They gamified my life and satisfied my OCD of tracking every aspect of my life, although the benefit and medical reliability is questionable.
The fact it shines every time I turn my wrist is extremely annoying during light out.
That half second delay between my wrist position and screen display. Maybe my nitpicking is the reason I’m better off with analog, one-function tools.
When I asked my wife whether buying a ASUS ProArt PA248QV monitor for work is out of necessity or impulse, she reminded me the wish list I have recently.
The list falls into these categories and moments:
This must have been the watch I wore the longest, it’s been close to 5 years.
I had two smart watches in between, a Xiaomi and a Huawei, none of which lasted more than few months.
What I learned about myself with this watch?
I replaced my old ASUS RT-N12 with a new ASUS RT-AX3000 last week and it 10x my bandwidth!
The previous router was purchased in 2017. It was a time when I was still single, no kid, and still renting a one-room apartment. All I needed at the time was something functional to keep my laptop and phone connected to the internet. But that’s far from the case right now.
Things are different 5 years later. With a family and a few smart gadgets, the number of devices has tripled. The web experience is sluggish; pages takes longer to load, video played at lower resolution, unexpected disconnection, and router RAM usage constantly occupied at 90%. This is an upgrade that’s going to happen sooner or later.
It got me thinking, what’s the line between “still works” and “need to be replaced”? Obviously, the old router still functions and I could live with it most of the time. But it exhausts me, I feel anxious when having to do a webinar at home, I knew the signal risks degrading so I carried a ethernet cable. These tiny incidents, although not often, breaks the purpose of a router. It’s a tool, and a tool needs to be functional and needs to be trusted. It’s functional, but it can’t be trusted, I think that’s what drove me to replace it.
Plus, the old one’s been running for 5 years, so it’s also about time.
(originally written on December 25, 2021)
The first day of owning a dumb phone was not full of anxiety from digital detox.
On the morning of December 24, I picked up the secondhand Nokia 3310 that I purchased online. Being late for work, I didn’t swap my SIM to the phone (it requires an adapter anyways), so I shove it into my pocket.
Size is a great advantage of dumb phone, I didn’t have to pull out the phone every time I sit. Even during walking, the size of the phone doesn’t break the posture. Smartphone inside the front or back pocket never felt right, it’s always awkward to walk with that.
I realize my first day reaction is not anxiety. I had, in my mind, to show my colleague the photo quality of the 2 megapixel camera, but I didn’t. I kept it inside my pocket the whole time. Something stopped me from doing that, and I think it was embarrassment. After all, it takes an effort to go against the norm.
What I couldn’t figure out at this point is the source of this feeling. Nevertheless, here are two hypothesis I have. First is the trust of this decision, I don’t have full confidence in this adjustment, which brings me back to my college days. It made sense, it’s only the first day and I haven’t dive into yet. The second guess has to do with how I perceive myself. As someone who works in the IT industry and as a marketing role, I should be on the edge of technologies, but this dumb phone is exactly the opposite to that. What part of myself will change, now or later, if the tech savvy part of me is taken away?
Fortunately or unfortunately, this experiment didn’t last long. That night I found out the phone only support 2G network, which service is terminated in Taiwan. I will need to purchase another phone to continue this experiment.