All Of These Gadgets…

I’m slowly becoming obsessed with the stuff I carry around with me all the time. I went from carrying a bulky laptop to a tablet to a phone and now a watch. Honestly? The move from trying to travel and use an iPad rather than a laptop was frustrating. I can read and watch things on an iPad but it’s far too clunky to use for my taste. Even a phone feels better. That makes no damned sense to me, but this is where I am with my relationship to tech.

Today, if I’m out at the library or wherever, I have my weird tablet situation running Debian and pretending to be a laptop (and succeeeding most of the time, if I’m honest), my iPhone, and my Apple Watch. Sure, I’m carrying around that weird mp3 player and my wacky little keychain camera too, but those things are always on me because they are the tech that I use.

The phone is the one I struggle with. I’ve got it on me all the time. I toss it into a weird pouch thing when I go mountain biking so that my watch can send an SOS if I fall and break something. I use my phone to pay for stuff. It’s always there. It’s this little brick I can’t do away with. But I’ve been leaving it at home or in the car more and more because I just don’t wanna anymore.

So is it the Apple Watch? My little Mortality Minder? Is that the one device I need to carry? I have it on all the time to track my steps and my vitals because I’m at an age where that data is actually useful to me. My workout data kind of matters now too. It also tells me the time. Plays music from The Onlines. Gets texts from my family. With a cellular connection, I could do calls on it. I can’t tether my “laptop” to it, but so what?

Why?

I’m trying to wrangle my computing and internet use such that it happens at my desk on my desktop machine(s) so that I’m not out there being a screenager all damned day. I need a lot less time online and when I’m at a computer I need to be getting shit done and not screwing around with all of the noise. Right now? I’m writing this at my desk in a terminal window because vim. That’s the kind of focused computing experience I need.

The Apple Watch fits this mode because I can pare down what it does for me to a very specific set of subfeatures. At some point, I will need to find a way to tear myself away from the Apple Ecosystem (probably?) because I don’t trust anything anymore. But for now, this could be my ticket to having one piece of tech on me 95% of the time.

The less I engage with the gadget, the better. Use it like the tool it is and then get it out of my sight.

I’m not getting away from my phone. I get that. This is just a step in the right direction. Probably.