Hello Fediverse!
I’m happy to announce the Single Purpose Devices community on Lemmy, a place for discussion, sharing of ideas and recommendations about the growing trend of single purpose devices: rather than relying on a smartphone that brings you anxiety and demands attention, how about going back to the days of carrying a MP3 player, a notebook and pen and a beautiful camera?
While people join this movement for a variety of different reasons, from reclaiming digital privacy, to mental health, to evading anti-customer repair policies and malicious software updates, we can all share our own experiences and tips. See you there!
I use a few
- Raspberry Pi alarm clock
- Raspberry Pi for music, packed with stored playlists
- Videophone thing for meetings
I wonder if using a whole computer for in the spirit of a single purpose device. Seems a bit overkill.
Is the objective to “reclaim control over your technology”, or is it to be a single purpose device? I can think of a lot of single purpose devices loaded with subscriptions and telemetry, and just as many general purpose computing platforms without that crap that let you be in control.
Pi Zero is barely a ‘whole computer’ – that phrase overestates the situation
Ah well, a Pi Zero I suppose is less overkill.
There was some science-fiction writer in the mid 20th century argued that each household would have one humanoid robot. Because, he said, if you have a robot vacuum and a robot lawnmower etc. you’d need multiple computers, and that’s overkill.
Sounds silly in hindsight because a ‘whole computer’ turned out to be cheap and small, and it’s not a big deal to have multiple.