A separated device to write my blog or some short stories would be a godsend to me. With each year it passes, I feel my concentration vanish more and more. A distraction-free device could help me regain some concentration (I think).
Except, if it did not achieve your expectations. Note the article is short on facts, high on marketing verbiage. If I'm not mistaken this is the same blogger, Alex Soto who previously made a lot of claims and when I challenged him on it, rapidly backtracked. Same guy previously claimed that E-Ink was a patent abuser, and another similarly named guy who headed some kickstarter program claimed E-Ink was suppressing his business and that was why he wasn't able to deliver on previous products, but when I asked him to substantiate it, he changed his blog post.
Yes, that's the same Alex Soto for the link you provided. However, I'm guessing whatever Kickstarter you're talking about is a different guy (I would probably know if Alex had done a Kickstarter because of an online community I'm in).
I've talked with him about e-ink projects before (because I've got a similar project brewing). You previously caught him on the steep upward slope learning about e-ink where he had some incorrect information (e.g., your link), but he always took corrections and has kept at trying to make the e-ink laptop vision happen.
He is a true open-source advocate and while I don't know about Modos beyond the website, I trust he really is hoping to help such a project see the light of day and empower others to be able to make their own e-ink laptops.
I immediately thought it was a joke myself - besides the picture of the thinkpad with a bolted on e-reader on a messy desk, the laptop name is "Sodom" backwards and the writer's name is an anagram for "A Sex Tool".
Either someone's taking the piss, or terrible at naming things...
You could make any PC or laptop into a 'low distraction' device by disconnecting it from the Internet and having a minimum install of only the required productivity software.
It won't free you from the distraction of your other devices though, as you've probably got a fully-online phone within reach.
There's some truth to your comment, and the one threat you'll never run away from is yourself, but it misses a lot.
I've been using an Onyx BOOX Max Lumi as my daily driver for about a year. It's an e-ink Android tablet, principally intended as an e-book reader (which I use it for), though it also serves quite well for podcasts, web browsing, and general terminal work (Termux / SSH).
If I really want to minimise distractions, I'll disable networking. I can read local content (articles, or my Pocket stash), which is already ample distraction. Or play back downloaded podcasts.
It is far more usable outdoors or under bright lighting than any laptop or tablet, which is itself highly useful.
Battery life is quite good when reading ebooks. This involves disabling Bluetooth, WiFi, and if possible, the Backlight, and avoiding screen repaints. When used for podcasts or browsing, CPU drain is fairly substantial, though I can get well over a day's use per charge typically.
There's no social media or any other apps on the device. My one authenticating app is Pocket.
The UI is not entirely as distraction-free as I'd like, but it is far more so than any other device I've owned in decades.
Lacking colour and high-speed animations is of and by itself a major win on distraction-free status. So, interestingly enough, is the ability to take freehand notes on the device. I'd not anticipated doing that much, it's turned out to be a significant use.
I got similar feelings as the OP though. It's not just about notifications popping up or having a browser at hand. I feel the epaper display puts me in a different frame of mind. A "Not sitting at the computer" state, in which I think differently. So I always wondered if writing on an epaper display would not feel entirely different than looking at an empty page in a word processor. I certainly feel the difference when reading a book an my ereader vs. my phone/tablet.
I usually just turn my phone off if I need to focus. If someone /really/ needs to reach me they could always call my workplace. And I avoid phone communication at all cost anyway.
I realise this is not an option for everyone of course. There's also apps that allow you to time lock your phone with exceptions for important things. Protip: set it up so you can get around it by rebooting the phone, in case you forgot to whitelist something, etc. Smartphones are painfully slow to boot anyway, so it still helps discourage the constant distraction if you can muster the will power to not do the reboot. More effort means you consider it rather than reflexively do it.
If YouTube, other videos, or fast-moving games is the source of their distraction, then an e-ink monitor would provide a hardware obstacle rather than a pure software one which can more easily be overcome.
Yeah I feel like this kind of thing is a bit of redundant, if you were going to be distracted by looking at HN on your laptop, you probably will do the same on your phone
The best AlphaSmart is still the Dana, though. The closest thing to a PalmOS laptop and everything that makes it an AlphaSmart, too, with the same great keyboard and "typing" feature.
