Misc Helpful Tools

I feel increasingly like technological progress is not designed to serve me. I've spent a lot of time over the past few months critically analysing how much of my life should be digital. It's still a work in progress, but here are things that are working for me right now.

Bedtime Home Automation for Sleep

Too often, I head into bed and I start doomscrolling and next thing you know it'll be 1-2am and then I try to fall asleep. Sleep hygiene takes intense discipline for me that I often just do not have.

I threw Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 3 lying around in my apartment and unified all of the smart bulbs in my room under HAOS. I then bought NFC tags off Amazon and programmed a tag to trigger my lights to turn off in fifteen minutes. Now, at bedtime, I trigger the automation and put my phone aside, away from my bed. After that, I can lay in bed and read on my Kobo for about 15 minutes, wind down, and then my lights turn off automatically, signalling time for me to go to bed.

In addition, I have the lights in my apartment set to mimic sunlight availability, dimming themselves to near darkness at night. For additional light, I've started using candles. The dim lighting in my apartment is now a reminder that it's bed time.

I really want to program an ESP32 board with an NFC chip to help make sure that I don't even need my phone to trigger NFC automations. At some point I need to find a soldering iron to do that.

Monotasking Items

Looking at the time on my phone is just an excuse to start doomscrolling. I've loved carrying around a simple, distraction-free analog watch around. I thought adjusting the time when transitioning across the country would have been a nuisance, but it's become almost a little ritual to mark arriving somewhere new.
I am a big fan of my Kobo, which I have installed Koreader on. Through a Wallabag instance hosted on Pikapods, I'm able to save articles to read later. Koreader supports pulling down these articles onto my Kobo as epubs so I can read them offline. This is particularly useful on the subway.
I bought a Tangara last year and at some point want to start purchasing my music again, but haven't managed to do that.
I started carrying a small notebook again for lists. There's something oddly satisfying about walking around the grocery store checking items physically off a list that I just have not been able to replicate otherwise.
A friend at church gifted me a brass Kaweco Sport. I have never considered the material a pen is made of when writing but it makes such a huge difference. The heftiness slows me down and is harder to lose.

Instagram Mobile Web Client

I didn't succeed in my 2025 New Year's Resolution to build the social infrastructure required to break up with Instagram, but for now, I find that a combination of Beeper acting as an IG DM client without the distractions of the Instagram app along with the Instagram mobile website is inconvenient enough that I don't feel the need to doomscroll constantly.

The most frustrating thing about Instagram recently has been its promotion of Threads. I find myself really sucked into the Threads algorithm, which is full of ragebait slop. On the other hand, most online discourse in Taiwan has moved onto Threads, which is frustrating because Taiwanese Threads is full of memes and interesting discourse about local politics.

I wish there was a way to force my algorithm to exclusively show me Taiwanese Threads content. At some point I might force it in that direction, but I haven't figured out how to do that yet.

Helix Editor

After a long time flying between different text editors, I've currently landed on Helix. It comes with a reasonable set of defaults for writing Markdown and I've come to find that it makes for a fantastic distraction-free writing environment. The setup I have for writing Markdown in Helix is very minimal. I merely set soft-wrap. To replicate my setup, edit your ~/config/helix/languages.toml to include the following Markdown configuration:

  [[language]]
  name = "markdown"
  soft-wrap.enable = true
  soft-wrap.wrap-at-text-width = true
  text-width = 70

I find that I spend more time tweaking my tools than I do writing with them. Helix is sensible enough that with this minimal configuration I feel very happy with where things are.

An Ask

What are small ways that you make this life feel more manageable? Let me know.