(2023-12-04) I am a dreamer. Sort of
------------------------------------
I have a confession to make. Ever since I was a little child, I've been
constantly dreaming about something. No, not living in a fantasy world, as 
I've been fully understanding the surrounding reality and the dangers it 
carries. But I've always been imagining myself in various situations that 
might not seem realistic at the moment. Did any of those situations ever 
come true? Not sure, not that I remember of. But it always helped me relax 
and even fall asleep quicker, or, on the contrary, to focus on my primary 
goals. And for this purpose, it kinda worked when I was 5 and it still works 
when I am 32.

It is a delight lurking through Bongusta with my own Gopher browser
(Bopher-NG) and finding that more people are getting interested in LPC and 
other things similar to mine. Although I'm not even sure how many people 
here (among those who still use Gopher) also use mechanical watches, I have 
updated the LuxDocs section and published my complete Orient F6/F49 movement 
regulation guide there nevertheless. I hope it will be useful for someone 
like-minded who stumbles upon this place or the archive of my gopherhole 
wherever it might turn up in the future. But I also have a strong feeling 
that whatever my recent hobbies became, they still share one common goal 
across them: regaining freedom.

On YouTube (yes, I still watch it), someone said that there is a distinction
between digital minimalists and neo-luddites. As I saw this on YouTube, I 
can't be the latter anyway, so I guess I'm closer to digital minimalism 
right now. It's all about selective and limited use of only those pieces of 
technology that serve your own benefit and whose usage can be fully 
controlled. But yes, on the smartphone (which I still pretty much need for 
work and banking purposes, as well as e.g. mech watch regulation), I have 
migrated back from eSIM to a physical SIM. This gave me back the freedom to 
choose from a much broader spectrum of devices in an event something bad 
happens to this one, and also the feeling of security that I can just pull 
out the SIM instead of trying to recover it through the carrier office 
giving them much more of my personal data than I'm ready to. And as for my 
main/talk SIM that was faulty and behaved strangely on pre-2008 
featurephones, I had replaced it with a new one (again, using an official 
but fully anonymous procedure supported by my carrier) and now can freely 
use the rest of my collection with my "talking" phone number.

The same thing can be said about using notebooks and notepads more actively
than before: they don't depend on electricity or online connection, they 
don't have backdoors/trojans installed by vendors, they can't be shut down 
or hacked remotely. Yes, they can be stolen physically but the "interested 
parties" don't even know they exist, not to mention what's in them. And if 
necessary, I live in a village so I can burn them down myself. Of course, 
you need something to write with in these notebooks. And this is why I 
switched to fountain pens: they are much more economical and ecological. And 
even when you run out of bottled ink (yes, I think that using ink cartridges 
kinda defeats the purpose), you can even make your own. By the way, I'm 
going to try out some ink recipes sometime in the future and will publish it 
on my Gopherhole if they are successful. But again, the point is that you 
are not limited to a certain pace of consumption anymore, you are free from 
constantly buying new disposable refills and throwing away the old ones.

This principle also can apply to how my watch collecting hobby has
transformed over this year. Yes, 10-year lithium CR batteries are great for 
watches, but first, the tendency is to phase them out in favor of 3-year SR 
batteries, second, they still are batteries that need to be disposed of 
after their runtime ends. So, whichever watches I'm going to buy further, 
they will be either solar-powered or automatic. Yes, the rechargeables in 
solar-powered quartz watches need to be replaced from time to time as well, 
but usually they last as long as the quartz crystal itself before it starts 
degrading, so I wouldn't worry much about that. Automatic watches, on the 
other hand, need additional precautions and preparations but, if treated 
right, also can serve you for a long time and even be as accurate as the 
quartz ones if you regulate them correctly. That's exactly why I, being a 
solar quartz advocate, have written such a comprehensive guide on how to 
regulate modern mechanical Orients to be as accurate as ±30 seconds per 
month deviation at most. But this is only my humble advice: either choose a 
solar quartz with the longwave and/or Bluetooth sync options, or choose an 
automatic that you are able to adjust at home and know its movement has good 
positional stability.

Last but not least, going back to phones, let's not forget the hobby that
started it all: featurephone firmware research. Yes, it's kinda stalled 
recently, mainly because I hit what seems a dead end in several areas: I 
haven't yet found a way to reliably flash any memory block for MT626x (on 
normal OSes using open-source tools, I mean), I can't find a way to decrypt 
half of the MT6261 firmware dumps and extract all secret codes out of them, 
I haven't even found a way to make a handshake for MT6276, SC770x and 
UMS9117(L), and I can't understand the internal structure of the SC6531x 
firmware too even after unpacking its partitions. And the META mode for 
MT626x and diagnostic/calibration modes for SC6531x/SC770x/UMS9117(L) remain 
complete black boxes to me as well, with no significant info about them 
whatsoever. Sad but true. I really don't know where to go now to start 
untying this giant knot...

...But I am a dreamer. Sort of.

--- Luxferre ---