Thank you for your words and for describing your use case. For writing, I tend to go analog. I use paper and pencil to write a rough draft and get my ideas on paper; the next stage is to type up the thoughts digitally and use a low-tech device like an AlphaSmart Neo, or Pomera DM30. I've found breaking up the writing process into steps and using a dedicated device works for me.
Using a typical desktop operating system, but on an eInk screen, is one of those things that sounds cool, but I suspect the reality after using it for a while will be "Never mind, this sucks, because no software (including the OS itself) was designed with working well on sluggish & image-persistence-afflicted panels in mind".
I think doing this concept properly is as much of a software project as a hardware project.
Unix was originally designed to work on teletypes, which are even slower and higher-latency than e-ink.
Having used an e-ink device heavily for over a year, including both local (Termux) and remote (SSH) system use via it and a keyboard, I'm conveninced that for text-heavy work it's fully functional, and would probably be viable with a sufficiently-thoughtful GUI which adhered to the design principles and respected the imitations of e-ink:
1. Persistence is free.
2. Pixels are cheap
3. Paints are expensive
4. Refreshes are slow
5. Colour is limited to nonexistent.
6. Pagination over scroll.
7. Full refresh (of page or portion) over pan.
8. Reflective rather than emissive.
9. Minimise animation.
10. Line-art or halftones over shade gradients (images).
That's essentially older GUI desktops before GPUs did more than just provide an interface for the monitor. Paints used to be very expensive (and remained so for quite a while). Pixel scrolling also took a while to appear on consumer desktops.
I have some insight in this as I'm currently building a very similar project myself. I'm using off-the-shelf components and the relatively cheap USB driver board for the 10.3" ePaper display is more than capable enough of showing a variety of content. Typing in a document or code is plenty fast, scrolling a webpage is usable, but you'd probably want to use PgUp/PgDown, moving the mouse around is fine but I'm using a tiling window manager to avoid having to drag windows around. I'm able to drive video, but it's quite choppy. In general small updates are plenty fast (like showing characters next to a cursor) and big updates are slow (like full screen video playback). Playing video in a small window is fine if you just want to get some information out of it.
All these speeds are in a dithered 1-bit mode though. As soon as you start playing around with grayscale things starts going slow (you essentially need to display N levels of grayscale as N frames). The system I'm using is capable of updating parts of the display in 1-bit mode and others in "high-fidelity" 16 levels mode. This means that I could e.g. tell it that my picture viewing program should use the full quality mode, and my text editor should use the fast mode. Since I'm using a tiling window manager opening a picture would then use about a second to display the image, but once it's there I could type into a window next to it at full speed. It could also allow me to highlight areas to redraw in high-quality mode if I was browsing a website for example and wanted to watch a particular image.
Well, that's certainly true for the majority of modern software, but the operating systems of yore and the software that ran on them was designed to handle old slow LCDs and restricted color environments quite well.
Mac OS up through System 7.5.5 works excellently on such displays, because it had to run on several models of PowerBook with black and white or grayscale passive matrix displays, which were notoriously slow. While not as good, black and white support remains decent all the way through the end of Classic Mac OS, with version 9.2.1.
For this reason, when imagining an e-ink semi-unitasker laptop such as this I imagine it being built with extremely low power hardware and running old operating systems, such as the aforementioned Classic Mac OS. I'm sure DOS/Win3.1/WinNT could stand in here too, probably more easily since 486/586/Pentium-compatible x86 CPUs are still being manufactured. One wouldn't be able to run Google Docs on such a machine, but there's a veritable cornucopia of abandonware readily available for such platforms at places like Macintosh Garden[0], and given highly specific use case of such a machine I think most people could find something that suits their needs.
I used and repaired those in the 1990s. System 7 was usable on those, to be sure, but I don't remember anything about it as "excellent". Everyone thought they kind of sucked. You could see the ghosting even then, and by the end of 1992 or 1993, IIRC, Apple stopped shipping passive matrix displays.
e-ink displays are not even up to that standard of responsiveness yet. And, as you point out, modern software has higher expectations than the systems that kind of sucked on those old passive matrix LCDs.
I use normal Android apps on my R-Reader. With some contrast settings and animations (mostly) turned off it's quite nice. However the animations that are still around (loading spinner, animated GIF) can be quite annoying.
A mouse pointer may itself be a bit hard to display on an E-Ink Screen. It will definitely leave a trail behind.
