Well 2022 continued to be weird in lots of unhelpful ways. This seems to be the new normal.

After saying last year that I wanted to post here more often, I managed two whole articles in 2022: a look at the games I had enjoyed playing in 2021, and a review of the Garmin Fenix 7S sports watch. No promises for 2023…

I did manage to read 11 books last year. Compared to my youth this is pathetic, but I’m trying to get back into it. The ongoing destruction of Twitter by an alt-right man-child has probably helped if I’m honest. Best book of the year was probably Gnomon by Nick Harkaway. I’m also re-reading the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons - some of the best SciFi ever written.

Speaking of SciFi, one of the best TV adaptations I’ve seen came to Amazon Prime - The Peripheral, from the book by William Gibson. This was a high bar to reach as Gibson is one of my favourite authors and the book is loved by his fans. The changes to plotting were fair and the cast and staging superb. Given the cliffhanger ending it’s to be hoped that a second season is rapidly commissioned.

I still have an account on Twitter, but Mastodon is where to find me. I like Mastodon, both in principle and practice. I hope it gains enough traction to succeed at a mass scale. Some communities have migrated wholesale (infosec being one), but others are lagging.

2023 promises to be busy and weird, again. All the best!

After a lot of research and procrastination, I finally bought a sports watch earlier this year. Pictured here, it’s a Garmin Fenix 7S Solar (black). I’m very happy with it, but was curious when rumours of Apple’s new sports watch began to surface.

Update 02 October 2022 - early reviews have largely confirmed the positive and negative points I discuss in this post, and most seem to agree that the Ultra is both pretty big, and aimed primarily at smartwatch users who want an upgrade from the Apple Watch in terms of battery life and rugged design.

A teardown by iFixit shows the battery capacity at 2.1 Wh - identical to Garmin’s biggest watch, the 51mm Fenix 7X, which runs a month of normal use and somewhere around 100 hours of full GPS. My 42mm Fenix 7S battery is 42% of the Ultra’s capacity and has similar GPS endurance - as you might expect, given the different experience the Ultra is offering.

Here are the five games I played the most in 2021, all on the PC. Two were bought from Steam but the rest are from Xbox Game Pass, which continues to represent excellent value.

As I mentioned in my review of Halo Infinite, I don’t get much time to play these days. I have a large queue of games I’m itching to try this year, including Control and Death Stranding.

I wrote last year that 2020 was a weird and difficult year, and 2021 doubled down on that. The year was very busy work-wise, but there was a relentless quality to the pandemic as Covid ebbed and flowed that ground down my enthusiasm. I’ve always tried to use social media to highlight positive news, but that approach took a battering last year, especially as politics continued to diverge from reality.

It’s now 22 months since I travelled outside the UK - by far the longest period since university. Although air travel is not exactly sustainable, my experiences travelling for work and pleasure have been very formative, and the sudden halt with few signs of recovery has required some mental readjustment.

Obviously I didn’t post here as often as I wanted. I’m hoping to improve on that in 2022, and have a very full slate this year.

Take care of yourselves and be kind.

I’m playing the Halo Infinite campaign and thoroughly enjoying it. It’s a joy to play, with enough narrative to engage you, and an environment that is gorgeous to explore.