2022 is probably the first year in my working life I have done less than in the previous year. That’s all to the good: I am often scurrying around from project to project and spinning lots of plates. It was nice to have a calmer year and build in more time off in my second half-century of life.

To get announcements about my new projects, you can sign up for my legitimately low-volume mailing list—I sent out just seven messages in 2022!

This year’s summary is thus a little simpler, too!

Books

2022 was my second banner year for books. Starting during the first pandemic year, I devoted myself to writing new titles in the Take Control Books roster. In 2021, that involved four new books and updates to several more—some multiple times. In 2022, I wrote just two entirely new books and significantly updated another author’s existing title.

Take Control of Untangling Connections and Take Control of FaceTime and Messages are my new works; Take Control of Calendar and Reminders is a major update for iOS 15/16, iPadOS 15/16, and macOS Monterey/Ventura. (Scholle McFarland developed the book and wrote earlier updates.)

I currently have 11 actively updated books; you can find them all via this link. This includes books about iOS and iPadOS privacy and security, macOS security, how to use Zoom, Wi-Fi networking, Apple ID management and troubleshooting, and advice and explanations particular to M-series Apple silicon Macs. (We’re on the verge of retiring a 12th book, my title on cryptocurrency—a book mostly devoted to explaining why not to invest in cryptocurrency or NFTs, recommendations now well borne out by real-world events.)

I plan in 2023 to write new works on typography and printing history. I have a lot of ideas sketched out and have one that’s particular burning a hole in my writing pocket, detailing the history of newspaper comics from the late 1800s to the present, told through printing and production artifacts.

I’ve also agreed to write a long chapter as part of a book on a period of printing history. Details will follow later in the year when I have a better sense of its publication date.

Typographic Projects

Early in 2022, I sold the remaining Tiny Type Museums, part of a project dating to 2019. We made 108 sets in the edition with 104 for sale. A generous benefactor bought the last three to donate to teaching institutions in the U.S. and UK. I wrote a three-year anniversary post about the museum project just before the last ones sold.

Working with the Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum & Library this year, I created a short video on how comics went from an artist’s drawing board to a newspaper page as part of their Man Saves Comics! Bill Blackbeard’s Treasure of 20th Century Newspapers exhibition. It celebrates the 25th anniversary of the library’s acquisition of Bill Blackbeard’s San Francisco Academy of Comic Art collection, a massive trove of newspaper clippings, pages, and bound volumes that he spent decades accumulating. Blackbeard, who died in 2011, wrote and contributed to many comics history books, using his collection as a foundation. His life’s work benefits all historians of American culture and comics history.

My video runs continuously at the exhibition at The Ohio State University, of which the library is a party. I visited the library in October to research in their collection and meet curators. The exhibition opened a few weeks later, and I hope to get there this spring before it closes to see the remarkable elements that make it up. You can watch the video inline below or at YouTube. This was my first participation in an exhibition and I hope not the last!

Early this year I also shipped out a 3D scanning/printing project designed to look into the use of these techniques in prototyping and producing replicas of scarce or expensive printing artifacts. This effort created copies of Monotype’s Electro Type Matrices, themselves an incredible piece of technology first developed in the mid-1800s and applied by Monotype starting in the early 20th century. You can read the project details here; matrices are still available for order with a limited supply available.

I’d call the project’s outcome a mixed bag: the scanning resolution was fine and the reproduction in metal via 3D printing truly fantastic. But I found limited interest after the initial funding for the effort, and the complexity of getting scans that truly captured the detail was too high to pursue again at present. I may need to wait for the next generation of scanning technology.

Other Work

A grab-bag of other projects occupied my time in 2022:

• The book Shift Happens is moving towards crowdfunding and printing in early 2023! This two-volume work on the history of keyboards, from typewriters to mobile phones and beyond, was written by my friend and colleague Marcin Wichary. He started research in 2016; I signed on as an editor in 2018. It’s been an amazing journey. We planned to print in 2022, but supply chains, inflation, freight prices, and war all contributed to the delay. You can sign up to get a notification email when the Kickstarter project goes live in early February at his Shift Happens website! The site also features a 3D browsable preview. (I say “book,” but it’s two volumes comprising 1,216 pages plus a third volume that will be over 100 pages full of extras; we’re putting the whole thing in a custom printed slipcase.)
• Somehow, the folks at This Week in Tech (TWiT) decided that I should appear on their shows, and I was booked on eight episodes in 2022, on both the flagship TWiT and This Week in Google (TWiG). You can find archives at their website. Episodes are recorded live with video, then released in video and podcast form.

• On the video vein, I’ve been trying to produce more videos, live and edited, to supplement my printing history and technology writing work. You can watch a short video explaining the vagaries and types of USB and Thunderbolt cables, and a live Q&A in which I open a huge box of Peanuts flongs (printing molds) from Sweden. I also did a live commentary track for Park Row, a movie about newspapers and printing from the 1950s! I have a few members-only videos for podcast-related projects that I also made, but I hope to be putting out more publicly available ones in 2023.
• Part of what enabled both of the above is that I finally got my office looking good in person and on video. I painted it, and hung a huge amount of photographs, art, design works, and artifacts that I’d wanted to put up for years. It’s been a great morale boost to come into a cheery, crisper-looking space every day, and glance around at work by friends, people I admire, historical items, and some of my own stuff.
• Near the end of 2022, I took my first two trips more than about 50 miles away since the pandemic started. In October, I went to the Billy Ireland museum, as I noted above; in November/December, I spent two weeks in Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Ljubljana, and Venice with my older child, who was then at the end of several weeks of solo European travel. We had a great time and, yes, I found a lot of flong and printing stuff, most without looking hard at all. (Sadly, I did contract COVID at the end of the trip, but a very mild case, isolated at home, and none of the rest of the family—including my kid that I traveled with—tested positive! I went nearly three years avoiding it, but was fully vaccinated with all three available boosters in sequence.)
• My reporting and writing contributions declined quite a bit in 2022, as publications reduced rates and interest in freelance contributions. I continue to write the Mac 911 column at Macworld, where I also contribute feature and reviews, as well as at my stalwart publication, TidBITS, for which I’ve written for nearly 30 years!
• Finally, despite my horrible addiction to Twitter, I said goodbye for now in November 2022, and you can now find me tooting (?) on Mastodon @glennf@twit.social.