It amazes me that I meet folks who haven’t heard of the Apple One bundle. Nonetheless I’ve met a lot of people who missed Apple’s announcement and subsequent rollout at the end of October 2020. The Apple One Bundle takes the various services Apple has built out over the last few years and packages them up into a single billing structure. With the Apple One Bundle you’re charged once a month for all of the services in your bundle. Prior to this every Apple service you signed up for had a different billing date and a separate transaction.By bundling more than one service you also receive discounts on the total cost of having these services. But is the Apple One Bundle worth it?

The internet is like the Wild Wild West, without the awesome soundtrack and dance moves of Will Smith. The truth is it’s a really dangerous place, for kids as well as adults. It gets harder every day to know what is safe and understand the consequences of interacting with all of the digital services that make up our world. As a father of three who are increasingly becoming connected it’s even harder, because the last thing I want is them stumbling into a snake’s nest. I’ve tried a number of things over the years, but I feel like for the first time my home internet is safe for me, my wife and my kids. Let me introduce you to NextDNS.

I’ve got mixed feelings about New Years Resolutions. They typically seem gimmicky and too often are unrealistic even under the best of circumstances. Both last year and again this year Jon and I discussed New Years Resolutions on our podcast through the lens of goal setting and in the context of what habits we wanted to establish.

What a mess of a year! If a global pandemic wasn’t enough to ruin it, throw in civil unrest and a nightmare election cycle and you’ve got 2020 in a nutshell. When the year started our family was already home-based, with me working remotely and my children being home schooled by my wife. We had a ton of activities outside of the house, all of which came to a screeching halt in March and many remaining in pause to some extent through the balance of the year. Staying home all the time sucks. Not being able to see people regularly sucks. The only thing worse than that though, is the hyper-politicization of everything. First it was political to say the virus is real, next it was political to wear a mask, then it was political to say racism is bad and here we are at the end of an awful election cycle where how you cast your vote became political! If we could make something political in 2020 we did. On top of all that relationships became sacrificed to your political leanings. Don’t agree with a friend? That’s fine, you can find a replacement. Have a disagreement with a family member? No big deal, just stop talking to them. It’s December finally and looking in the rear view mirror I’ve realized that as awful of a year as it’s been it hasn’t been a total bust.

I did not set out to read 64 (and counting) books in 2020 but, like so much this year, it just sort of happened. I was pretty convinced that after 40 books last year I had peaked and I would never read more in a single year. Was I ever wrong! I read a ton of really fantastic books this year, the full list of which you can see on Goodreads, but I thought it would be interesting to pull out my top 10. That exercise proved to be really hard, even more so when I attempted to put them in order. Nonetheless, here they are!