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Best of 2022

6 minutes to read — 1131 words

Best of 2022

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.

Development on Windows is... Good?

4 minutes to read — 707 words

Not that long ago, most people would laugh if you told them you did any serious software or web development on Windows. All the serious coders used Macs, except for the handful who ran Linux. I was in the latter camp; I installed Debian on a clunky Compaq laptop in 2003 and was immediately hooked by the idea of running an open source operating system. I don’t really run Linux much any more, though, because in the past few years, Windows has become a functional, even good, development platform.

Slow Horses

3 minutes to read — 486 words

Apple TV+ is on a roll. Its content strategy seems to be the opposite of Netflix’s; whereas Netflix produces a ton of shows and movies and gives directors and writers essentially free rein, hoping something popular will happen, Apple TV+ is going for a much smaller, much more carefully curated selection. It seems to have paid off, with the first Best Picture Academy Award for a streaming service going to CODA and the universally beloved Ted Lasso.

ProtonAOSP on Pixel 6 Pro

5 minutes to read — 1032 words

One of the best things about Android, the world’s most popular operating system for mobile devices, has always been its customizability. For the truly adventurous, that’s often meant ditching your manufacturer’s preinstalled software and installing a custom ROM, essentially a third-party operating system. In recent years, it feels like the popularity of custom ROMs has declined as manufacturers and carriers have made it harder to install them, and improvements to Android have made the advantages of a custom ROM less obvious.

"Countdown to Zero Day" by Kim Zetter

2 minutes to read — 335 words

Countdown to Zero Day is an account of the Stuxnet worm, widely regarded as the world’s first cyberweapon. It was a computer worm that most cybersecurity analysts believe was designed to target Iranian nuclear weapons facilities. Stuxnet sparked an intense debate of the use of cyberweapons and our vulnerabilities to cyber attacks.

"This is How They Tell Me the World Ends" by Nicole Perlroth

3 minutes to read — 430 words

Nicole Perlroth is The New York Times’s cybersecurity and digital espionage reporter, and This is How They Tell Me the World Ends is her definitive account of the shady market for zero-day exploits. A zero-day exploit is a software vulnerability unknown to those responsible for fixing it, and zero-days are crucial tools for hackers, intelligence agencies, and law enforcement.

"The Looming Tower" by Lawrence Wright

2 minutes to read — 317 words

Lawrence Wright’s authoritative history of Al-Qaeda and the lead-up to the September 11 terrorist attacks is one of those books I should have read a long time ago. I finally got around to it, and it was fantastic. It’s non-fiction, but its subjects are presented so compellingly, and the action is described so vividly, that it reads like a novel. Wright’s style calls to mind Peter Hopkirk (The Great Game, Trespassers on the Roof of the World) and Stephen Ambrose (Undaunted Courage).