I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished these last few years. My relationship to technology has changed a lot. I’m carrying a non-smartphone full time, I’m primarily using Linux for personal use, and I’ve turned cast-off and second-hand electronics into stuff I actually use. And all while working full time, cooking all my family’s meals, and being a walking jungle gym for a high-energy baby and toddler. Oh, and I write for this website to collect my thoughts and document them.
With all my lifestyle changes around technology, I want to keep the momentum going. Here are some tech projects that I’m looking forward to in 2026.
Confabulator updates
Confabulator is more than just geeky side projects (not that there’s anything wrong with those!). Everything that I’m doing is really about the future. I’m picking and choosing the future I want based on readily available technologies and the relationship I want to have to them. Much of what is said about the (capital-F) Future is influenced by, or directly broadcast by, hedonistic ends-justify-the-means plutocrats who call themselves futurists or techno-optimists. The influence of plutocrats has skewed the internet discourse into a false dichotomy. When the Future is framed as block chain and cryptocurrency or generative AI, any substantive criticism, or y’know, different interests and preferences, naturally gets framed as a regressive view of technology. Futurist plutocrats have granted themselves a monopoly on, among other things, optimism itself. I reject that. This next year I want to focus my writing on the future. I believe managing e-waste, promoting digital ownership, and protecting against internet media is part of a vision for an optimistic, human-focused, future rather than a condemnation of it.
In the short term, I’ve made some updates to the look of the site. I want to arrive at a design that I’ll keep for at least a few years. I feel like I’m close.
In the long term, I’m thinking about changing web hosts. This website is hosted with GitHub Pages which has been great for how easy it is to publish and it’s no maintenance. But I assume that one day GitHub will betray us. They have to. It’s practically their fiduciary responsibility to make user-hostile changes. I’d like to evaluate some alternatives so that when the day comes that GitHub steps in the poop, I’ll already be halfway out the door.
The big project: A family computer / computer for my kid
As a parent, it’s not really up to me what kid absorbs from the world around them. Despite my best efforts, and rarely carrying a smartphone, my kid has internalized that all screens are touch screens. My goal with a family computer is that I’m giving my kid something to play around with, but on my terms with built-in guardrails. Something that is attractive enough to want to use, but that isn’t quite as addictive as an iPad. This project is largely a thought experiment about what sorts of applications a small child might use and enjoy and what I can do to make the computer more usable.
Long term project: Owning my movies, TV, and music
Admittedly this is a couple projects in one. It’s not about replacing music and video streaming services today. I want to have a baseline of media services that I own and run. Over time these will improve. I’ll keep them maintained and ready. They’ll serve as a commercial-free alternative in the face of increasing prices and changes in terms of service. Similar to the family computer, the measure of success is if my alternatives are attractive and usable enough for my family. I’m not shutting off even a single streaming services until I have comparable alternatives in place that my family uses voluntarily. Since streaming services are just icons on our Apple TV set-top box, the scene it set for something like Plex, Jellyfin, or others to rotate in over time.
Nice to have: Wallabag on Kindle
I got pushed off of Pocket when it reached end-of-life this summer and I installed Wallabag on my Raspberry Pi. So far, so good. But what I really want is to read my saved articles on my Kindle. That would cut down my internet consumption and dovetail nicely with my curated RSS feeds. A Wallabag client exists for Jailbroken Kindles (which I have), but getting it is more involved than downloading a binary. I need to compile it and whatnot. So I’ve queued this up as a project when I have the time and mental energy for that sort of thing.
Nice to have: Dumb phone alternative
I love my Light Phone 2, but the battery is not replaceable and the micro-USB port is wearing down, so unfortunately it is future garbage. I should get at least another year or two out of it, but if it broke irreparably, I don’t know what my best alternative is. I wouldn’t buy another Light Phone 2 because of its age and lack of repairability. I didn’t care for the Light Phone 3 which I pre-ordered last year and promptly sold on eBay. My goal for the year is to evaluate my options and have a front-runner even if I don’t buy anything.
While trying different mobile operating systems, I came across a really interesting option called /e/OS. I learned about /e/OS through its association with the Fairphone. I’ve been following the Fairphone from a distance because it’s the rare phone that’s designed for repair. I noticed that you can buy the Fairphone pre-installed with /e/OS from Murena (the developer of /e/OS). And if it’s good enough to pre-install on a phone, it’s most certainly good enough for me. Murena even sells refurbished Pixel 5s with /e/OS, and because I had one lying around, it was game on.
The Pixel 5 is the newest of my “old” phones so it has the best specs of all my cast-offs. It has 8 GB of RAM, a fast processor, great battery life, and a sharp display. It’s thin, measuring only 8 mm thick, with basically no camera bump. The screen has small bezels and the edges of the phone curve to match the corners of its screen which makes the screen feel edge-to-edge. I really like the shape, size, and the look of the Pixel 5. It’s an attractive package with hardware that has many good years left in it. But at only five years old, it won’t receive any more major Android updates. And since it won’t receive updates, it’s fair game to unlock the bootloader and install something else.
After installing /e/OS on the Pixel 5, I was struck with the polish of the home screen – in Android the home screen is called the launcher. The /e/OS launcher borrows heavily from classic iOS before version 14). Every installed app is on the home screen, as opposed to having some app shortcuts on the home screen while the rest are tucked away in the big list of all apps (the app drawer). You can drag and drop app icons into folders, and there is a dock at the bottom of the screen that holds four icons. Also similar to iOS 13 and earlier, widgets are restricted to the left of the home page, and shown as a verical list. It includes built-in widgets for app suggestions (much like Siri suggestions), weather, and Advanced Privacy (more on that later).
