dumbsmart phone

3 military men working on a portable phone switchboard

When I wasn’t off doing real life stuff, how have I filled my time this past month?

For one, I’ve eased off the monke, innawoods mantra and changed back to my 2017 smartphone as my daily driver. The straw that broke the camel’s back was a strange glitch with the Nokia 225 that cut off predictive text halfway through a word if a text was received during typing. As much as I enjoyed flexing on people’s iPhone 47Smax2+funkymode and its tumor growth of cameras, the threshold for this lifestyle meme was always functionality, and I don’t see anyone coping with such a major oversight.

Don’t worry, though; I haven’t gone full normie ;). I went on a hunt for the lightest and most up to date custom ROM, and got to work setting up my workflow for as little dependence of the internet as possible, only using the occasional public connection for app updates and file sync via Syncthing (which I use begrudgingly; I would use MTP and rsync in a heartbeat if I could). I don’t even have a web browser or a YouTube client installed. This and the wombo combo of no internet at home plus a measly 50 MB of data for MMS means that I effectively have a fancy dumbphone.

However, there is a surprising amount of things you can do offline, including: