In September 2022 I took a 3-week trip to the Azores to visit family members, and to have my first real vacation since the end of 2019. I wasn’t planning on taking my daily driver MacBook Air with me because I was concerned about it getting lost or damaged, but I wanted to take something with me in case I needed to do some work or to connect to anything at home. I ended up getting a Chromebook for the first time in several years, and it worked out exceptionally well, despite some minor limitations. I wanted to see if a Chromebook could actually be useful as a primary device for an extended period.

We are over halfway through 2023 and I wanted to provide a few updates on what I am working on since I have been receiving a few emails from people about it. I wanted to get into details on what I am working on now, what I plan on releasing in the next few weeks, and what the rest of my plans are for the remainder of the year.

So, this post ended up taking a lot longer to put together than I thought it would. I am still using the same MacBook Air (M1, 2020) that I was using 16 months ago when I wrote the first post, and I am still happy with the performance and the capabilities of it. I have owned it since February 2021 and been using it as my primary machine for over 2 full years now. Enough has been written on the capabilities and performance of Apple Silicon chips, so I am just going to talk about my experiences with it.

Today is the last time that Microsoft will publish any updates for Windows 8.1. Today marks the end of extended support for Windows 8.1, and Windows 8.1 is now officially end of life. To say that Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 were controversial is an understatement, but at the end of the day they were both solid improvements over Windows 7, despite the issues that they introduced.

Is 2022 over already? I don’t have a lot to talk about, but this was the first year that has felt like normal since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I recently deleted my Atlassian accounts and migrated all my code from Bitbucket to GitHub. This was for a couple of reasons, but bottom line I am just finished with Atlassian as a company. Their business model is horrible, and they are just not worth it anymore. On the upside, GitHub is pretty much the de facto standard for Git, and Bitbucket is more of a niche at this point.

I am launching a dedicated website that is going to be just for documentation that I have created over the years, and for all documentation that I will be creating going forward. It uses Hugo and Netlify just like this website, and GitHub for hosting the Git repository. I have decided to make the repository for the website public, so anyone can download it if they want.

I published my book, Practical Guide to PKI with Windows Server on September 22, 2021, and it has now been over a full year since I made it generally available for purchase. I wanted to reflect on what I have learned since releasing the book, what issues I have encountered, and what the next steps are.