sephoric

I had room fulls of boxes of things that I thought might one day be important, or significant to someone. Then I realized, when I die, all those things are just going to be thrown away or donated to a thrift store, and it's highly unlikely that anyone who buys any of that will find the same value in it that I thought it had. If I have created anything truly timeless and worthwhile, then it had better be something I created for a client and got paid for making, otherwise it's just going to probably end up in a garbage heap. So I made a decision to get rid of all of it. Time is too short to be held down by the (truly) endless possibilities of "what if" this or that thing ends up being useful to someone in the future.

Aside from my other answer, the local library has internet access, so I'm able to use AWS as needed.

You'd be surprised how much documentation you can download. And the ones that are hosted on sites, those sites are often just git repos that you can clone. A few of them (like webpack.org) are trickier because you have to build the static site while online, but then you can run it offline (via python -m SimpleHTTPServer). There's tons of little tricks like this you can use to get documentation for pretty much anything you need. Not to mention Zeal (open source Dash clone) for tons of other things, Win32 API has a CHM file, and actual books at the library work great like for Python or C++, which often have the whole standard library in them, or at least most of it. And it's always a pleasant surprise when an NPM module bundled its thorough README.md file right into the package file (and often even more docs than that), and sometimes even the original source code, so that all I have to do is run `code node_modules/webpack-dev-server` and press Cmd-Shift-V (to preview .md file as Markdown in VS Code) and then it's as if I'm right there on their GitHub page. Also Safari has an amazingly useful feature of saving a page exactly as-is into a single file that can be opened in Safari, instead of saving all the external files into a sibling folder like Chrome does.

It's self sufficiency I want for our family, and those features discourage that. My kids' schools don't teach them many things anymore, including reading an analog clock. I'd rather my children know how to buy a map at a gas station and read it to get where they want to go, or do most simple math in their head instead of using a calculator. Alarms are built into most clocks made today, even (perfectly good) ones you can buy for $3 at a thrift store, and most microwaves have timer features. Using an app for ride sharing discourages phone (or text) conversations that are naturally able to lead to many unexpected places.

At the end of the day, I look at it this way: I'm able to live a full and happy life without a smart phone, the only thing I'm missing is the ability to call someone. That's where a phone comes in handy.

Or they try to not use those features but get sucked back into it, like I did the many times I tried exactly that. I wonder how many people there are who wanted to live a life like this but because such a phone doesn't exist, they keep getting pulled back in and have to abandon having a phone altogether.

It is a lifestyle I'm forcing on my kids, and that's intentional. Kids don't always know what's good for them, and confuse wants and needs. It's a parent's job to create a safe and healthy environment where their kids can grow and thrive. We used to live the kind of life where video games and TV were "bonding experiences" and it just created all sorts of problems inside them. With this lifestyle, I see those problems vanishing one by one. And they all see it too and are happier now.

Which model did you buy? Does it have an internet browser or apps?

It looks like you mean the M5 phone, which from what I researched, used 2G towers and thus no longer works since those have all been decommissioned. It also seems to be cheaply made and commonly have a ton of problems.

I have that exact phone and it has a browser built in. It's lower quality than usual but it's good enough to waste a few hours with.

I have seen those at Best Buy, the most popular is called the Jitterbug, which does come with a browser.

That looks over engineered and still not as simple as it could be. Think of those cell phones in the 90s that had a single line (or two) of spaces for text, and they had no features but calling and texting. That's perfect, it has literally already been invented, it just needs to be resold, and perhaps put in a pretty package again, but not like this. Not like this.

I'm at my local public library which has wifi. It's also how I download new NPM modules, email my client, deliver my work to him, etc. But I do 90% of my work offline at home.