After years of trying different things, I have come to a conclusion that any variation of technology is not going to help from distractions until and unless you excercise discipline and restraint. Dialing back from the things that distract you can work with any technology. Healthy eating, excercising and sleep can do wonders. Walking away from "digital" world for some time can work too.
> any variation of technology is not going to help from distractions until and unless you excercise discipline and restraint
There's definitely a feedback cycle here though. Swap your dazzling iPhone 14 Pro Max for an iPhone 4S and then change the display to greyscale and see just how fast this technological solution reduces your levels of distraction.
Of course as you say it alone isn't a panacea: doing that is painful. But live with the pain long enough, and you've now used technology as a crutch to change your brain to expect the distraction less.
Here are some other technological solutions that I have found helpful:
* News Feed Eradicator: a browser plugin that hides those algorithmic news feeds that are the cocaine of the internet
* Unhook - Remove YouTube Recommended Videos: removes the sidebar on YouTube
* Podcasts - Even if you "already know" all the psychological tricks the world is pulling on you, your brain is programmable and if you simply listen and re-listen to Tristan Harris on a regular basis this imprints these lessons into your head. That, in turn, provides a well of motivation that can be used when the lure of addiction presents itself.
> There's definitely a feedback cycle here though. Swap your dazzling iPhone 14 Pro Max for an iPhone 4S and then change the display to greyscale and see just how fast this technological solution reduces your levels of distraction.
This worked for me. A few years back, I turned down everything (black background, no icons on home screen, no auto-wake on raise) on my iPhone SE (original version) and removed all social and mail apps. I’m still on this phone, both for this and for (small) size reasons.
Other than direct texts from people who need to reach me (which I liberally put into Do Not Disturb from time to time), I don’t get any notifications on my device.
It’s wonderful.
I eventually brought back Mail, mostly because I was using it for address references or communications during things like Craigslist transactions, but I no longer check it unless I’m looking for something in particular.
Along these lines, for all apps I install, I deny notifications by default, then consider (and often, don’t) enabling them for functionality that I need later on.
Though I don’t do as much as I used to (I’ve mixed in many other platforms), I do contract iOS development from time to time. I typically use my (also 5+ year old) iPad Pro for either iPhone/iPad development. When I need actual phone testing, while my SE is a little slow, the bigger problem I run into there more frequently is screen size considerations — even some of Apple’s apps assume you have more screen real estate and cut things off awkwardly.
> Of course as you say it alone isn't a panacea: doing that is painful. But live with the pain long enough, and you've now used technology as a crutch to change your brain to expect the distraction less.
For me, it's like quitting smoking. I couldn't do it cold turkey, it took trying many different things to 'wean' myself off of nicotine.
Technology is the same. I noticed I was getting distracted when I carried a tablet for work. So I replaced it with a remarkable. No more easy distraction = no more distraction.
So for some (especially those of us with addictive personalities), it is about finding supplementary aides to help with that discipline and restraint.
Reading on a fully featured tablet with a browser, apps, notifications vs reading on a special purpose device is a world of difference when it comes to attention for me.
I do a lot of writing, but I find that the idea of a distraction free environment doesn't work for me because I need to refer to external material too often. It doesn't matter whether it is for reviewing engineering projects, writing sermons or eulogies for funerals, or doing academic work (I have a bit of an odd lifestyle), I always need to use more than the editor or word-processor. I could see how it might work for a poet, but I'm not that.
If you are one of the people for whom a low-distraction environment works, could you say what sort of stuff you are writing?
> If you are one of the people for whom a low-distraction environment works, could you say what sort of stuff you are writing
When I was studying American Lit in college, my laptop died and I replaced it with an AlphaSmart Dana (this would’ve been around 2004). It was like a palm pilot with a long narrow screen and nearly full-size QWERTY keyboard.
I used it for about 2 years and just synced files w/ my roommate’s computer to print. Most of my reference was to external material as well, but in the form of printed books. It was also a great note-taking device in class.
Philosophy, but I divide the work of research and writing into separate activities. This isn't great from a productivity/quantitative aspect, but it's much better for quality.
For my distraction-free writing, the solution I found was to buy a 1992 grayscale LCD 386 laptop. I can do writing in Word that I have installed on Windows 3.1 and then open them later on my modern day computer with a floppy disk drive. This setup works great and I can help answer questions if anyone is curious.
