand writing to text. 

And I also use my tablet as a replacement for physical books, because I have around 12 thousand ebooks, so it's like having my own library, along with my own typist.

I think there is a solid difference between computer addictions like social media and gaming, and using computers effectively for things like research or writing.

But even so, all computer use clearly has negative side effects, both physical and mental, without even delving into what all the effects of the EMF exposure actually is.

It's easy to not even notice how much time we spend using computers. In the 90’s I spent zero time using computers, because I didn't have one, but these days I struggle to keep my combined computer use under four hours a day.

I'm not too bothered about time I spend offline because that is mostly under my own control and reading an ebook or using an S-Pen isn't really much different to reading a book or using a notebook.

But anything online is a potential problem. There is some handy stuff available online, but most of that shit is messing with my head!

If I was going to set a time limit what would it be?

If I'm awake for 16 hours a day, the. four hours a day would be a quarter of all my waking moments. Put like that, even that amount sounds excessive.

At this stage I'm not going to include offline time which can actually be quite productive and creative when used within reason, but online time I want to cap at four hours a day maximum.

Wifi use is even worse and I want to place strict limits on my use of WIFI - one hour a day really should be quite enough of that.
 

I'm going to have next month off all social media including blogging.

The only social media platforms I look at are Odysee, Youtube, and Facebook. 

 

Youtube and Facebook are both filled with AI slop and I was unhappy about wasting around 30 mins a day looking at them. So to me these figures of adults spending over four hours a day on social media are mind boggling! 

As with all things internet, it's hard to know if any of the stats are genuine because the majority of internet use is now AI, but the statistics being quoted for social media use are incredibly high.

If these figures are remotely accurate, this would all be extremely unhealthy.

Time Spent On Social Media Demographics:

Teenagers (aged 13 to 17) tend to spend the most time on social media compared to any age group as of this year.

On average, teenagers spend around 8 hours and 39 minutes per day on screens. Social media usage is their top activity during this. Meanwhile, young adults (aged 18 to 29) spend around 7 hours and 22 minutes on their screens, and their top activity is social media usage.

Tweens (aged 8 to 12) also have a significantly high screen time these days, with an average of 5 hours and 33 minutes, up from 4 and 44 minutes a couple of years back. However, their top activity is video streaming, and social media comes second.

Adults (30 to 49) and older adults (50+) spend the least time on social media. On average, adults spend around 4 to 5 hours on screen.

https://newvisiontheatres.com/time-people-spend-on-social-media

 

YOUTUBE HAS LOST THE PLOT

There is a guy posting videos on YouTube called Michael Girdley. He is very popular and is probably one of the few content creators left who isn't AI slop.

He does videos about the rise and fall of American corporations. They all follow the same pattern of becoming huge then making stupid greedy decisions and eventually collapsing.

 It may take years but eventually they get what's coming to them.

Right now the behemoth that is YouTube is going down that plug hole

Youtube certainly had it's uses - primarily as a massive repository for videos, but most of the new content now is AI. And by "most" I don't mean about half, I mean over 90%. As are almost all the hits and comments. Although with those it's probably more like 99%+.

The AI comments are now all saying "this is AI slop". Even AI can't stand AI .

There comes a point where even clueless normies have just had enough. Ask McDonald's. Every greedy corporation hits it eventually.

Personally I'm at the same point with YouTube that I was with Microsoft a few years ago. I'm still sort of using it but I hate it and want to stop. It's an unhealthy habit I want to give up.

When I switched from Windows 7 to Linux Mint that was a good move. Now I want to switch from YouTube to Odysee, because Odysee is cool and YouTube sucks.

The main problem with Odysee is that it doesn't have all the content that YouTube does, otherwise the platform is better in every way

So I've set up my own Odysee channel and now, rather than complaining about lack of content I'm going to gradually start re-posting the content I want to watch on Odysee. It may take a quite a while but eventually Odysee can replace Youtube

It's becoming more obvious by the day that Youtube has totally lost the plot. This month they have even gotten into a war with the Brave browser. A bad move, and for me that is the final straw.

 There are plenty of ways to block YouTube's stupid ads, and I don't really need Brave to do that, but I'm using Brave as my default browser so when I have to switch to a second browser to view YouTube (Waterfox with Ghostery extension works fine) that is yet another reason not to use YouTube.

WHAT IS OPTIMAL?

 

Computers have been perplexing me for decades. Is my computer use helping me or hindering me? I honestly can’t tell, but I suspect that while some judicious use of computers is helpful, the amount I’m using them currently is having negative effects.

There is one way to test this hypothesis, and I’ve tried it before. A clean break. Just as a fast can sometimes be helpful for a short time but you wouldn’t want to do it all year, I sometimes feel like I need a short complete break from computers.

But I'm not going to have a complete break, instead I'm going to do my best to simplify and reduce my computer use over the rest of August and see what happens.

