Tue 19 November 2024

In Part III, I discussed fountain pens, and how they revolutionized writing for me.

I thought I was done with my EDC series, until a toot from my FediFriend OrbitalMartian reminded me of one more every-day carry item: the "wrist check."

"Smart" watches are quite popular now. Smaller companies like Fitbit and Pebble helped start the trend, and Large-Scale Exploitation Engines such as Apple and Google made them immensely popular.

They're a fascinating idea: You purchase a device that gets strapped to your body and constantly measures all kinds of intimate data about your bodily functions, and then saves all that to an encrypted storage device for your personal perusal and analysis, and does not share it with any untrusted entity. Oh, wait. Sorry, that's Earth #65536. On this Earth, those devices instantly phone home all of your intimate data to an absolutely untrustworthy Large-Scale Exploitation Engine for their enjoyment and analysis, and I suppose, for your own health tracking purposes.

It doesn't take a genius to see the issue with this. Fortunately, there are a few small movements in the opposite direction:

1. There are a handful of devices that perform the function of a smartwatch without sharing that data with any third parties. The PineTime is one of them, there are a couple other projects like it.
2. There is GadgetBridge, a FOSS Android program which allows you to use a handful of commercially-available smartwatches in a privacy-respecting way. This program allows you to track your fitness data without ever sending that data to an LSEE — Large-Scale Exploitation Engine (a.k.a. corporation), or at the very least, to allow you to continue using your watch privately after initially setting up the watch with the LSEE and extracting an auth token.
3. "Dumb" watches: Inexpensive and attractive wrist-mounted timekeeping devices are still readily and cheaply available, and yes, they still keep time, without requiring Bluetooth or an internet connection.

It is in this third avenue of counter-corporate-cultural timekeeping that I found myself helping to, well... start a cult.

One of the most popular (and still quite inexpensive) manufacturers of "dumb" watches is CASIO. The company has been around a long time (78 years!) and is known for quality, affordable products in a multitude of sectors.

One of the most popular watches is the Casio F-91W. In fact, you cannot search Wikipedia for CASIO without also seeing an entry for the F-91W in particular high-up in the list of results.

I purchased my CASIO watch in 2019. I had been using an Amazfit Bip (one of the best-supported devices on GadgetBridge) with my Android phone, but when I switched back to iOS that year, I no longer had the ability to use the smartwatch in a secure and private way. iOS, being extremely locked down, has a limited number of FOSS apps available, and very few apps (if any) that are designed to circumvent the exploitative practices of LSEEs like GadgetBridge. So, after using it with the Amazfit app for a little while, I sold the "smart"watch on eBay and bought a CASIO at a local Walmart.

I had heard a lot of good things about the F-91W, but I wanted a slightly larger screen. The W-217H fit the bill nicely, and other than the "keeper" (strap loop) breaking (I replaced the strap with an inexpensive metal chain), I haven't had a single problem with it.

Well, except for...

How do you make a CASIO watch owner angry?
"Hey pal, go time something in the dark!!"

So, back to the formation of the... cult. As wrist checks started getting popular on the fediverse (particularly among the folks on Fosstodon), I wanted to use my formidable artistic talents in the field of PHC (Pithy Hashtag Creation) to come up with a tag to unify our small cadre of loyal Casio wrist-checkers.

#CasioCult!!!

Now, this happened over two years ago, and I can't conclusively prove that I originated the #CasioCult hashtag, but I seem to recall that I did, and my toots are the very first to show up when searching for it on the Fediverse.

Addendum

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that the Prime Mover of this particular trend/cult was none other than Joel, who wrote an account of how this whole crazy enterprise got started here.

Category: Tech Tagged: Computing FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Hobbies Informal post Non-religious post Non-technical post Productivity QuickPost WritingMonth