Building a Website with Hugo
7 minutes to read — 1375 words
I experimented with rebuilding my personal website using Hugo rather than Gatsby, and found that the speed and development process were much improved.
Posts
Development on Windows is... Good?
4 minutes to read — 714 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; as someone who’s never liked Apple products, 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.
Meditations on Decentralization
7 minutes to read — 1331 words
I got an NFT with a movie ticket. Accessing it and using turns out to be an adventure that reveals some of the flaws in the crypto onboarding process.
Slow Horses
3 minutes to read — 486 words
Slow Horses by Mick Herron 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 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.
Most of the book follows a group of cybersecurity researchers trying to figure out what Stuxnet does.
"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.
It seems like cybersecurity problems were poorly foreseen at almost every phase of the development of computing.
"The Looming Tower" by Lawrence Wright
2 minutes to read — 317 words
The Looming Tower 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).
"The City We Became" by N. K. Jemisin
4 minutes to read — 738 words
The City We Became was a huge disappointment. N. K. Jemisin is a fantastic writer—I loved her Broken Earth Trilogy, and I’m looking forward to reading her Inheritance Trilogy. But The City We Became, the first installment in her new Great Cities urban fantasy series, was just bad. It’s boring, not much happens, and the characters are bland and monotonous.
The novel’s basic premise has some promise. The fundamental idea is that to become truly alive, cities must manifest in the form of human beings.
"Too Like the Lightning" by Ada Palmer
3 minutes to read — 529 words
Too Like the Lightning This book was interesting. “Interesting” can be used to mean a lot of things, and frequently to dissemble. But in this case I mean it simply—it was an interesting book because Palmer creates a fascinating world that the novel spends most of its time exploring. The book is also unflinchingly pretentious, very well-written, and quite slow. It’s often described as political science fiction, because the futuristic setting is mostly a vessel to explore how society and politics have changed.