LINUX GEEKS

 In this post I'll be referring to "GEEKS" quite a bit. This is not entirely disrespectful, I do appreciate all the work geeks put in, creating open source software. 

But like so many people who have transitioned from Windows to Linux I have come to view geeks as a bizarre sub-species of computer users who take a perverse pleasure in exerting their superiority over NEWBS (I was a newb too)

Making the shift from Windows to Linux is neither massively difficult, nor is it entirely easy. It's a bit of both, but a lot of the information online is biased, or badly presented, or created by geeks who are sometimes making things harder than they need to be.

Possibly some computer geeks place a value on themselves that partly stems from being the only ones who understand the technology, so making them gatekeeper tech gods. Which they get a buzz out of. 

Unfortunately this tends to mean that rather than making things easier for newbs by giving them simple instructions, they often give out incomprehensible instructions like "Just enter this simple command in Terminal". Their condescending tone of "this is all really easy" is infuriating and one of the main reasons so many newbs give up.

Geeks seem to be unwilling to accept that about 90% of people using computers are not other geeks, but regular people who want to have most, or even everything they do accessible through buttons and menus that they can click on. 

Personally I like to do everything on my PC using my mouse, and am about as anti keyboard command as it's possible to be. The very word "type" totally turns me off. "Copy & paste" I can do when necessary, but not "type" What I actually want to see are the words "click on".

Life often plays out in strange ways, and I have brain damage to the left hemisphere of my brain, so am very right brain dominant, but I still use computers anyway, and even sometimes seem to end up trying to explain computer stuff to other non-geeks who just want some basic instructions. 

My perspective from being a right brain computer user is a bit different to most of the people who are usually commentating on this stuff, so I imagine any actual geeks who see my posts might view me as a clueless idiot. Which I sort of am.

During the process of transitioning from Windows 7 (Yes, I was still using Win 7 up until 2024) to Linux Mint, it struck me that a lot of the information online is confusing rather than helpful, and I wish I could have read (Yes READ, not viewed endless badly done videos) web-pages that explained things in a way that made sense to me.

Now I want to leave some notes for my friends who at some point will be wanting to escape the clutches of Microsoft. Windows 11 is likely to be the final straw for a lot of people with it's obvious and intrusive spyware, so the end of Windows for non sheeple is looming close on the horizon. 

Linux is the only real option for anyone who wants to continue using a computer without selling their soul to the deep state. (Yes, Apple & Google are spying too)

As I've found from sticking with Windows 7 and refusing to use Windows 8 or Windows 10, it is possible to soldier on for years with an unsupported operating system. 

But installing Windows 7 on more modern hardware is a pig of a job, mainly because sorting out drivers can be really tricky, and there are ever increasing problems with software no longer working properly. 

Linux is the future and I think everyone who wants to use a computer with some degree of privacy is going to have to get the hang of it. So that's why I do a few Linux posts attempting to clarify things.

YANDEX SEARCH

 If you are searching for any non-approved content the search engine you use determines what content you see, so I've just been testing some search engines.

As expected the most useless, manipulated, & censored content comes from Google. 

I'm still getting the best results overall from Russian Yandex Search - https://yandex.com/

But don't use it to find out if Putin is a double, or a freemason, or a pedophile. Just kidding, actually it gives quite good results for all three of those queries. 

Yes there have been four or possibly even more different Putins, they are all connected to the Freemasons, and at least one of them has been accused of pedophilia. 

FROM COOL TO BALLS

This is probably going to sound like an advert, but don't hate me, I'm not sponsored by Logitech! I have just bought a Bluetooth speaker.

My new speaker looks like a small blue ball. It's called a Wonderboom 4 and I bought it to play random MP3's from a playlist of 500 tracks I've now loaded onto my cell phone.

Make no mistake, for over 25 years I've been saying cell phones suck, and refusing to even use one. I can honestly say, this is the first time I've ever had the thought "Maybe those mind control devices can be useful". But they do seem to be quite decent MP3 players.

I suspect 90% of my half dozen regular readers will now start wondering if I'm Amish or something, but back in 2002 I made a conscious decision to avoid using phones and have never previously used one for playing music.

I've switched to the dark side because I'm currently painting the house and having some music pumping out from a portable sound system comprising of just a small indestructible speaker and an old cell phone, is the perfect technology for the job.

I borrowed one of these trendy little Boom speakers and tried it out before buying one myself. I was initially fairly skeptical because I thought a speaker that small would be a gutless little toy with a tinny sound and a lame bass output.

But after hearing one I had to eat my words, it's actually a grunty little bugger with a surprising impressive sound. In fact it really can kick some arse, and I've been rocking out to some 90's house music in the back garden.

 It's tough as well, both shockproof and waterproof. I've rapidly warmed to it and now I think my new stereo, which is actually only a mono, is really pretty cool. And it also runs for 13 hours on a charge, which is better than my power tools.