I was going to write a blog post about this but I ended up sitting on the draft for too long and forgot about it, I really should publish that post :)
Are you always connected to power? I kept a few old laptops that would be practically useless today, but always wanted to resurrect for simple offline things. The biggest issue I have is power when off the charger.
I think my best laptop is 45 minutes or so per charge. At one point I even bought extra batteries and kept them safely stored and dry, only to realize that this does almost nothing to preserve their longevity as now years later I find them all to have about the same lifespan. I have extra 18650 batteries, however Im not sure, given the size of these, that this is what they use in there.
Yes the battery is long dead, so I always run it off of wall power. I have though about making a 3D printed modern day battery that is shaped like a NiMh battery of old, but has LiIon batteries inside, gets charged off of USBC, and provides voltage at the same level that the original NiMh would provide. Should be doable, but never got around to it.
I love the look of e-ink but I’ve been skeptical of using it for work ever since trying a few devices with e-ink screens—the latency of an eink screen can be a lot higher if the manufacturer doesn’t get it right, which is fine for some use cases but can be really annoying for others, such as typing.
For those looking for a distraction free, portable writing experience specifically, check out the pomera dm 200. It does not use eink but has a UI that sports a very similar look and feel to eink devices. It’s responsive, extremely portable, and only supports writing text. It’s Japanese, so the UI is in Japanese only, but you can write using English characters.
It will appeal to people who have to do a lot of reading, writing and thinking; and who are currently distracted by a lot of applications and features on their all-purpose devices.
Theoretically, you can turn off the Wi-Fi, put the writing app in focus mode, turn off notifications and avoid googling and looking at email and twitter. In practice, it is nearly impossible to do so. Which is why there are so many focus apps, pomodoro timers etc. It takes a lot of will power to avoid distractions.
Unlike a Kindle this thing can be used to key in text.
It certainly has a niche. What we don’t know is how big that niche is, and whether it will cause others to adopt non-distractive devices.
I honestly don't see an added value to such a product. Pushing for minimalism can be nice in a lot of situations, but to me, this seems like it's going a bit too far: The target audience for such a product can't possibly be that large. Visual applications aside, even coding without any syntax highlighting does not sound too great.
A couple years ago I was toying with the idea of using an e-ink display instead of an active one. I wondered about the same thing, how is coding without syntax highlighting?
Not too bad it turns out. You still have bold, italic, underline and gray. You can do an inverse text, which is good for headers (e.g. magit sections). I guess with a GUI editor, you can do things like boxes around tokens etc. -- I'm in an emacs over ssh most of the time, so I haven't looked into that.
I actually ended up liking this and have been using it since then, on a LED display.
As someone who'd adopted syntax highlighting somewhat grudgingly, it's something I do miss significantly whan it's gone.
That said, working on an e-ink device and doing mostly lightweight scripting occasionally, it's not a showstopper, and greyscale highlighting (which I've not looked into yet) could well work out.
I do remember when monochrome ANSI sequences were all I had on early serial terminals: regular, bold, underline, and reverse video. That's at least four gradations, and with a few greyscale shades, the palette should be usefully broad.
A few years ago, I threw out Molokai and made a deliberately-minimal and high-contrast colour scheme that I named “bland”. For the first two weeks, it was strictly black (#000) on white (#fff), with keywords bold, comments italic, escape sequences in strings bold italic, and things like Rust attributes underlined. I was fairly confident I’d want a little colour, but I wanted to give strict black-and-white a fair trial period before introducing anything further. After this self-imposed moratorium I made strings red, comments green and number literals blue, and have since made a few tweaks (e.g. italics instead of underline for Rust attributes, italics for macro invocations, and orange for things like macro variables), and made a dark variant somewhere along the way, but this is what I use to this day and find to work very well. It’s also what I use on my website, though generally with a slightly grey background rather than white.
Now all this was for monospaced terminal and Vim use. I’d very much like to try it with the ability to use a proportional typeface, and especially in the context of a monospace environment, to experiment with mixing different faces (Triplicate + Equity).
