Reviews and Comments

Focused on suburbs and local chains — not a single general-interest shop in the Mission is listed — this is a guide for the Bouquets to Art crowd. Suburban chains take up space that could have been used for more independent shops. (I say this as a frequent customer of Books Inc., who got nearly all of the business I would give to Amazon.) All I know of Bookshop West Portal is its politics, but it's enough to make me wish someone else had gotten the featured slot.

A good skim through some hundred travel destinations that are at risk of being less attractive in the future. Most are threatened by climate change, but some face more direct stupidity — war, neglect, bad planning. Each place is visited only briefly, but it is a useful calibration for your own bucket list. You're unlikely to choose a new destination just because you see it here. But you might not realize that Stonehenge is at risk of being felled by rodents, or that Machu Picchu — already with twice the visitor load recommended by UNESCO — will be more crowded many times over after a new airport is completed.

The overall concepts in this 2015 book are sound, if actually not paranoid enough for our times. Most of the details — particularly in what software to get — are necessarily dated.

There's occasionally the observation that nobody could have anticipated would be a groaner in 2025, like the characterization of Chrome and Firefox as the best browsers for privacy. The basic behaviors for keeping yourself out of harm's way (as much as possible) remain valid, as are the reminders of all the ways that "we are the product" for social media companies.

A charming guide to network infrastructure, in the style of a nature field guide, by @ingrid@everything.happens.horse, a self-proclaimed artist-not-techie. Like a good field guide, the sketches highlight the visual differences between, say, a public Wi-Fi access point and an automated license-plate reader.

Atlas Obscura wrote the review that I'd like to have written: www.atlasobscura.com/articles/mapping-the-hidden-structures-of-new-york-citys-internet-networks

[This is a resubmitted 2021 review that was lost in an instance migration.]

When written in 2009, this book covered a lot of networking concepts that may not have been general knowledge. Ethernet! Wi-Fi! Sharing a printer between computers! Our devices were yoked to individual machines by USB cables; we were dumb and happy.

Sixteen years later, we're much less dumb and much less happy. Anyone who needs to know what's in here already knows it. It feels unfair to rate a book poorly when it once was good, but really, you don't need to pick this up.