Initially I planned to treat it like a power tool, and if it got paint and dirt on it, too bad, but I must admit after deciding I quite like it, now I'm keeping it in a zip lock bag while painting so it doesn't get all abused looking.

I'm not very happy about radiating myself with Bluetooth EMF's, but for a work tool, not having an audio cable is actually really handy. 

And then I got to reminiscing. Back in the 80's everyone aspired to own a huge and expensive high tech stereo. I still have mine, and every once in a while I get out my record of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" and listen to sonic perfection through my Rega Planar turntable, Yamaha amp, and a pair of Kenwwod speakers the size of small refrigerators.

Back in the day, music equipment was big, impressive, and stylish. These days I'm using a set up that looks more like a Nee Doh ball in a plastic bag, sitting next to a cell phone. 

So I've "downgraded" from two 160W 3-way speakers (each with a tweeter, a squawker, and a woofer) to one 10W speaker that is smaller than one of my old tweeters!

 While it's cheap, efficient, and bomb proof, I don't quite know what to make of all this modernist minimalism. Is modern life rubbish or is this progress?

FINDING A TIMER

Really, how hard can this be? I started out thinking. All I wanted was a timer to encourage me to take regular breaks from using my computer.

But as I often seem to find, it was more difficult than I anticipated. I don't even want all that much really, I thought.

I'm running Linux Mint 22 so as far as Linux goes I'm totally mainstream 

To start with I was thinking I'd like an all in one app that included a repeating countdown timer, and a stopwatch.  

Maybe also with a clock, a world clock, and an alarm as well. And of course I'd like a cool looking moving analogue clock showing the time counting down. Also I'd like to be able to customise everything, and make it stylish and purple. 

And obviously I want it all free as well as ad free and open source.

But after trying half a dozen different apps that all sucked for one reason or another, I ditched all my expectations and just went for one that only did the repeating countdown timer part.

I decided upon "STRETCHLY" 

It's not flashy but it does the job, and yes it is available for Windows and Mac as well as Linux. 

Finally I found a timer that does the basics that I really need with no added stressors. But first I had to ditch any other extras and go full Swedish Minimalist.

Hovering over the logo (black & red yin yang) in the far right of my toolbar shows the remaining time until the next break.

I have it set to do a 3 min break every 30 mins. So every 30 mins it gives me a 30 second warning and then my screen changes to a plain blue notification screen telling me to take a three minute break.

At that stage I can't do anything on my computer, I can't even take a screenshot of the notification screen, so to get this picture I had to take a photo with my camera. 

And it works brilliantly. Because I have no choice, I actually do have a break! In fact I get up, bugger off and go and do other things often for a lot longer than three minutes. 

So I get other things done, and feel better after having a break as well.

When I come back to the computer my next 30 min session has started automatically, and already used up a bunch of time, so I right click on the icon and reset the session, starting it again from 30 mins.

I didn't quite grasp this before I tried it, but this basic app is exactly what I needed!

WEBSITE - https://hovancik.net/stretchly/

ONLINE PRIVACY

 Lately I've seen even more discussion about all the AI spyware that is currently being rolled out. But most people seem to be blissfully unaware that pretty much everything they do online is being monitored and recorded by big tech companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft, along with advertising companies, and deep state agencies like the CIA.

A common response upon being informed that they are being spied on, is to just accept it as "normal" and pretty much give up even trying to maintain their privacy. But as we saw with the covidhoax and the death jabs, unless people take responsibility for their own freedom, the deep state plans to enslave and kill us. 

Yes it is possible to maintain your privacy in a surveillance state, but not if you are using a regular "smart" phone or a modern commercial operating system. You can actually keep using computers, phones and the internet, if you want to, and maintain your privacy, but you will need to make the effort to stop using big tech spyware and switch to using different technology. 

If you want any privacy, Google, Microsoft, and Apple are total no go zones. They are all spying and have been for years, but their latest tech is next level. An example is Windows 11 which has a new "feature" called Recall that is essentially taking a screenshot every five seconds and using AI to analyze it. 

If anything, the AI on recent Apple I-phones is even worse, but some normies seem to be more open to the idea that Microsoft is spying rather than Apple, so calling out Microsoft is often a good entry point to the whole AI rabbit hole.

Normies are so addicted to their spy-phones they will pay thousands of dollars to be tracked, recorded, and monitored by the deep state. 

On average, an Android smartphone sends data to Google 90 times a day and an iPhone communicates with 51 servers per hour. 

So what do I recommend doing to maintain privacy? Here are some good first steps:

Switch to using a Linux operating system such as Linux Mint 

Stick to using Free Open Source Software (FOSS) such as GIMP

Use a "de-googled" phone such as a Brax 3

 Use a privacy browser such as Brave or Floorp (& especially avoid Chrome)

Use privacy mail services such as Proton Mail (& especially avoid Gmail)

Use online aliases and avoid using your real name, especially on platforms like Facebook