Back to the monochrome thing: I’d like to be able to use grey in most or all of the places where I currently use colour, simply to distinguish them more clearly; it’d be a lighter grey than the luminosity channel of the corresponding colours. Give me that, and monochrome is quite sufficient. But really, even black-and-white was tolerable, though it’d lend significant difficulty for some features line diff highlighting. Certainly full colour is nowhere near as necessary as most imagine (commonly often never having experienced anything else).
When discussing external eink screens the comments were that you definitely do get syntax highlighting, just not in color but rather bold, italic, different font etc.
That said, I also think that an eink screen (or tablet with screen) that you can use with any laptop has a much larger audience than having it built in.
Interesting. I cded without syntax highlighting for three decades. I think I could go back in an instant as I still haven't got comfortable with modern code editors. Visual Studio Code (as an example) has so much going on that I often can't tell if a word is high-lit because it's in my search field, I have selected it, or some other reason.
The Onyx BOOX Max Lumi features 16 greyscale shades, with more available via dithering and/or halftoning, which is mostly tolerable on text, given 220 dpi resolution.
They had a dual mode so you could have the look/feel of a normal backlight LCD panel but when you wanted to go outside you could toggle to transflective mode.
This means you would have normal refresh rates, color, multimedia, and an actual useful display when outdoors.
Not sure why they ever went bust or what happened to the IP for these displays.
Readit News
A separated device to write my blog or some short stories would be a godsend to me. With each year it passes, I feel my concentration vanish more and more. A distraction-free device could help me regain some concentration (I think).
Except, if it did not achieve your expectations. Note the article is short on facts, high on marketing verbiage. If I'm not mistaken this is the same blogger, Alex Soto who previously made a lot of claims and when I challenged him on it, rapidly backtracked. Same guy previously claimed that E-Ink was a patent abuser, and another similarly named guy who headed some kickstarter program claimed E-Ink was suppressing his business and that was why he wasn't able to deliver on previous products, but when I asked him to substantiate it, he changed his blog post.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26245563#26249219
I've talked with him about e-ink projects before (because I've got a similar project brewing). You previously caught him on the steep upward slope learning about e-ink where he had some incorrect information (e.g., your link), but he always took corrections and has kept at trying to make the e-ink laptop vision happen.
He is a true open-source advocate and while I don't know about Modos beyond the website, I trust he really is hoping to help such a project see the light of day and empower others to be able to make their own e-ink laptops.
Either someone's taking the piss, or terrible at naming things...
Some guy in his basement that cobbled together a working e-Ink word processor would be much more interesting to me.
It won't free you from the distraction of your other devices though, as you've probably got a fully-online phone within reach.
I've been using an Onyx BOOX Max Lumi as my daily driver for about a year. It's an e-ink Android tablet, principally intended as an e-book reader (which I use it for), though it also serves quite well for podcasts, web browsing, and general terminal work (Termux / SSH).
If I really want to minimise distractions, I'll disable networking. I can read local content (articles, or my Pocket stash), which is already ample distraction. Or play back downloaded podcasts.
It is far more usable outdoors or under bright lighting than any laptop or tablet, which is itself highly useful.
Battery life is quite good when reading ebooks. This involves disabling Bluetooth, WiFi, and if possible, the Backlight, and avoiding screen repaints. When used for podcasts or browsing, CPU drain is fairly substantial, though I can get well over a day's use per charge typically.
There's no social media or any other apps on the device. My one authenticating app is Pocket.
The UI is not entirely as distraction-free as I'd like, but it is far more so than any other device I've owned in decades.
Lacking colour and high-speed animations is of and by itself a major win on distraction-free status. So, interestingly enough, is the ability to take freehand notes on the device. I'd not anticipated doing that much, it's turned out to be a significant use.
I realise this is not an option for everyone of course. There's also apps that allow you to time lock your phone with exceptions for important things. Protip: set it up so you can get around it by rebooting the phone, in case you forgot to whitelist something, etc. Smartphones are painfully slow to boot anyway, so it still helps discourage the constant distraction if you can muster the will power to not do the reboot. More effort means you consider it rather than reflexively do it.
Plug it into a computer via USB and it will declare itself a keyboard, and with one keystroke, "type" all your text into your computer.
Very clever.
https://getfreewrite.com/collections/writing-tools/products/...
