My home screen.
Snacking on: black tea with milk.
Well! The last week has been pretty hectic. I had a follow-up with my psychiatrist and we made some changes to my meds. So most of the week has been occupied with dealing with the withdrawl symptoms. But I'm already all better!
Not having much energy to work with, I decided to customize my phone a bit, and to dig in the settings to find a couple of options I have been meaning
to change for a while. Firstly, I finally switched over to DuckDuckGo from Google as my default search engine, and the
difference is HUGE. I have known about the issues with the Google search engine for a while, but I had not
realized the severity of it until I started using DuckDuckGo. It's nice finally being able to find what I'm searching for,
without having the top results be an unrelated Reddit post and a bunch of the same websites over and over. I know DuckDuckGo probably
has some advanages when it comes to privacy as well, but if I have to be honest I do not care that much about who gets my user data.
Not that I think caring about your intenret privacy is wrong, in fact I would love to see more legislation protecting user data in the future.
But for me specifically, and in the state the internet is currently in, the hustle of avoiding my data
being collected is more of a bother than my data being out there.
While I was at it, I customized my theme as well, changind my wallpapers and adding some widgets!
I decided go with a Zelda theme: the new background is a landscape from Twilight Princess, the widgets contain
images from Ocarina of Time, and the lock screen is a promotional poster for Majora's Mask.
Then I set up a filter that I can turn on and off to make my screen be black and white. It's nice when I'm overstimulated,
it helps me not get overly distracted by my phone and honestly it simply looks nice!
As I mentioned before I wan't really happy with how much time I had been spending doing uproductive things on my phone, and especially on social media.
So I set a maximum time I can use Instagram and a bunch of other apps, around 20 minutes per day, and I looked for something else I could
do on my phone when I need to relax or decompress. I ended up picking up Professor Layton and the Spectre's Call, which I've
playing on a DS emulator. It's great for when I'm on the train, or waiting for class to start, or too tired to
do anything else. I have been enjoying it so far, and I've already added it to the Game log.
I also downloaded a couple of the Star Trek novels, but I'm not planning to start them in the immediate future. It's
just nice to have the option for when I'll be in the mood for it.
I'm really happy with how the phone is right now. I'm quite impressed that I did not have to go through jaibreaking, or having to download a bunch of apps to get it at the point it currently is. I just installed an app to have access to some simple widgets and did everything else through the Android settings. I might tinker with it a bit more today, given I find the time and energy to do so, because the day is quite busy: I'll shower, do some schoolwork, then have lunch, take the train to uni and have class until 7PM.