I have not thrown off the yoke of my watch yet, but the feeling of looking forward to that moment has not passed either.
I also have not become a person daily driving his Jolla, but I have settled into a interesting new balance. Trying to connect my Airpods has so far been an exercise in frustration. They would be discovered, appear to connect, even give the connection chime, then I would hear nothing from the phone, then a few seconds later I would get the disconnect tone and sometimes even the connect tone as if they had chosen some other device to connect to.
I was about to start doubting everything about Bluetooth with the Jolla, but fortunately I found another pair of Bluetooth headphones which were mostly lying around waiting to be put to good use. And these were non-Apple, and thus free from strange sugar sprinkled on top of the protocol, free from ideas about magically intuiting which device you really want to get your sound from at any given moment.
Suddenly, I had reliable headphone audio for my Jolla.
I of course put it to use for some podcasting, but the standout experience has actually been Youtube. First off, the Jolla is lighter and more pleasant to hold. But much more important is the Youtube experience of Fintube, a Sailfish native app I somehow discovered.
Imagine what Youtube would be if it got out of the way. Completely. Search, subscription, playback. Nothing else. No recommendations. No long lists of stuff everywhere. Oh, no login, of course. No jumps to a strange, algorithm-fueled next video. When a video ends, it ends. I can go back and search for something else.
The darn thing even manages to skip ads embedded into the videos. And I have never seen any ad breaks or ads before or after videos, either. And it respects my choices about subtitles better than all my Apple devices.
Magical.
I have not quite got into podcasting yet. Pocket casts handles my library well and looks good, but it feels a bit crashy and I suspect it is about as good as Android on Sailfish gets. I think what I should do is find a well-rated native podcast player and build up a smaller library rather than importing my existing one. I am, after all, only listening regularly to a small subset of all the podcasts in the list.
I made a very deep cut into that subset as well. Once I caught up on my listening on IOS, I stopped all automatic downloads there. No new episodes unless I go looking for them and actively choose to start listening.
I did that, and I have not set up any automatic downloads or notifications on the Jolla either.
The feeling of space this creates is … surprising.
There are so many little things I can now just do. I can just start them, without needing to put on headphones, without selecting what to listen to, and without missing someone trying to talk to me. And once I finish the activity, I am done right away. I will not do other little stuff - or just sit around - just to prolong listening time.
This is of course virtually guaranteed not to last, but it is amazing to do things which break habits this noticeably every once in a while.
Speaking of habits, Øredev is coming up in one week's time. Am I prepared enough? Am I making the most of it? Should I have more pre-conference nerves?
I know it will be fun, but I am also looking forward to the post-conference section of the year. I am not sure what exactly has made this autumn feel so intense, but it has managed to do so while at the same time nothing much more than usual has been going on.