So, today I was not going to have time to do my blog, and at the same time, I have been thinking about doing stuff for the sake of getting it out of the way and do nothing for the rest of the day. I am talking about homework.
I will be going back to University this Monday, I am still going to be in quarantine, but now I will have to study, assist to online classes, do assignments and other things in order to continue my studies. And I sometimes feel like I am doing this blogs just to deliver something even if the quality does not compare with stuff that actually takes time to and effort to complete.
Everytime I have to do essays for school, especially when they ask for a certain amount of pages or words, I always try to expand the simplest topics into full paragraphs, and over-explain some things. Thats exactly what I am doing right now in an attempt to deliver a not so short blog post.
Of course, I don’t want this to be a waste of your time either, so I am going to share some quick apps I have checked this morning, and that I am using to help me deal with distractions and use my time better, or make my phone look epic or just because they are open source and I like them.
DetoxDroid
So I have been looking for a way to be less distracted by my phone, to be a bit more of a digital minimalist. Before I was using Google’s Downtime mode, as well as other of their Digital Wellbeing functions. Honestly I just wanted to have the ability to change to monochrome and whitelist only a few apps like Newpipe or my Gallery. And so, DetoxDroid managed to get it right, and it was also able to control Do not Disturb mode with ease. It was all working as expected, until I tried to turn it off, and the screen did not go back to normal. So, this app is still a little bit buggy, and I stopped using it, but I will keep an eye on it. At the moment, I found Monochromatic to work as expected, it just requires an adb command to get it working (DetoxDroid can use root, which I used to enable it).
DarQ
After putting my phone screen in black and white, I checked many of my apps to see how they looked like, and one of those apps was the Protonmail android client, which still does not have a dark theme. And after many months since I’ve known of this app, I decided to finally give it a go, and checked Protonmail among a few others that don’t offer dark mode either, and it all worked fine!, so yeah, DarQ is another fine addition to this little app list.
Lemmur
So, I have been quite interested on Lemmy, a decentralized social media similar to Reddit, and I wanted to give it a go. So I have used it for a while, and one of its mobile clients made its way to F-Droid. Lemmur is quite fantastic, still in its infancy, but already pretty complete, and it does work great. It is just a pretty young mobile client for an also young social media, so I don’t have nothing to say, but I hope that both keep growing in the internet space.
QuickTiles
Back on android 4.X, one of the coolest things you could do was add notifications that allowed you to launch many different programs from your status bar. With the arrival of the quick settings on Android 7 (I think?), devs were able to create their own tiles, and a bunch of apps arrived that allowed you to do that. Launch apps from a quick setting, or access shortcuts and so on. This is one of those apps, I found it while looking for a way to do my screen monochrome, and while I did not found that function, it still offered me some useful tiles, all open source (and to think there are some paid options for this).
Share to Clipboard
So, this one is really interesting, for some reason, F-Droid’s has a custom Share menu which does not offer a quick “Copy to Clipboard” option, and other clients, such as Foxy Droid, don’t even have a Share menu!, I did not try F-Droid Classic, nor Aurora Droid, but the point is, that to make most of the hyper-links shown in this post, I used this app, and then shared my clipboard using KDEConnect. So yeah, most apps use the default Share menu, but I guess that I am going to use this until F-Droid put their stuff together and add the option to their app.
It looks like I had more time than expected
But yeah, this weekend has been kinda busy and I hope I manage to do everything I have to, and to be ready to go back to school. I shared a lot more than I expected, and I hope you find a good use to these apps, just like I did. This is day 15 of #100DaystoOffload.