Kill the Smartphone, or, my adventures in the land of mp3 player firmware

I’ve been listening to podcasts and music on an mp3 player again, which I haven’t done since I got my first smartphone in mid-2015. It’s been fun, so I decided to write up some of the Why and the How of this below.

Little bit of background first: my setup back in the day was running an open source podcatcher called gPodder on Linux Mint. gPodder allows one to download episodes and automatically sync them to a device. I’m not sure I have fond memories of that time, since I was a depressed high school droppout who went on the same walk every day listening to episodes of The History of Rome by Mike Duncan, alongside some much more embarassing podcasts that I won’t name, which covered video games and computer hardware news.

These days I’m a reasonably cheerful law student that’s developed something of an aversion to being glued to The Smartphone and I’m looking for ways to banish it from aspects of my life. There’s a few things that make this something of a Project given how much of life expects you to have a small computer on you at all times, and how much I’m used to relying on it.

One thing that’s really helped me (and I would actually recommend, unlike my podcast listening setup) is getting a cheap digital watch. It’s a basic Casio model that seems to be part of the autism starter pack, alongside big glasses and an IKEA shark plushie. This has eliminated the need for taking my phone out of my pockets just to check the time. It’s great, highly recommend doing this if you’re also someone who is easily distracted.

Now on to the freak shit. I listen to what I would describe as an embarassing amount of podcasts in a week. I’ve been using Pocket Casts for this since July of 2015, and its Stats page informs me that I have listened to 310 days of podcasts since then, or 7440 hours. Back in my depressed teen days I averaged over 3 hours per day, which has since dropped down to a more modest 1 hours and 50 minutes. This is how I gained my geographically ambiguous accent and why I know anything at all about skyscrapers, nazis, cursed AI startups and the types of pseudoscience currently big on Instagram. Listening to one or two podcast episodes without an App isn’t too difficult, but listening to a dozen quickly becomes too much friction to bother sticking with. This is why I was delighted to learn that gPodder still works, and still lets you sync your mp3 files to a Device as it did in 2013.

Now some notes about the Device. I’m sporting a Sandisk Sansa Clip Zip, an mp3 player that was available in the Netherlands from late 2011 to 2015. I bought it off someone used after my first Sandisk player broke. Miraculously it still turned on 11 years later, custom firmware and all.

Even though it still turned on, I suspect its internal memory was corrupted during the decade it spent in a box. It took me several hours, two different computers (both Linux and Windows) and a lot of searching through Sandisk forum posts from 2012 before I was able to fully reset the mp3 player and force a new version of Rockbox onto it. (It’s wild to me that Rockbox still gets updates btw, its most recent release was in 2025). After all that my little device now connects to my Windows PC without file explorer giving me a concerning error message before automatically disconnecting the troubled USB device. I still get the error message, mind, but at least my mp3 player stays connected.

The internal memory likely can’t be saved, as I’m still unable to load anything onto the mp3 player itself. It plays everthing off the MicroSD card perfectly, but it crashes and shuts down when you try to change a setting.

If you too are distraught about your smartphone usage and wish to find some workarounds, I suggest you try Literally Anything Else, but to me personally this process has so far been great fun. I get to go on walks now with just my mp3 player and a pocket notebook. I probably look like an extremely annoying hipster but if that’s the cost of freeing up some mental space I’m willing to accept that.

I also ordered a flip phone off ebay, since my university requires me to use some form of 2-factor authentication. I might write another one of these once that arrives.

of these once that arrives.