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The U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against Apple claims that Apple’s iMessage service degrades messaging quality when iOS users communicate with anyone using a device that doesn’t run Apple’s operating system. iMessage is an excellent—almost pardigmmatic—example of a market dominator excluding competition. But as the tech and legal worlds have digested the DOJ’s complaint, the discussion has mostly missed the key problem with iMessage: it’s rarely had to compete fairly with other messaging apps, and when it does, it loses.

I rang in 2024 from a cabin in the Sierra Nevada mountains, surrounded by family and friends. It was a pretty great New Year’s Eve, and now it’s time to look back on 2023.

One of my main programming projects is development of a complex site powered by WordPress, but I’ve never put together a description of my workflow. I build the site on my Windows box using XAMPP and Gulp to manage everything. It’s surprisingly difficult to find a good explainer¹ on how to set this up, so this post will explain how I get my WordPress development environment up and running.

Expanding public transit in the United States is crucial, and integrating technology into existing public transit systems is important, too. Over the past couple of years, many of America’s public transit systems have been implementing digital wallets—namely Apple’s and Google’s—by permitting riders to use virtual transit passes rather than physical plastic or paper ones. That seems like a great idea: it cuts down on waste, you don’t have to worry about losing or forgetting a physical card, and they should be easy to manage right in the wallet app. Unfortunately, the implementations so far are terrible, and I’m switching back to plastic.

I spent the last days of 2022 with my family in the lovely southern California town of Oceanside. As 2023 begins, I’m taking a look back at the best of 2022, from my favorite books, movies, and music, to my best travel and culinary experiences.