I’m grateful this year is nearly over and I’m grateful my family has remained safe during 2020—and that we’ve all managed to keep ourselves occupied. It’s a hard lift, and I know exactly how privileged we are, as I can read and see around us how many people are struggling. That fact keeps me hard at work, knowing what a gift it is to have a purpose, and thankful to all editors, patrons, podcast networks, product purchasers, and colleagues I’ve had the chance to work for and with this year.

A Little Help by Taking Control

I put at the top of my list of 2020 achievements releasing two free ebooks with Take Control Books. Joe Kissell is the stalwart publisher, running the business with his wife, Morgen. Not only did Take Control provide a significant percentage of my 2020 income, as people are still buying ebooks, but Joe and Morgen supported me when I said, “Hey, I would like to release a free book” and then “hey, how about another one.”

Take Control of Working from Home Temporarily attempted to be an early boot camp book for people who weren’t accustomed to having a place to work at home, particularly full time. I consulted dozens of colleagues, friends, and folks I know on social media, and combined that with many years of being a home worker. We turned the book around in about 10 days from start to finish back in March. In the midst of feeling helpless, it was something useful I could do.

Many, many thousands of people downloaded this free book, and I hope it helped their transition a little. The title was optimistic! We didn’t know what the future would bring, and many people have switched to long-term telecommuting or perhaps will never return to a full-time office.

Following this title, I wrote Take Control of Zoom, a book of the moment, with hundreds of millions of people piling onto that videoconferencing software. However, at a couple hundred pages, I thought it might also be useful to have a quick-start guide for people who needed to get up and running and weren’t generally hosting meetings. That led to the free, 40-page Take Control of Zoom Essentials, which we released later in spring.

Museums, Ho!

My biggest job this year was finishing the vast majority of the Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule project. Conceived with my friend and close collaborator Anna Peterson in October 2018, we launched a Kickstarter in February 2019 and funded it fully. The project encompasses 100 “museums,” which are custom wooden cases containing a huge array of actual type and printing artifacts, some of them historical and even rare, and others of which were commissioned and created by people around the country for the project.

I think of these museums as a combination of teaching collection, a “Wunderkammer” (cabinet of curiosities), and a gift to the future—a real time capsule, providing all the pieces and accompanying text that explains how printing worked from the 1450s to the 2020s. Each purchaser winds up becoming a curator and teacher, as well as having the pure enjoyment of it.

We had planned to ship the Kickstarter rewards in January 2020, and were slightly delayed. By the time we had caught up in early March, things shut down enough that we had to press pause on completing a few final elements that need a woodworking shop and were “nonessential.” It took a few months for Washington State to fire back up, and then the USPS had been intentionally disrupted—museum shipping was keyed to the affordability of shipping by the PO. When that seemed to die down, wildfires pushed so much smoke into Seattle that I couldn’t safely work in my daylight basement office, where I have all the museum materials (an air purifier kept us safer in the main floor).

Finally, nature and postal management malfeasance couldn’t hold us back, and in October, we began shipping the first of the 93 museums ordered to date. A big shoutout to our mail carrier and local post office, as all domestic shipments of the 10-pound museums were by the USPS, and handled magnificently. And our carrier and her alternates had to deliver 1,000s of pounds of materials to my door!

By the end of November, the vast majority were in people’s hands—including all museums promised through December 2020! A few remain available for order, and a handful ordered in November and December I’m prepping to ship after the Christmas backlog at the PO clears up so I can make sure they reach buyers reliably.

This project was a huge part of my life over the last two years, and my life’s biggest artistic and professional achievement. I’m so excited to get photos and emails from people who received theirs. Some people had bet on this becoming a real thing and then had to wait about 20 months to get theirs; others had pre-ordered much more recently, but were no less eager.

At one point, Anna and I joked that she and then I had the largest concentration of museums in one place in the world. No longer!

Many Books

Also this year, I also wrote, updated, or released a long, long list of books:

• Six Centuries of Type & Printing was written in 2019 as part of the type museum project—a copy is included with each museum, and I’m selling it separately as well. Finished copies arrived via London and Germany in April 2020. It’s a book about the development of printing starting before Gutenberg through the present digital day, and set in hot-metal type and printed by letterpress in London, then bound by a German firm in a beautiful hardcover with a slipcase.
• Take Control of Home Security Cameras. Possibly in a bit of bad timing, the book came out just before everyone was home all the time.
• Take Control of iOS & iPadOS Privacy and Security. A revised version of my long-running book, which now covers iOS 14 and iPadOS 14.
• Also this year, I updated Take Control of Your Apple ID, Take Control of Wi-Fi Networking and Security, and Take Control of Slack.
• I have another new title due out in January that I’m working on now, about security and privacy for your Macintosh.

Other Work

This year was a mixed bag of projects as it always is. No two years are ever alike.

I started by taking over a daily political podcast for Ride Home Media, Election Ride Home, from a friend who needed a break. I produced a brief podcast every weekday from mid-January to late February, at which point I needed a break—and also needed to hop on to the Tiny Type Museum project more intensively to move it towards what I thought was its near-term completion!

In January 2020, during the Jeopardy! Greatest of All Time championship—ah, simpler times—I penned this analysis for Vice’s Motherboard about the state of play after three days, particularly focusing on why the then all-time-cash winner, Brad Rutter, was in a deep third place.

Starting mid-year, I wrote a number of pieces for a new project at the Economist, called Economist Applied. A test of a slightly more practical approach to business insight than the normal Economist news and analysis, I wrote features about how tech conferences were quickly pivoting to virtual get-togethers, how to manage security effectively with all one’s workers suddenly in their homes and more at risk, and whether tools that help identify flaws in your writing actually help you write better.

While it sits a bit in the background, I have a group of people who support my writing about type and language at Patreon, where I publish on an irregular schedule prose and pictures about historical printing and related stuff with a modern twist. On Christmas Eve, I posted this entry about how a ligature (a set of letters drawn together) caused a joke to misfire in the Christmas crackers that are part of British-style celebrations.

This year, I also continued my extensive writing for Macworld, where I pen multiple columns each week in the Mac 911 series, something I’ve now done for years, answering reader questions; and wrote a number of reviews, mostly of uninterruptible power supplies (UPSes) for sibling publication TechHive.

The Future

With my museum project winding down and a changed media landscape at the end of 2020—lots of publications I wrote for suffering from ad declines and loss of subscribers, even as mainstream publications have thrived—I’ll have to reinvent myself once again, I’m sure.

I have a number of new type and printed-related projects, much more modest than the museum one, that I’m queuing up, and I’m sure 2021 will include lots of books once again.

I wish you a happy new year and l clutch to my chest the notion that 2021 will wind up far better than 2020.