Offline Advocate

19 Nov 2024

It’s possible of course that I am just a digital hoarder. (Is that a bad thing?) Regardless, it may very well be the actual reason behind my offline advocacy.

I have no intention of preaching (and so perhaps advocacy may be putting too fine a point on it?). I thought though that there might be like-minded people out there (others in the choir?) that also find a kind of solace from having their digital content local, not streamed, not cloud-contained.

And so I’ll let you know what my relationship with my own media assets looks like.

Music

I suspect, like a lot of people, my first digital hoarding began with music when the MP3 rage swept the world.

I already had a large collection of CDs (and before that vinyl), so naturally I ripped everything. I tried to get album cover art for all the tracks, refused to tag them with a “genre”, generally primped and curated them. And I loved the convenience of hitting scramble and not having to lift a finger while song after song I enjoy came through the computer speakers.

When streaming came along I tried it. I guess I didn't see the point. I had already ripped my music at the highest (and lossless) quality and so was loathe to downgrade the experience in any way.

My audio set up is, and has been for over a decade now, a “dumb” MP3 player having a 128 GB MicroSD card attached to a sound system, sitting in the living room. I tend not to listen to music when on the go.

I’m always exploring new music though so in the “lab” (I suppose you could call it my man-cave) I have a similar sound system but attached instead to a computer that is playing playlists of, yes, streamed music. So I’m not a streaming Luddite. Streaming has its place — ideal for music discovery. But after songs in the playlist make the cut, I typically go to Bandcamp and buy the tracks or album, lossless, and they end up on the MicroSD card in the MP3 player (in the lviing room).

Here’s a funny story. I met and got to know another Macintosh programmer named Jeff Robbin back in the 1990’s when he and I were both publishing software with Casady & Greene, Inc. I had a game called Glider, he had written a utility called Conflict Catcher. Not surprisingly Jeff would soon graduate from college and land a position as an engineer at Apple. Perhaps surprisingly though, I would also land a job at Apple a year or so later.

Apple soon acquired NeXT, Steve Jobs came back … you know the story. The project Jeff was working on was killed though. Having already been an independent developer before he joined Apple, maybe it’s also not surprising that Jeff soon left Apple.

I popped over to his apartment one day around then and he confided in me that he was working on Macintosh software that would play MP3s. MP3s were the new thing so I understood the appeal. “What do you think?” he asked me excitedly.

“Let me get this straight — there are already free MP3 apps out there like MacAmp, Audion, and you want to write an MP3 app and charge money for it?”

“Yeah. MP3s are taking off.”

“You’ll first have to catch up with what’s out there and then add features in order to be able sell it.”

“You know John, you’re the first person I’ve told this to that was not excited,” Jeff scolded me.

And of course the app he wrote was Sound Jam, published by Casady & Greene. Apple bought the app from C&G and rebranded it iTunes. Jeff returned to Apple then — but this time, eventually, headed up an entire division within the company.

Video

Anyone who has created a playlist on YouTube doesn’t need me to tell them how ephemeral content is on the site. Years ago I had been creating a playlist of early NASA films only to notice, some time later, that a number of the videos I had earlier added were “Video Unavailable”. After that I began to archive video content that I would find on the internet.

Video does not seem analagous to music on one level — you probably aren’t going to have a running playlist of random video content always on.

Or, well, why not? Weirdly, I obsessed over this idea of having a curated “TV station” that was my own. Like the independent broadcast station when I was young, Johnny Sokko, Ultraman (the O.G. one) would come on after school — old horror films or giant monster movies might come on Saturday or Sunday afternoon.

So I built such a thing in Python, running on a Raspberry Pi (with a 5TB drive attached with the offline content). It’s the opposite of streaming. You can’t pause it, watch it on demand … a program comes on only when it is scheduled to come on.

It’s unlikely that, out of the blue, I would decide one day to watch an old Columbo episode, but when I see the TV playing it (per it’s schedule) as I cross the basement, sometimes I enjoy just pulling up a chair and watching a bit.

No commercials (it fills in dead airspace with random shorts — episodes of The Little Rascals for example), and it is even scheduled out in advance for an entire year (more of a challenge if the content it relied upon were online). Maybe though it’s my digital hoard looking for a problem to solve.

I called the app UHF and it is on Github, such as it is. And I offer that caveat because, although functional, it still has bugs. But worse, the creation of the schedule itself is a huge undertaking. I’m working now on a new app though that should make schedule creation much simpler. You might want to wait on this one.

Magazines

Why am I now hoarding old digital scans of electronics magazines? There are some fun electronics projects in a lot of these older magazines of course. I find it relaxing though simply perusing them — identifying when the CB radio craze was at full throttle, or noting how many of the ads seem to target men’s feelings of inadequacy regarding their paycheck. They seem to call to mind simpler times.

With the recent blackout of Archive.org though, I don’t take the continued availability of digital media to be a guarantee. So again the local copy gives me comfort.

It's nice for some reason too knowing that I have enough content sitting around to fill up any stretches of boredom for the foreseeable future.

I know this is stupid — I should just use an iPad — but I prototyped a kind of dedicated magazine reader.

Just a prototype — a Raspberry Pi (hiding just behind the aluminum plate, in the lower right) drives a nice LCD display I had sitting around. A hat switch (also lower right, but this side of the aluminum) connects to the GPIO header and allows you to navigate your magazine (or any kind of PDF) collection.

Distraction free, of course. I think though having the dedicated machine acts as a reminder to me that there are hundreds of magazines yet to peruse. Such as it is (that caveat again) you can pull the (Python) software, MagazineRack, down from GitHub. It works fine with a keyboard as input. I've tried on a Mac and Raspberry Pi. You’ll need to supply your own content.

Quiet Comfort

To be sure though, I am online. And Google Drive, Apple iCloud — I use them often. (But I guess I treat them as the backup to my local storage and not the other way around — if that makes sense).

I'm online daily — Hacker News, etc. But sometimes you want to minimize the firehose that is, for example, world events — something seemingly harder and harder to avoid online. Having more offline activities feels good. (But, also, you can get a film camera and go out and take some photos, find a bike trail and go riding, etc. I need to do more of those things too.)

Maybe too there’s a quiet comfort in having a digital hoard. I’m probably more tech savvy than most people but even I have a growing discomfort with the way the world is, the way it seems to be going. The abstractions on top of abstractions kind of hurt my brain, feel increasingly like a house of cards. There is a seeming simplicity to double-clicking a local file and knowing the path the bytes take from storage device to display/speakers is relatively trivial.

Or maybe I’m a digital prepper, ready for the internet apocalypse. (In exchange for a can of peaches you’re welcome to join us for film-night when we project A Boy and His Dog on a sheet in the backyard.)

Whatever the reason, I thought I’d toss this post out there in case there are others that feel similarly. If you haven’t already, it’s easy enough to start an offline “radio station” to listen to your music and playlists locally. Keep Spotify around for discovery but see if you don’t find that same comfort I find from “cutting the stream” when playing music in the living room.

And then go from there. (And also go for a bike ride.)