ProtonAOSP on Pixel 6 Pro
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 …
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"Countdown to Zero Day" by Kim Zetter
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 about the use of cyberweapons and our vulnerabilities to cyber attacks.
"This is How They Tell Me the World Ends" by Nicole Perlroth
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
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
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.
"Too Like the Lightning" by Ada Palmer
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.
Snap Apps Crash Silently Due to Cross-Filesystem Symlinks
This won’t mean much to many, but there seems to be a small number of people stymied by a weird problem: some Snap apps won’t work on Linux. You install a Snap app, and it might work the …
"Middlegame" by Seanan McGuire
I hadn’t read anything by Seanan McGuire before discovering Middlegame, but she’s an accomplished author who’s published a number of very well-received novels. Middlegame is McGuire’s latest novel, and it’s best described as urban science fantasy. It follows the lives of protagonists Roger and Dodger, two brilliant children who live on opposite sides of the country. Roger is a gifted linguist, and Dodger a brilliant mathematician. At around five years old, they discover that they can communicate telepathically.
HEY Email
Hey email launched in mid-June to generally positive reviews, but coverage of the product itself was largely overshadowed by a fight between HEY and Apple regarding HEY’s monetization strategy.1 …
Static Site Search with Gatsby and Algolia
About a month ago, I wrote about developing a static website with server-side Javascript. As I discovered, there are a lot of advantages to a static site. But one of the disadvantages to the lack of a …