Thank you for your words and for describing your use case. For writing, I tend to go analog. I use paper and pencil to write a rough draft and get my ideas on paper; the next stage is to type up the thoughts digitally and use a low-tech device like an AlphaSmart Neo, or Pomera DM30. I've found breaking up the writing process into steps and using a dedicated device works for me.
https://github.com/joostkremers/writeroom-mode
I think doing this concept properly is as much of a software project as a hardware project.
Having used an e-ink device heavily for over a year, including both local (Termux) and remote (SSH) system use via it and a keyboard, I'm conveninced that for text-heavy work it's fully functional, and would probably be viable with a sufficiently-thoughtful GUI which adhered to the design principles and respected the imitations of e-ink:
1. Persistence is free.
2. Pixels are cheap
3. Paints are expensive
4. Refreshes are slow
5. Colour is limited to nonexistent.
6. Pagination over scroll.
7. Full refresh (of page or portion) over pan.
8. Reflective rather than emissive.
9. Minimise animation.
10. Line-art or halftones over shade gradients (images).
All these speeds are in a dithered 1-bit mode though. As soon as you start playing around with grayscale things starts going slow (you essentially need to display N levels of grayscale as N frames). The system I'm using is capable of updating parts of the display in 1-bit mode and others in "high-fidelity" 16 levels mode. This means that I could e.g. tell it that my picture viewing program should use the full quality mode, and my text editor should use the fast mode. Since I'm using a tiling window manager opening a picture would then use about a second to display the image, but once it's there I could type into a window next to it at full speed. It could also allow me to highlight areas to redraw in high-quality mode if I was browsing a website for example and wanted to watch a particular image.
I wonder, is there any practical way to do 1-bit just around the cursor?
Mac OS up through System 7.5.5 works excellently on such displays, because it had to run on several models of PowerBook with black and white or grayscale passive matrix displays, which were notoriously slow. While not as good, black and white support remains decent all the way through the end of Classic Mac OS, with version 9.2.1.
For this reason, when imagining an e-ink semi-unitasker laptop such as this I imagine it being built with extremely low power hardware and running old operating systems, such as the aforementioned Classic Mac OS. I'm sure DOS/Win3.1/WinNT could stand in here too, probably more easily since 486/586/Pentium-compatible x86 CPUs are still being manufactured. One wouldn't be able to run Google Docs on such a machine, but there's a veritable cornucopia of abandonware readily available for such platforms at places like Macintosh Garden[0], and given highly specific use case of such a machine I think most people could find something that suits their needs.
[0]: https://macintoshgarden.org
e-ink displays are not even up to that standard of responsiveness yet. And, as you point out, modern software has higher expectations than the systems that kind of sucked on those old passive matrix LCDs.
A mouse pointer may itself be a bit hard to display on an E-Ink Screen. It will definitely leave a trail behind.
There's definitely a feedback cycle here though. Swap your dazzling iPhone 14 Pro Max for an iPhone 4S and then change the display to greyscale and see just how fast this technological solution reduces your levels of distraction.
Of course as you say it alone isn't a panacea: doing that is painful. But live with the pain long enough, and you've now used technology as a crutch to change your brain to expect the distraction less.
Here are some other technological solutions that I have found helpful:
* News Feed Eradicator: a browser plugin that hides those algorithmic news feeds that are the cocaine of the internet
* Unhook - Remove YouTube Recommended Videos: removes the sidebar on YouTube
* Podcasts - Even if you "already know" all the psychological tricks the world is pulling on you, your brain is programmable and if you simply listen and re-listen to Tristan Harris on a regular basis this imprints these lessons into your head. That, in turn, provides a well of motivation that can be used when the lure of addiction presents itself.
This worked for me. A few years back, I turned down everything (black background, no icons on home screen, no auto-wake on raise) on my iPhone SE (original version) and removed all social and mail apps. I’m still on this phone, both for this and for (small) size reasons.
Other than direct texts from people who need to reach me (which I liberally put into Do Not Disturb from time to time), I don’t get any notifications on my device.
It’s wonderful.
I eventually brought back Mail, mostly because I was using it for address references or communications during things like Craigslist transactions, but I no longer check it unless I’m looking for something in particular.
Along these lines, for all apps I install, I deny notifications by default, then consider (and often, don’t) enabling them for functionality that I need later on.
