Now

Updated: 2022-01-01 This is a now page. You should make one, too.

Curbing my smartphone addiction

  • Because it’s the gateway to other bad habits
  • Because it makes a travesty of real human interaction by taking it to the limit of shallowness
  • Because I want to choose every day how I spend my time
  • Because I don’t want to covet consumption devices whenever a corporation tells me to
  • Because these devices are tainted with blood and tears from slave labour
  • Because my attention belongs to the Lord, and must not be sold to the highest bidder
I am therefore getting rid of my smartphone. I’m still reachable on my mobile phone, but only if you call or text me. For friends and family overseas, I’m working on setting up a number to relay calls.v It feels strange to call this a “project” or something I’m “doing” now — this is all about not doing. Still, it’s something that occupies my mind a lot of the time, so I’ll take the effort to be deliberate.

Email Bible reading plan

This is something I have wanted done for a while. I use email for a lot of the reading I do. The thing I read the most is likely the Bible. There are great reading plans out there to read the entire Bible in a structured way. These days, they appear as smartphone apps. Smartphone apps are the easiest way to get me to not do something I set out to. Email is likely the opposite of that. So I build this thing, which is currently just a signup form attached to a cron job. It will email you the daily reading from the M’Cheyne reading plan. I felt like learning Rails for $NEWJOB would be a good excuse to use it, and have not been disappointed so far. The tooling is great, ActionMailer is brilliant. Sidekiq is pretty cool, too. This scratches my itch for now, but I have more features I would build into it, should more people be interested. Such as creating groups that become mailing lists (for posting comments and discussions), expanding the selection of plans and translations and maybe more. I am also hopeful that, since it touches email. I have a long list of itches, things I wish I could do over email. Setting up the infrastructure to run this has now lowered the cost of subsequent projects. It would be great to keep the momentum going.