It turns out that these posts are about 90% of what I actually write on here. After the Great WordPress Migration of late-2025 (hence the new format), I was going back and re-reading some of my earlier posts on this and have been doing some retrospection on my technology usage. Where I am right is certainly as “connected” as one can get. But I think it’s ultimately not a happy place to be. So let’s fix that (or at least come up with a gameplan on how to try).
Read more: Reducing infinities, early 2026 edition (a.k.a., the great technology overhaul)Shockingly, it’s been over a decade since the first time I did this. At the time, the firehose of aggregators had just started and the era of “The Algorithm” was still a few years away. Social networks now firmly in the dustbin of time (we hardly new ye, Google+) were still very much a thing. And the “quick scroll” videos of TikTok (and then Instagram and YouTube) weren’t even a thing we had even dreamed about yet. Twitter was yet to be re-branded into X and LinkedIn was still a place to basically just post your resume and keep up with work friends (rathe than the Facebook-lite it’s turned into now).
In the 2015, I’d been using an RSS reader to keep track of honest-to-god blogs. Do you remember https://slashdot.org/? Because I’d entirely erased some of these aggregators from my memory banks. Things back in the mid-10s hadn’t quite hit the full mainstream firehose yet and things like Google+ (and Twitter, at the time) still maintained some sense of control (fictional or not) on the content that one wanted to see. I wrote about trying to “keep the streams” separate for work, fun, and things I just wanted to keep up with.
I won’t bother summarizing the intervening iterations. But I think it’s safe to say that it’s time for a hard refresh. When I was a postdoc, being fully leashed to my phone was essential to monitor things like data processing pipeline and to keep up with any alerts in the community. My science interests have moved away from that sphere a bit now, but I still have deeply ingrained “let’s just check my inbox real quick” or “Let’s see what’s happening on Slack” habits. So it’s time for a change.
As I wrote at the end of last year, we’d tried using the Apple News infrastructure. And I’ve pondered whether just jumping full into Reddit is maybe an alternative. I’ve browsed other things like SubStack, but it’s still focused on community-driven content. When I do any kind of dive into topics that I actually know something about (astronomy) it only takes me about 10 rows to find something that’s highly rated but that is either just regurgitating / reposting other people’s work or is demonstrably just wrong. So that’s out.
The 2026 plan: Return to the past!
Part 1: Clean up the damn phone
I went through all of my phone’s apps and did a pretty aggressive New Years cleaning with the intention of removing as much of the “content consuming” things from the phone. I’ve left on my work mail (via Outlook) and Slack but they are hidden (for now) from the main screen. I may put them back on after I get back to work, but in a “need to swipe over” screen. Gone are Facebook, Reddit, and the News/Stocks widgets. Banished from the home screen is also Safari (so long Chome). The intention here is that if I want to actually track down some content I need to actually go and sit at a computer to do it.
Remaining on the phone are the various text tools (Messages/WhatsApp), Podcasts/Audiobooks, and the app I use to charge the car at work. Also Photos, Maps, and AnyList (our shared shopping list app that we’ve been using since it launched). My second screen is a Calendar widget and a Weather widget. Various games are on the phone, but relegated off of the home screen as are the multitude of seldom-used, but phone-essential apps (Über, iQ Chef for smart thermometers, etc). Gone are the NY Times and LA Times apps from the phone entirely.
Part 2: Set up the computer again.
The goal of this exercise is to make the computer the primary place where I consume content. I have two: a laptop for work that I travel with, and my home Mac mini that is predominantly used for photo storage and gaming. There’s a choice to make of whether I want to mirror the content over to my work computer, or not. I’m declaring “not” to avoid cluttering up my work computer and having any distractions on that machine. And, since we’re no longer intending on having any of this content on the phone itself, we have obviated the need for cross-platform synching between the macOS versions and the iOS versions or between multiple machines. Which makes life much simpler.
And it turns out that RSS readers are still a thing. In fact, top News apps on the macOS store (both paid and free) are almost entirely RSS readers (some masquerading as news aggregators). I think that some are gunning for replacing the native News app in macOS with slightly more control, but I’m not sure thats a winning strategy. And most of them seem to have some issues with read/unread tracking. So I’m going to go extremely old school and go with NetNewsWire as an RSS client. The developers are going for a light-weight, stable, app. It looks like the macOS Notes app. There are easy links out to the main story page, which can be clicked on if needed. But there’s very little extraneous loading of the pages into the app (which I’m guessing is where others fall flat). So we’ll start there.
Part 3: Content streams…again.
Just for fun, let’s go through the inputs from 2015:
- 2015 Blogs (with 2026 comments)
- Celestial Waste of Bandwidth (Andy Ihnatko’s blog). I don’t really listen to Apple-specific tech news any more or consume content like Mac Break Weekly, so I’m not going to include this here.
- The Loop (Jim Dalrymple and Dave Mark). Barring what I said above, this is the one Mac-specific thing I’ll keep.
- Daring Fireball (John Gruber’s blog). I still like John’s writing in a “get of my lawn” tech veteran feeling.
- Ars: Scientific Method (mostly an aggregator) – Still exists, and still looks good.
- NASA Breaking News – Removed. I get this more directly via email.
- National Geographic News – Doesn’t seem RSS friendly anymore. Also, the Latest News feed is venturing into the clickbaity zone. Dropped.
- Nature News – I think this was a defunct website. Dropped.
- New Scientist – Adding their generic “News” RSS feed. Good popular science coverage check.
- JPL News – Dropped.
- The Planetary Society Blog – Added
- Scientific American – Dropped
- SPACE.com – Added
- Universe Today – Added
- 2026 adds:
Now the hard part…what to do with the news? The short answer is that this doesn’t go in my feed. If I want to get news, I’ll just go to the NY Times or the LA Times I’ll just go there directly. No need for news story to build themselves into my feed. Especially since the BBC is migrating to a subscription model for a large chunk of their content, I need to get out of the habit of just going to the BBC to try to get a pulse on the news.
Part 4: Profit?
I’m setting all of this up on Jan 2, 2026. We’ll come back in a month or so and see how things are going. But one of the hardest parts is going to be breaking the habit of waking up and just checking my phone. That’s been ingrained (especially in the years during and since COVID) as a standard part of my day (both waking up and going to sleep) and it’s one of the things that I want to try to break myself of this year (carefully not calling it a New Year’s resolution, because those things never stick).
Leave a Reply