3 Years
I have this old iPhone XR that I turn on every once in while to check the stats on this app I used to use called “My Last Cigarette”. I turned the phone on today and realized that thanks to leap year, it’s technically been 3 years as of yesterday, since I had my last cigarette. The app still exists but has been enshitified, so instead of installing it on my new phone, I keep this old version around.
I’ve restarted the clock on this app so many times that I can’t even count. I used to wake up some days determined to never smoke again, reset the timer on the app, stare at the dashboard imagining how good it would feel to look back on it 1,5,10 years from then and be proud of myself. Then a day, or sometimes a week, and once even 3 months would go by before I crumbled and gave into the addiction.
I never imagined I would break free. Then three years ago something clicked, and the app keeps ticking away, I hope forever.
3 Years 32,000 + cigarettes not smoked $16,000 saved
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- 2024
- Reinstalling Windows at 1am
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- How to Disable Wayland in Debian Testing
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Give Your Spouse the Gift of a Couple's Email Domain from mtlynch.io
- Skip the Next iPhone from Articles on Jose M.
- Have smart glasses finally hit an inflection point? from The Torment Nexus
- The McPhee method from the jsomers.net blog
- Pluralistic: LLMs are slot-machines (16 Aug 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Pluralistic: Bluesky creates the world's weirdest, hardest-to-understand binding arbitration clause (15 Aug 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Just a Little More Context Bro, I Promise, and It’ll Fix Everything from Jim Nielsen’s Blog
- The Futzing Fraction from Deciphering Glyph
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Weekend Update #29
The weekly update, plus bits and bobs that caught my attention this week.
via ODonnellWeb September 14, 2025What’s a Foreigner?
Across many countries, resistance to immigration is rising — even places with little immigration, like Japan, now see rallies against it. I’m not going to take a side here. I want to examine a simpler question: who do we mean when we say “foreigner”? I would …
via Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings September 14, 2025Zero-configuration TLS and password management best practices in MariaDB 11.8
Locking down database access is probably the single most important thing for a system administrator or software developer to prevent their application from leaking its data. As MariaDB 11.8 is the first long-term supported version with a few new key secur…
via Optimized by Otto September 14, 2025Generated by openring