If you want the writerdeck experience I'll echo the recommendations here for an Alphasmart. The brute-force autotyping file transfer it uses is quaint but always amusing. Gave one to a screenwriter friend and it's now gotten regular use for years. PDAs are a solid choice as well that may resonate with the HN crowd.

Don't sleep on owning an actual typewriter though. I have a small collection and use one daily. There's a rabbit hole of ~150 years of makes & models (most of which continue to function fine today) that will give any mechanical keyboard enthusiast much to chew on. :)

If you just want to try out distraction-free writing with USB a used AS3000 is easily found <$50 (YMMV re. battery corrosion).

Some folks in the community even have upgraded PalmCards (the replaceable CPU board in these) that run PalmOS 5 now, hack the display to show more bits, etc.

They're more "outwitting not-Soviet saboteurs with nuclear-powered inventions" and were written when science was putting the universe in our grasp.

They get mentioned here as an influence on folks from time to time (myself included), predictable adverb structure aside. :)

We are mindful of potential Pandora's boxes though. You can't ban everything unhealthy without causing long term issues. You strive though to only introduce things when they're developmentally ready to cope with it, even if that means restrictions on yourself as an adult.

You work to constantly provide good examples via your own life, compelling narratives, etc. of people who exemplify the virtues you want to instill. That's how you help shape (the best you can) the life of someone with an innate identity to, when necessary, "just say no", or simply be uninterested in and unswayed by things that don't conform to their value system.

They aren't stifled by rules and wrestling with temptation--not valuing YT Kids is just who they are.

"We just don't watch Youtube on our phones in this house." [and you work to develop that into healthy self-confidence rather than ego]

Growing up homeschooled, we had the same simmering sense of pride in not doing what others (e.g. "public schoolers" did). Never had a rebellious teen phase, etc. Some families overdid it, but...idk...I'm still quite close to my parents, so I never felt stifled.

It makes it -very- natural in life to focus on what my SO and I think are optimal and more or less disregard what's normal.

I have a millenium-era iMac set up as the family computer in anticipation of introductory computing when old enough (probably soon) and learning that digital entertainment is a state of mind and place you go to for a time, and then shut down and do something else. It's in the living room and off, so right now we're just building familiarity with it and exploring the keyboard, mouse, etc. and mimicking dad. Currently the little one -loves- the physical interaction of a typewriter and requests one more than a keyboard (but loose keyboards are fun too!).

The TV is a projector screen that recedes into the ceiling. Total screen time for them in the home right now over the past ~2.5y is probably...3 hours? Maybe?

My daily driver mobile is a black and white PDA and almost never a phone. I don't think my toddler has -ever- asked me for my phone and certainly wouldn't think to request, e.g. a video on it. Entertainment comes from our books, legos, and trains.

My theory is an accelerated progression through history. Mastering technology means understanding where it came from. It takes the shine off the modern rectangle of doom if you can place it in time and space and your first habits aren't built around it.

To @ozim's point, the issue is what has been normalized in broader society and so, yeah, we've clearly figured out touchscreens and plenty of local places for kids have unnecessary TVs. The concerns of other kids/parents introducing things to ours too early is mitigated by building a core [home]school and social group who shares enough common values. The differences between our respective households become learning opportunities for everyone.

What's fantastic is that I can go to the grocery store or sit in a restaurant for an hour and a half (and even better, two flights with a layover--with effort) with no tantrum from a toddler and no technology. Just...not even a thought that enters.

I mostly use a few models of Handspring Visor, typically grayscale, so not even the latest OS. Visor Edge for something as thin and sleek as a modern phone. Visor Neo if I want expandability (similar to pg6-7 in the Ars article). There's a fun module that adds both more memory and a vibrate motor for alarms, but I'll swap that out for a camera or mp3 module at times. Charge or swap batteries once or twice a month.

Common tasks:

* Notes, To Dos, Contacts, Calendar (excellent stock calendar, per @j45 above)

* Alarms & Reminders (stock + Diddlebug, which lets you draw/write notes w/ a timer)

* Offline browsing (Plucker can crawl pages and sync them)

* Weather (note: cached on sync because my Palm doesn't have wifi)

* Calorie tracking

* Games (we have a Wordle port!)

* Longform writing - I have a foldable keyboard and usually use plaintext, but there are word processing apps that save to HTML if you want. I also often write on an Alphasmart Neo, which can IR beam back and forth with the Palm and PC.