Though I don’t do as much as I used to (I’ve mixed in many other platforms), I do contract iOS development from time to time. I typically use my (also 5+ year old) iPad Pro for either iPhone/iPad development. When I need actual phone testing, while my SE is a little slow, the bigger problem I run into there more frequently is screen size considerations — even some of Apple’s apps assume you have more screen real estate and cut things off awkwardly.
> Of course as you say it alone isn't a panacea: doing that is painful. But live with the pain long enough, and you've now used technology as a crutch to change your brain to expect the distraction less.
Absolutely — a great way to put it.
Technology is the same. I noticed I was getting distracted when I carried a tablet for work. So I replaced it with a remarkable. No more easy distraction = no more distraction.
So for some (especially those of us with addictive personalities), it is about finding supplementary aides to help with that discipline and restraint.
If you are one of the people for whom a low-distraction environment works, could you say what sort of stuff you are writing?
When I was studying American Lit in college, my laptop died and I replaced it with an AlphaSmart Dana (this would’ve been around 2004). It was like a palm pilot with a long narrow screen and nearly full-size QWERTY keyboard.
I used it for about 2 years and just synced files w/ my roommate’s computer to print. Most of my reference was to external material as well, but in the form of printed books. It was also a great note-taking device in class.
That's a... superpower.
I was going to write a blog post about this but I ended up sitting on the draft for too long and forgot about it, I really should publish that post :)
I think my best laptop is 45 minutes or so per charge. At one point I even bought extra batteries and kept them safely stored and dry, only to realize that this does almost nothing to preserve their longevity as now years later I find them all to have about the same lifespan. I have extra 18650 batteries, however Im not sure, given the size of these, that this is what they use in there.
For those looking for a distraction free, portable writing experience specifically, check out the pomera dm 200. It does not use eink but has a UI that sports a very similar look and feel to eink devices. It’s responsive, extremely portable, and only supports writing text. It’s Japanese, so the UI is in Japanese only, but you can write using English characters.
It will appeal to people who have to do a lot of reading, writing and thinking; and who are currently distracted by a lot of applications and features on their all-purpose devices.
Theoretically, you can turn off the Wi-Fi, put the writing app in focus mode, turn off notifications and avoid googling and looking at email and twitter. In practice, it is nearly impossible to do so. Which is why there are so many focus apps, pomodoro timers etc. It takes a lot of will power to avoid distractions.
Unlike a Kindle this thing can be used to key in text.
It certainly has a niche. What we don’t know is how big that niche is, and whether it will cause others to adopt non-distractive devices.
Not too bad it turns out. You still have bold, italic, underline and gray. You can do an inverse text, which is good for headers (e.g. magit sections). I guess with a GUI editor, you can do things like boxes around tokens etc. -- I'm in an emacs over ssh most of the time, so I haven't looked into that.
I actually ended up liking this and have been using it since then, on a LED display.
That said, working on an e-ink device and doing mostly lightweight scripting occasionally, it's not a showstopper, and greyscale highlighting (which I've not looked into yet) could well work out.
I do remember when monochrome ANSI sequences were all I had on early serial terminals: regular, bold, underline, and reverse video. That's at least four gradations, and with a few greyscale shades, the palette should be usefully broad.
Now all this was for monospaced terminal and Vim use. I’d very much like to try it with the ability to use a proportional typeface, and especially in the context of a monospace environment, to experiment with mixing different faces (Triplicate + Equity).
Back to the monochrome thing: I’d like to be able to use grey in most or all of the places where I currently use colour, simply to distinguish them more clearly; it’d be a lighter grey than the luminosity channel of the corresponding colours. Give me that, and monochrome is quite sufficient. But really, even black-and-white was tolerable, though it’d lend significant difficulty for some features line diff highlighting. Certainly full colour is nowhere near as necessary as most imagine (commonly often never having experienced anything else).
That said, I also think that an eink screen (or tablet with screen) that you can use with any laptop has a much larger audience than having it built in.
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I'm not sure how many tones this eink screen has, but there certainly is a variety of monochrome editor themes. You could make your own if not.
Here is a demo of the Pixel Qi10 display : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi6DbFyZde8
They had a dual mode so you could have the look/feel of a normal backlight LCD panel but when you wanted to go outside you could toggle to transflective mode.
This means you would have normal refresh rates, color, multimedia, and an actual useful display when outdoors.
Not sure why they ever went bust or what happened to the IP for these displays.