Single-purpose devices

I always had a special interest for retro-looking technology. My Ghostty terminal has a sutil CRT shader applied to it, that certainly doesnt make my code run any better but it sure does looks cute as hell. I feel like I'm not old enough to feel nostalgic about this kind of stuff, I never actually had a music player, or an old videogame, but I really like their simplicity. They all only do one thing, sometimes having too many options can be overwelming, specially if you are a neurodivergent.

I like bringing my emulator when I want to play old videogames, my MP3 player when I want to listen to my favorite albums, and I bring my eReader when I want to spend some time with my books. I dont actually need any of these, but I like collecting them as a hobby.

No advertisements, no internet connection requirement, no monthly subscription, no big tech scraping your data for LLM training. You can bring them in your pocket, they are yours.

Music Player: Snowsky Echo Mini

It has been a while since I decided to stop using Spotify, their CEO Daniel EK recently made a €600 million investment in AI destined for military usage, my money will not be funding wars. I still needed a way to listen to music, and getting an actual music player sounded really fun. After some research I found a really cute one on aliexpress called Snowsky Echo Mini, its design reminds of a portable cassete player. The device itself is really nice! It comes with bluetooth connection, 3.5+4.4mm outputs, USB-C support and a microSD card expansion, the buttons are clicky and nice to press. It also has a screen to display embedded album covers.

Spotify has a huge catalog of music, but it doesn't have everything. I remember using a cli tool to download stuff when I needed short clips for my youtube videos, luckly it can also extract audios too. I dont have that much space on my SD card and I dont understand much about audio formats. Apparently MP3 files have a high compatibility but the format is old and doesn't sound that good, FLAC sounds really nice but requires too much space. M4A seemed like a good middle-ground between sound quality and disk space, while also having pretty good support for metadata.

yt-dlp -t sleep \
    -x --audio-format m4a --audio-quality 0 \
    -o "%(album)s/%(track_number,playlist_index)s %(title)s.%(ext)s" \
    $argv[1]

I still needed to add the tags for artist name and album title, for that I used the autotagger feature from MusicBrainz Picard. Just pick an album, drag and drop the files and it will automatically embbed the metadata and album cover (so cool). After inserting the SD card back into the device I could finally listen to EPIC: The Musical on my way to college again!

E-Reader: XTEink X4

This year I also decided to start reading more. Books are good for your brain, and there's a lot of cool stories that I never got to know. I tried bringing a copy of Jurassic Park in my backpack for a few weeks, unfortunately it ended up making my back pain worse. As much as I love physical books I dont have the money nor the strength to carry them around. But I do have a spare MicroSD card and access to the internet.

I bought an eReader I called XTEink X4, this thing is smaller than my phone, I bet it could even fit inside my wallet if I tried. The screen uses that cool e-ink thing that Kindles have, so battery life wont be a problem. I flashed my spare SD card with a custom firmware called Crosspoint, it has a lot of quality-of-life changes, including a EPUB (e-book file format) optimizer. Transfering the books was actually quite easy, the new firmware has an option to start a web server, just open the link displayed on its screen and start transfering the digital books using a file explorer.

I always had the possibility of reading books on my phone, the problem was that I never felt like I was actually imersed in the story, there's always a imaginary goblin on my shoulder telling me to open Tiktok or maybe checking if there's any notifications, one missclick I'll probably forget what I was supposed to be doing. So far the experience has been great, and I'm already 5 chapters into Project Hailmary.

Im looking forward to try more and more devices and I'll make sure to review them here too. Thank you for reading.