tl;dr If you have an older computer, consider using it for more focused time away from social media!¹ Also take advantage of ublock origin on firefox!² Enabling more UO filter lists is the simplest start to learning more!

I’ve recently been thinking about certain devices I have as distraction machines. My phone certainly is. And my main laptop (a thinkpad) is not quite as bad but can definitely go down the doomscroll path. I have an old chromebook that I’ve setup with the intention of not going on any social media besides an rss reader. I’m hoping that helps with doomscrolling and mindless time wasting. (Especially in the midst of terribly bleak news.)

It’s also interesting seeing what my experience of the internet can be with 2 GB of RAM. There are people using the internet with less than that but that involves more and more trade offs. This chromebook still works, so I’m figuring out what trade offs work for that. I experimented with many weird browsers but ended up right back where I started with firefox.

In the process, I learned about the many, many features of ublock origin that I had no idea were there. (I’ve been repeatedly surprised by how much depth there is to UO.) I’ve used the default UO settings for quite a while (and other adblockers in the time before that). This is in addition to setting up pihole to block ads across my network.

Then I learned about the different blocking modes that UO has. Like medium mode, where you block all third party javascript and iframes by default. Domains that are not the domain of the page you’re on are third party. You can always change the setting per site if you want to enable all resources. The blocking would just be the default. There’s hard mode, where UO blocks all third party resources. That would also include images, css, and remote fonts.

Beyond those modes, there are additional options for blocking large media elements (like images above 50 KB). As well as the ability to disable javascript.³ These settings obviously break many webpages. But on an older device without social media, I’m pretty fine with that! I selectively decide what features I want to enable for a site.

The advanced settings also change the look of the UO interface to help you see all of the different domains that the page is trying to load from. It ends up teaching me a bit about the architecture of different pages and the different services they use. I’ve been using medium mode on my thinkpad (with a lot of content delivery networks set to noop) and hard mode with no js or large content on the chromebook. All of that blocking is an additional layer that I feel lessens mindless scrolling as well as limiting the CPU and memory load.

I previously didn’t fully consider the different filter lists available on UO beyond the default. This page has good suggestions for which ones to enable. It’s not really beneficial to enable all of them at once. If you don’t want to fiddle with UO settings much, but want to take a bit more advantage of UO, just modifying the filter lists is a good option! There are additionally two options for enhanced easy modes that are an option that don’t go as far as medium mode if you want to experiment a bit further.

If you have an older computer sitting in a closet, it might be a good device for more focused reading or writing time! If the operating system is also slow, linux might help revive it! I’m planning on a separate post in the future about the linux distros I’ve been using (pop!_os and void linux), as well as hoping to learn more about netbsd as a non-linux option.