The first thing to do with a fresh install of /e/OS was to get the apps I wanted. Now this is a “de-Googled” version of Android, so it doesn’t come with the Google Play Store. Instead it has the App Lounge. The App Lounge is interesting because it has all of the apps from the Play Store, but you don’t need to be signed in with a Google account. It means that despite having a de-Googled experience, I’m able to use all my usual third party applications such as 1Password, Chase, Spotify, and Todoist. In addition to the Play Store apps, it has all of the apps from F-Droid, the open source Android app repository. I appreciate that open source and commercial apps are in the same unified interface. I have a mix of Play Store apps with open source apps, and I can receive automatic updates for both. It’s very convenient and without requiring a Google account.
A major feature of /e/OS is its Advanced Privacy features. And before I get into it, I need to describe what privacy means in this case. Here the privacy concern is that mobile apps collect data about your app usage (often called analytics). They do this mostly through well-known analytics and advertising services (e.g. Firebase and Admob). By default, /e/OS blocks connections to these services. What that does is prevent mobile apps from collecting data that can be used to track your activity across the web. The blocking and reporting of blocked attempts is referred together as Advanced Privacy. You can view which services were blocked and which apps attempted to use them in either the system settings or from the Advanced Privacy widget.
Taken together, it’s a great mobile operating system and all without a Google account. So what’s the catch?
I mentioned earlier about the App Lounge providing apps from the Google Play Store. I can’t imagine Google is happy about their Play Store apps being available on an unofficial platform. Additionally /e/OS includes something called MicroG, which is an open source alternative to Google Play Services. Google Play Services solves the problem where Android users all have different versions of Android. To smooth out the differences between the versions of Android, Google create Play Services, a set of features available to other apps that that can be delivered and updated through the Google Play Store. All of this is replaced by MicroG on /e/OS.
My main concern is that these are not supported use cases. Google has no interest in making sure this continues to work, and if anything, they will do things to break it. If there’s something keeping /e/OS and MicroG safe from retribution, it’s that the install base is so small. If /e/OS gained steam, Google may take active measures. And unless the European Union (Murena is based in the EU) is willing or able to step in, Google could break the App Lounge and/or MicroG.
To be fair, these issues have been true for the entire lifetime of /e/OS (since 2020) and MicroG (since 2015) and today everything works fine. But I have to mention my concerns about its future.
Conclusion
In my survey of alternative mobile operating systems, I’m looking software that lets old hardware do something, and that something may not be a full-fledged mobile experience for daily use. I’ve written that LineageOS is the best alternative mobile operating system because it’s available for a lot of phones. Installing it will often give you a newer base version of Android, adding years of modern software and application support. /e/OS doesn’t support nearly as many devices, but it adds some extra features and a level of polish that makes it attractive for daily use.
My primary phone is the Light Phone 2, but I still live in the modern world and need access to third party applications. This is especially true as more services require the use of a mobile app and make analog options (like a printed Metra ticket) less convenient. For these cases, I have a six year old iPhone 11 Pro which gives me access to essential apps. But the dual problem of future garbage and software precarity means that the hardware is not made to last forever and the software changes independent of my needs, beyond merely supporting my phone.
With my goal to only buy second-hand consumer technology, I’m thinking seriously about what that future looks like and its limitations. I’m looking for tools that enable this future for me. /e/OS gives me a commercial-free mobile operating system and it’s really very good! It’s a strong contender for my future smartphone OS, and I’d welcome it.
A mention goes out this year to the application FreshRSS, which I’ve been hosting on my Raspberry Pi computer for the last three years. What’s different this year is that I’m using the FreshRSS web interface. Previously I used FreshRSS as nothing more than a back-end for other applications, namely NetNewsWire on Mac and iOS. And as I look to disentangle myself from Apple’s platforms, I switched to using FreshRSS in the browser. Part of it is that I never found a good RSS application for Linux. There are a few, and I thought they were awful in one way or another, either looking like they were fresh out of 1999 or not working in a way that I liked.
As I used my Linux laptop more, I found myself using FreshRSS in the browser and then I bookmarked it on all my devices, and I really liked it. It even looks and works well on mobile. Normally I prefer a native application to a web application because I feel like it’s a waste of system resources to run a browser when I could have a native application running locally. In the case of RSS, it feels different because the content of all of it is web-based, so viewing it in a browser feels native to that content. When I open links from the RSS feed, I’m going to open it in a browser anyway. RSS feed items are all of the internet and on the internet and it makes sense to have it all in a web browser from the get-go.
This year in particular has required a different approach to media. My country, the great United States of America, elected a new (old) President, and this guy is far more interested in creating headlines and spectacle than running things well. He needs to be the center of attention for something every single week, if not every single day. And for the last 12-13 years that he’s been in politics, the mainstream media can’t help but play into it. Internet media drinks up traditional media and dissects it into thousands of tiny bits of re-packaged out-of-context twaddle. It’s not a sane person’s quest to sift through that, especially when the sifting is aided my algorithms tuned for maximum emotional reaction and engagement.
It’s more important than ever that I can pick and choose my sources and put them into a system that lets me manage my reading, group my sources however I like, mark news items as read to get them out of the way, or star them to reference later. It puts some control back in my hands rather than being the recipient of a feeding tube. And I find that control has been really healthy and wholesome.
And that’s why I give FreshRSS a 2025 Favorite Things honorable mention. Because of the capabilities of the software, which is very good and reliable, and also that the media landscape in which I live makes this kind of thing necessary.