Here is my fourth installment of the best things I’ve found, learned, read, etc. over the past year. These things are listed in no particular order, and may not necessarily be new.

See the 2017 post here!
See the 2016 post here!
See the 2015 post here!

This annual “Best Of” series is inspired by @fogus and his blog, Send More Paramedics.

Favorite Blog Posts Read

I end up reading a lot of articles over the course of the year, and cannot possibly remember all of them. Here is a good selection of that ones that I can recall:

• Meet the Community Keeping Obsolete Supercomputers Alive - A Community of people documenting and resurrecting SGI hardware.
• AN ORAL HISTORY OF ‘GOLDENEYE 007’ ON THE N64 - An awesome look at the development of GoldenEye.
• Consulting Adult - A series of articles about working at Sun Microsystems during its heyday. 
• Confessions of a Disk Cracker: the secrets of 4am. - An interview with cracker 4am.
• The Story of Sun Microsystems PizzaTool - A funny story about ordering the first pizza over the Internet.
• ‘WE GOT TO BE COOL ABOUT THIS‘: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE LØPHT - A multipart history of L0pht.
• HOW THE DREAMCAST COPY PROTECTION WAS DEFEATED - An interesting look into how copy protection was defeated for the Dreamcast

Articles I’ve Written for Other Publications

I’ve continued to write for a few different places outside of my own site. Here is a complete list for 2018:

• The Brain Mutator For Higher Primates — A bOING bOING Retrospective - Article for Neon Dystopia where I discuss the history of the b_OING bOING_ (1989) zine.
• On Wetware and Cybersmut — A Future Sex Retrospective - Article for Neon Dystopia where I talk about the history of _Future Sex _(1992) magazine.
• A few more that aren’t out yet 😉

Favorite Technical Books Read

• Networks of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide to Urban Internet Infrastructure (2016) - A really interesting field guide to the hidden world of network infrastructure within NYC. It inspired me to do a similar project for Philadelphia.

Favorite Non-Technical Books Read

• The Philip K. Dick Reader (1997) - My second time reading any Dick, this collection is amazing, lengthy, and inexpensive to pick up. You’ll be up all night reading this and surprised how sci-fi from the ’50s is so relevant today.

Number of Books Read

Back up to a good amount of books read this year!

9

Still Need to Read

Dream Machines, Literary Machines, Design Patterns, 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10

Favorite Music Discovered

• Buckingham Nicks
• The Zombies

Favorite Television Shows

Black Mirror (2011)

Favorite Podcasts

Reply All, 99% Invisible, My Brother, My Brother and Me, Darknet Diaries

Programming Languages Used for Work/Personal

Java, JavaScript, Python,Objective-C, Swift.

Life Events of 2018

• Visited Ireland.
• Got my Amateur Radio Technician license.

Life Changing Technologies Discovered

• Baofeng radios - Inexpensive amateur radios. You can get a decent handheld for about $30
• MuckRock - A 3rd party service for submitting information requests.
• TIL Wiki - A wiki idea for doing small today-i-learned posts as a way of note taking. 

Favorite Subreddits

/r/amateurradio, /r/vintageaudio

Conferences Attended

• FossCon 2018 - August 25th in Philadelphia, PA.
• Pumpcon - October 26th-27th in Philadelphia, PA.
• BarCamp Philly 2018 - November 10th in Philadelphia, PA.

Completed in 2018

• Wrote for Neon Dystopia, and others.
• Worked on magazine scans for Anarchivism (Slowly going through Mondo 2000).
• Did some work on Philly Mesh.
• Started the Networks of Philly website.
• Redesigned the Philly 2600 website.
• Started the router.city BGP testnet project.
• Tried to get more organized by moving research and notes into a GitHub repo.
• Published a lot of backlog articles that I had written over the years but not published.
• Set up FreeBSD and OpenBSD machines
• Restarted my own PBX to interface with old phones.
• Set up a gopherhole.

Plans for 2019

• Write for stuff I’ve written for already (NODE, Lunchmeat, Neon Dystopia,  2600).
• Write for new stuff (Do you have a publication that needs writers?).
• Participate in more public server projects (ntp pool, etc.).
• Launch a BBS?
• Continue work for Philly Mesh.
• Continue rebooting Raunchy Taco IRC (Have one server and a certificate authority configured).

See you in 2019!