No Laptop Wee… Month?
By Artyom Bologov
It’s a deep night and I’m psyched up having watched around 20 Kpop music videos in one sitting. Meaning: No Laptop Week challenge ended after one month of abstinence from laptop and YouTube specifically.
At the start of July, I set myself a goal: to radically minimize the time I spend on a laptop. And to cure my YouTube addiction. Every time I open my laptop lid should have a distinct motivation / goal and be strictly timed. I almost delivered on that, using laptop almost exclusively for useful and humanity beneficial purposes! All for a week, that ended up a month.
I used the laptop to:
- Write a wiki and Wittgenstein post, Uses (paper) page, and the Strange Gods fiction story. I also edited some posts, like GESS stenography post and Kaktovik numerals post.
- Update some markup on HTML5 rendition of R7RS and knstrktr spec.
- Watch 7 NMIXX videos, 2 BABYMONSTER videos, and 2 aespa videos. Also, 3 IU videos at the suggestion of Gosha.
- Listen to music (mostly aespa’s LEMONADE album) because my iPod was dead.
- Charge the iPod.
- Respond to emails and issue discussions on Codeberg and Github (do move off Github!)
- Contribute to Codeberg, ChiPass, Chibi Scheme, Gauche Scheme (spent 3 hours compiling it,) Skint Scheme, and probably something else I don’t remember.
- Update SRFI 273 before finalization. Also add some ideas to two in-progress SRFIs (TBA!)
- Research sysvinit and POSIX Make for a potential project of writing sysvinit services as Makefiles. Try to find a service that mounts disks on XFCE, to no avail. Rewrite this website Makefile to POSIX Make in the process.
- Format Sokolov’s GESS book, R7RS, and a set of SRFIs for offline programming.
- Finish downloading my games from GOG before deleting the account, because they’re Nazi.
- Read Federico García Lorca’s poetry with a dictionary. Laptop is more convenient for that, because phone interfaces are slow and paper dictionary… I don’t have one 😢
- Pay taxes (hopefully I didn’t fuck it up.)
- Translate 1 picture in Google Translate (iPhones are unsupported.)
- Watch Canon Cat videos as an inspiration for a project (ended up binge watching Devine Lu Linvega YouTube channel!)
- Create a new utility in aed(1), my ed(1) wrapper: calced
This might seem like a long list, but most of these tasks required merely half an hour of total time. Well, with the exception of compiling Gauche Scheme…
Apparently, I relapsed on YouTube more than once, but I quickly cut it out every time, only watching 1 or 2 videos. At some point I even realized that I cannot (!) watch more than 3 Kpop music videos, because they overwhelm me! So this was a self-reinforcing restriction, in a sense.
My analog activities for this month were centered around my paper setup:
- Reading Bible. I’m not religious, reading for giggles!
- Reading An Infinitely Large Napkin. I like Set Theory, so only chapters on it, and not far into them yet!
- Reading other books, mostly smaller ones, on the bus.
- Writing in my numerous notebooks. Some blog posts and one fiction story.
- I found that writing on paper, especially stenographically, is hard. I have no infinite undo and momentary delete, only strike-out. And stenograms are not easiest to read either. So I ended up writing posts as rough drafts, transcribing them on a laptop, slightly editing, and publishing them in this half-finished state. To minimize laptop use!
- Listen to music on my iPods.
- Completing stenography course exercises I’ve been slacking off on when completing the course initially.
- Programming on paper.
- I printed out R7RS libraries section and a set of SRFIs (1, 13, 43, 69, 204) for offline programming but ended up not using them. Not because programming on paper is hard, but rather because I didn’t have many ideas on what to program. Now that I’m back to laptop, I have all the projects and their bugs at my disposal, so I have a near infinite supply of programming projects!
- Reading stuff on my phone. Yes, the phone use was not prohibited! For a reason: my phone is thoroughly cleared from any type of attention sinks. With the only “social” apps being Mail (projects,) Telegram (news and personal comms,) Ice Cubes (Mastodon, mostly Merveilles-local feed,) and Bumble. So the phone is not the danger at all
- Playing with my cat.
- Playing games, either on friend’s Xbox (Mini Ninjas) or in a computer club with friends (Counter-Strike, Quake.)
- Learning to meditate and generate ideas without my insomniac streaks.
- Sleeping well with my Non-24 Hour Sleep-Wake Disorder addressed.
But even with this long list of activities, I was sometimes bored. In particular because things like stenography exercises, math textbook, or Bible reading… Are not the most entertaining activities and need some effort and commitment. And other activities are not as “useful” as these. So I was procrastinating from these “serious” things and didn’t move forth much in, like, Set Theory. (Also because Napkin is quite obscure and terse, but I digress.)
So this challenge taught me: one has to use their laptop in today’s landscape. One may live mostly offline if they have the privilege to do so. But not without tech at all. Especially with stupid digital reforms Armenian government pushes.
Going forward, I’m thinking about continuing the motivated-only use of the laptop. But relax the restrictions a bit. In particular, allow YouTube to catch up with new Kpop stuff and to get my dopamine hits. (Hey, I no longer consume sugar, I need some other stimulation!) But only for a little and with a certain goal. No binge-watching!
Join my No Laptop Week, even if for a week, won’t you?