hemmert

I made a browser for this: https://leash.ax/ – it cut my own screentime to two hours per day. Boring, in a good way!

Plus, you don't have to manually convert from 24h to 12h time.

A web-view with no title bar - no blocking so far. I'm exploring that, but for now this does a really great job (combined with grayscale-mode phone)

I want my phone to be greyscale (low-dopamine), but some apps need color. Here's my workaround that works for me (triple-pressing the side button didn't, I forget to turn greyscale back on.)

It will clear all cookies / logins very often, so you'd basically start from scratch, logging in and so on. It is cumbersome, and for me it was totally enough friction to not fall into old habits.

(So yes, there are potential loopholes, but they are uncomfortable to crawl through. Dopamine is all about friction, I guess)

Yes! There was some paperwork to do with Apple (it is a manual approval process), and it got the entitlement to be the iPhone's system browser. For Android, things were a bit easier.

So after installing Leash and selecting it as the system browser, Safari can be deleted.

Beautiful! Congratulations! Can’t wait to try it on my Playdate!

Pretty impressive!

Two things at once, contrary to my new year‘s resolution!

1. An app for personalized interactive audiobooks for kids - https://www.vivid.cx

2. A book about the edge of the thinkable - https://www.unthinkable.net

Uh-oh, thank you!

About 8 years in, Escape Team steadily keeps growing, which surprises me (I didn’t add any new missions for about 5 years):

https://www.escape-team.com

It‘s making about $700 on iOS and $300 on Android, solely from $2.99 IAPs for the later missions in the game (the first 2 missions are free).

I think a main reason for this is that escape rooms (and games) don’t „saturate“: you play them only once, because then you know the solutions. So another escape room (place, game, app) doesn’t cannibalize the market - it may rather strengthen the others by fostering it as a group activity.

I also put 0$ into ads- it solely spreads itself by being a group activity (3-5 people are best) and through its mission editor (people can make their own missions, used in school and for birthdays etc).

Curious to see where it goes next!

Congratulations, really nice! I wasn’t aware of this.

Great solution, great example of how open source should be done.

Excellent advice, for everybody. Thank you!

Your're absolutely right!

Where exactly is the opt out?

I recently started getting the feeling that they also make their workflows way more inefficient for me: their models started to always ask "do you want me to make that change for you", before they made the edits and I would simply reject them if they were not what I needed.

Beautiful!

I‘m writing a visual travel guide for the edge of the humanly thinkable:

https://www.unthinkable.net

(I made a small newsletter sign-up form, feel free to join the wait list for betas and a free e-Book!)

Really cool! How do you identify the most interesting areas of the fog?

For me its about things to not do on my phone.

I disabled Safari (via parental settings), use an email account that auto-forwards everything to my main email, thus I can only send email from my phone, but not receive any (the inbox is always empty and I don't check my main email on it).

I only have apps that I use to input things into the phone (writing, taking photos) and I eliminiated everything that isn't designed to end at some point.

No Instagram or any of the likes, only WhatsApp, but muted so I have to proactively check it. I do use a news reader, which is subscribed to the RSS feeds of the sites I want to follow. No algorithmic curation of that content, and no ads (unless I open the sites that the RSS items link to).

Keeping one's sanity away from the side effects of tech these days is quite a technical job, somehow ;)

Thank you, also for the note regarding "the future of the future of work" - I didn't know it!

Still pushing around things – what really helped me was to see it like a "travel guide". There are different "sights" at the (moving) edge of the possible/thinkable, and I wanted it to be somehow more than just a "trip through time".

(I just submitted it here, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42004783)

This one's for you, HN.

I'm writing a book about the 'edge of the thinkable', how it developed over the years, centuries and millenia, and I'm sure you'll be interested in this. (Whenever I browse through HN, I think 'oh, I didn't think THAT was possible..'.

So, more soon, but I'd love it if you'd sign up for that (very, very occassional) status update newsletter. I'm sure it will include beta versions of the book, too!

Excellent article! Thank you very much!

I'm currently writing a book on the "edge of human thought" (more from a point of view of inventions over the course of humankind's history) – here's a newsletter signup page, in case you want to stay up to date:

https://unthinkable.net/

(Posting this is also in the edge area for me... ;))

Keep up the great thinking and writing! :-)

I've been (I'm the guy on stage) thinking about this for a while: there's the old Steve Jobs quote of the 'bicycle for the mind'. Perhaps, we've somehow entered the automotive age.

I'm pretty sure that cars have done their fair share of bad things, and we should probably learn from that.

Just what I needed for my next moonlight project :) Happy to try this out and give you feedback!