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I loved this book. It’s a really fun, fast-paced novel about a guy in a seemingly utopian future with an uhappy family who accidentally destroys the future utopia by using his father’s time machine to derail the technological developments that made it possible. But in the much-less-utopian present, our present, he finds that he’s a lot happier, his family’s a lot happier, and he has a shot at a life with the woman he loves.

The Daily is the New York Times daily news podcast. It typically runs about 20 minutes, and involves the Times’s Michael Barbaro taking a deep dive into an important news story, often with interviews of people involved and/or a Times journalist who covers the story, followed by a summary of the day’s headlines. The Daily is consistently excellent journalism, but the episode from yesterday was one of best in a series of phenomenal episodes. It told the story of Shannon Mulcahy, a factory worker in Indiana who worked at a factory that manufactured ball bearings.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is a science fiction novel by Becky Chambers. It borrows some tropes of the genre that’ll be familiar to fans of Firefly and The Expanse. However, Angry Planet is light on world-building and plot; it’s almost entirely character-driven. I liked the first half of the book, when getting to know the characters—many of whom are alien species—and, for the most part, the characterization is well done. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to drive an entire novel.

Just a few days ago, I wrote about setting up my GNOME desktop on Linux. Unfortunately, the current state of play in the GNOME world is that it’s just really hard to make the desktop look polished. While there are a lot of themes that look nice, I’ve found a minor issues with almost all of them. I just couldn’t settle on a combination that satisfied me. That may change when Ubuntu adopts GNOME as its default desktop environment; Ubuntu is one of the most-used Linux distros, and it has an active community that creates a lot of great stuff. For now, though, I’ve decided to try Elementary OS for a while.