The Lost Art of Single-Tasking Devices | Hacker News Reader

The Lost Art of Single-Tasking Devices

simone.org

17 pointssmnrg9 comments

I have a tiny Sansa Clip+ mp3 player, flashed with Rockbox, which I use with a nice pair of Bose wired earbuds. It's an incredibly low-friction device. It has physical buttons so you can operate it without looking at it. It lasts for multiple days of continuous play, and I'm not an all-day-every-day kind of listener, so I seldom worry about charging it (and wired earbuds don't need charging either). It's got a 512 gigabyte microSD card in it, so for all intents and purposes it can fit unlimited music, and copying music to it is trivial. It masses 24 grams and can sit in a top pocket without weighing it down. It exists completely independently of my phone, laptop etc, and so I always have my favorite tunes (and an FM radio) wherever I go.

Single tasking devices are great.

Sansa Clip 1 GB from 2008 still going strong here. I use it to listen to podcasts with wired earbuds while going on walks.

I love the physical buttons and simple lcd screen for status.

I do wish I had purchased one that accepted a microSD card like yours though.

Kindle is another example of a single-tasking device I enjoy using.

Does it support increasing playback speed without affecting pitch? I'd like to get a capable mp3 player that I can use for podcasts, but I need to lidten tkm some of them at 1.5x/2x.

I tried an old samsung mp3 player I had lying around, but for some reason they thought implementing playback speed without adjusting the pitch was fine, so my podcasts sound like chipmunks. Needless to say, I abandoned the idea of using it.

Same, but with a FiiO X3 I can't abandon because it has physical buttons.

My single task devices are:

A digital audio player, mostly when walking and resting.

An ereader for reading fiction books.

A PS4 for games. I don’t game on my phone or computers.

Home theater setup for movies.

My other devices are more location and usage restricted. Like my iPad for drawing, reading PDFs and comics, but it still has some apps so it can quicly serve as an alternative for my laptop (writing, managing servers,…)

E-book readers are great. I also use mine to read collections of interesting online articles I encounter over the course of a week. Instead of just passively reading the headline and maybe the first paragraph on a glowing screen, I read them end-to-end on a comfortable e-ink display.

I'll also add smartwatches to those single-task devices. I use mine as basically a fancy beeper. I can read incoming messages, but not respond to them (at least, not very conveniently). And there's certainly no distraction of social media apps or a full web browser on that tiny watch screen.

If a WhatsApp (pretty much the standard communication platform in my country) was not so closed, I'd buy an android phone, install a custom phone on it, and use it exclusively as a PDA/Pager device. So a few utility apps (notes, calendar, mail) and communication (barebone phone, whatsapp client: only text and voice call). Everything is so bloated right now.

An involved alternative is to access whatsapp through a matrix bridge. It requires either paying for hosting or figuring out how to host a matrix server and the whatsapp bridge [1]; I do the latter and can attest it's not very hard if you have a technical background (and you're on hn, so you probably do), but YMMV. There's a lot of matrix clients, all of which open source; and the whatsapp bridge works really well nowadays, enough that I've been using it almost exclusively for my texting (no whatsapp calls tho).

In fact, I recently bought a non-smartphone running KaiOS, and use whatsapp through a matrix client, chooj - which, although in early alpha, works well for my use case of accessing whatsapp while outside the home without having to carry an addictive smartphone with me. KaiOS does have a native whatsapp app, but it does not support whatsapp web at all, and that is an absolute necessity for me, especially when typing requires (bad) T9.

My point is, matrix bridges afford A LOT of freedom with how to access whatsapp (and other closed-source communication apps), if you're willing to deal with some friction. And now they're stable and mature enough that they work pretty darn well - no doubt thanks in part to support from beeper [2], which funds development for several major bridges. Within the android ecosystem, beeper is probably the easiest way to gateway all your communications through matrix, though I have no experience with it. Sounds like paid matrix+bridge hosting, plus a generally much nicer and frictionless experience.

[1]: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge

[2]: https://www.beeper.com/

I think this is why The Nintendo Switch (and other handheld gaming devices) have been so popular despite smartphones being so powerful and ubiquitous. Having a dedicated 'gaming' device makes playing more relaxing and stress free.

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