* Personal project tracking/flows

* Photos (technically video too, but only have 8MB memory for everything)

I have newer PDAs too that can natively handle things like voice recording, cameras, video playback, etc., but I really like the grayscale ones. A late Clié like a VZ90 or some of the others in this thread will have more bells and whistles (even OLED!).

Note also that all of the above is a more manual process than modern phones (and more manual today than it was then, because Outlook supported Palms in 2002 unlike now). If you use Google Calendar I think you can still sync, but if there's an important work meeting that I want in my pocket in addition to the laptop--I do the little ritual of adding it myself.

Windows Phone was absolutely crushing it with first-time smartphone adopters, but for folks switching it was tougher, because WP didn't use depend on the whole "grid of siloed apps" concept as much. If you'd already used an iPhone, it took a second to unlearn.

And considering anyone making smartphone apps in 2010 was still on the early-adopter side of the curve--they'd already experienced that way of using a phone. There were still a lot of first-timers in the following 5 years, but the folks at the agencies and companies making the software weren't them.

Though I'm not sure how much users noticed that fiasco (my SO didn't) and honestly, even when WP7 was getting updates and looked healthy it was pulling teeth to get companies to make a 3rd app.

Windows Phone was similar. Superior product (not just technically--in usability testing too), but late to the party and lacking cultural caché considering its parent company.

I'm also biased though. :)

To the article's point, what we do with modern devices today is just another iteration of what these do. For the average modern app/SaaS, there's a very often a Palm app that did the same thing in 2002.

There's also still active exploration in the Palm space (ARM board swaps, new expansion modules for the Visor, apps in-dev from several folks including myself).

Happy to provide recommendations.

I had a year of American government around 9th grade-ish, which covered the basics of the system, the founding documents, etc. and then spent a lot of time with the formative debates driving it (Federalist/Anti-Federalist Papers, Montesquieu, Hobbes, Locke, and such). Plus during elementary school a year or two of American/state history, which had civics elements. Then there were sundry courses like geography and things like read-alouds covering topics like economics (I definitely recall learning about inflation and the labor movement in middle school).

American Government was also a required course at uni (which I believe is common among liberal arts schools). That one was more practical in focus.

Back in first grade I remember participating in a mock election based on the candidates of the day...

Bear in mind I was homeschooled for much of the above, and many of the homeschoolers I knew were already very civically engaged with volunteering, Boy Scouts, interning at the state capitol, and more.

Maybe that was just my social group, but we as a family weren't political activists or anything (nor was politics a particularly common or passionate discussion) and some of this was just the path laid out by the curriculum.

I still have some websites live (and untouched) from the period if you want to see some...evocative but rather unrefined examples: http://www.biotechgaming.com/software.php (left nav buttons, for example)

Homepage is offline because it has code expecting PHP5 (and Flash); deeper pages mostly work though!

Though from a hobbyist perspective I probably own more interesting designs falling under Y2K. Transparent PDAs, game systems, etc. have always been cool in my book!

The trick for Duolingo is to use the desktop version and disable all the "helpful" bits you can or at least use the browser version if on mobile. Desktop had far fewer gamified bits than the app as of a year ago (sadly the new UI broke my workflow and I dropped Duo altogether). Gems weren't a meaningful thing, etc.

In particular: Use your keyboard for everything. You'll probably want to be able to type in the target language anyway and it helps you avoid the trap of being really good at pattern recognition instead of really learning all the grammar quirks.

You can disable both animations and the leaderboard gamification in the settings (the latter by setting your profile to private). CSS/uBlock can help hide other distractions, add dark mode, etc. as needed.

It takes some extra work now to unbury the learning tool beneath but Duolingo itself, especially if you go in with a general idea of how to go about learning a language, is still really useful.

Super helpful link that I used along the way as well (not mine): https://runwes.com/2020/02/11/howilearnedfrench.html

I also actually took my own series of photos on a whim a few weeks ago with the intention of DIY stitching my own pano and used to love using Microsoft's "old" (08-10) Seadragon/Photosynth tech.

I'd be very curious to learn more about your JS implementation. :)

Emphasize math for older kids when their brain is better prepared for abstraction (some even argue age 10+!). Emphasize language and character for younger kids, especially because at _very_ young ages that's really what they're soaking in anyway.

The logic here being efficiency. An older child can learn in a week what a preschooler may drill for months. Cover some math facts in primary school to build a strong foundation, but strong language skills compound against _all_ education and should come first, with a heavier shift to advanced mathematics later in schooling.

Again, don't know if I ascribe yet (I was accelerated in math at a young age myself) or how this really looks in the real world, but definitely an argument that wise people make in good faith.

Probably impossible in a standardized school setting. :)