Using a shock collar to stop myself doomscrolling | 011.sh<br>I’m hooked up to the dopamine scroll machine where Meta harvests my soul for advertising. At this point that’s how I see it. Like anyone with a smartphone and social media I’m susceptible to a junk food diet of endlessly scrolling Instagram Reels or viewing pigs sling mud at one another on whatever Facebook has deemed popular enough to show me against my will.<br>I do dream of a healthy social media diet (and more self-control). Instagram is full of lovely creators that fill me with motivation and, well, Facebook has some interesting things on marketplace. Typical wisdom would suggest removing temptation completely and deleting these apps, but I find them marginally useful for work and for buying furniture. So instead I’d much rather try and reduce my consumption.<br>Now this isn’t anything new - over the years I’ve tried putting time limits on my apps, moving their icons around so the reflex to reach for them is stunted, and even using accessibility settings to invert the colours as if social media was some analogue for cigarettes and dulling the box would stop me (it must be if Meta is currently going to trial for it).<br>Most recently I’ve had success with a bit of behavioural modification. I decided that it’s not simply enough to disable the app, after all I could easily re-enable it when it called for just “5 minutes” of necessary use, I would need a motivating factor. So using MacroDroid I set up a macro that would launch a picture of a sad ant every time I opened a certain blacklist of apps - in an attempt to show me what would happen if I spent all my free context switching energy on social media - I’d become a sad poor ant.<br>But as that goes I had to disable it one day and just never re-enabled it. Sisyphus slipped down the feed again. I deduced that I just wasn’t scared enough of being a sad ant. I needed something like a good old case of operant conditioning.<br>Inspired by cartoons from the late 90s and early 2000s I knew a solution was out there: dog training collars. As a concept I’m totally against them and I believe pain should only be shared with yourself or between two consenting adults. However, they would fit the requirement exactly. I did my research and found that modern devices come in mostly one of two varieties - radio controlled on the 433 MHz spectrum or bluetooth controlled - both via a remote. Since many of the listings don’t specify this at all, I had to spend some time on FCC ID trying to match generic product names to devices, trying to get a peek under the hood, hoping I can spot a generic antenna or bluetooth module in the hope of finding an ideal model that way. Failing that, while I could set a trigger using a WiFi button pusher hooked up to the control remote, I knew that would be clunky (a bit boring) and it wouldn’t allow for fine grained control. As a quick test I purchased a model from a local supplier - the 433MHz version but turned out to be the Fisher-Price oven equivalent of a training collar and I would’ve gotten more vibration sticking an old Nokia to my face.<br>Coincidentally, at the same time I rediscovered the joys of Alibaba where you can buy anything from a dummy inflatable military aircraft to a horse cremation machine provided you meet the MOQ and can make it through the designated threshold guardian that is the factory liaison. And with a simple search I’d found what I was looking for - a collar named the S900 which had a bluetooth app control (a much rarer third variation of control) and promised a “diary” (which I assume is a helpful paper trail for the SPCA to audit). I purchased a sample and it arrived. It was much better quality than the test 433 MHz style collar I bought before, dare I say good enough that a dog wouldn’t choke on it.<br>Box contents: one training collar, 4 metal prong contacts (two long and two short), a USB-C charging cable, a little bulb tester to show the shocky bit works and an “invite” card with the secure code of P2026.<br>The next question was how would I get the actual collar to respond to me opening an application? I’d been playing some CTFs lately so I kneejerked to “hey let’s decompile the Android Application” which I recognised would needlessly overcomplicate things. I deferred this decision until I’d played around with the app.<br>I opened the Pet Diary app (it has “Pet and Human Joy, Always” as the tagline) - it let me create a guest account with a dummy email and new username (which is a great feature even if it happens to be a symptom of buying sample tech) and then asked me for my invite code which was the P2026. I booted the app, and pressed the button on the collar. It found the collar automatically and it started showing me stuff - battery level, the diary mentioned above, automatic bark monitoring and a...