From the Editor’s Desk: Technology Has Never Failed Me (Premium)

I owned personal computers—what we then called home computers—before I was even a teenager, and I was an early and regular consumer of technical books and magazines that covered this early passion. And I was convinced at that time that the authors of those books were technical gurus who had spent years learning and honing their skills, and that those books were the culmination of that work.

Years later, when I unexpectedly began writing my own books, I realized that I had had it all backward. Most technical book authors knew something about the topic going into a new writing project, I’m sure, but the learning and skill-building occurred while writing those books. In other words, the process of writing the book was what made them an expert. And that’s absolutely fine because the readers of those books still received the same benefit.

Now that I’ve written around 30 books—I’ve lost track—and have committed what must be millions of words in front of readers, I guess I can be judged accordingly. Not everything I’ve written should be celebrated, of course, but I’d like to think I’ve made some kind of contribution, have helped some people get over whatever technical or conceptual hurdle. It’s not a horrible life, and while I do sometimes wonder about the 9-to-5 schedule that so many of my friends and family have, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Well, I would change one thing.

I’ve always been a fan of what I now think of as personal technology, of course, but I’ve also likewise experienced a lifetime of frustration because of it. Recently, I’ve observed that technology, literally built on a foundation of 1s and 0s, could thus be perfect, but so rarely works correctly that it more closely resembles magic than science. This has been an ongoing topic for me over the years—because of the crazy nature of the house we moved to in 2017, I touched on it then, for example—but the problem has gotten worse recently, which is not what I would have predicted. And that’s especially true with Windows, the product that is somehow still at the center of my professional life after 30 years.

Expressing frustration with things that don’t work properly is part of the job, though I am of course labeled as a complainer for pointing this out. But fixing or working around those problems is also part of the job, and it’s one I take seriously. And Microsoft’s escalating stupidity with Windows, which results in inconsistent user interfaces and feature sets across multiple PCs that are otherwise updated and configured identically, is a growing sore spot. When you are supporting others, it’s important to be able to say, “If you do this, this will happen” and not, “If you do this, this might happen. Or maybe this.”

But I keep running into problems. Some I figure out. And some I do not. And that is vexing.

I recently noted that I added over 100 pages and new content to the Windows 11 Field Guide in two months, adding three completely new chapters and thoroughly updating 15 others in my push to cover the changes that arrived in Windows 11 version 23H2. Building up to that set of updates, I did exactly what you might think I would do and examined everything we’d written in the build-up to the release as well as the limited documentation that Microsoft had provided at that time, and I created a list of what I wanted to add to the book, and where. There were big topics in there, like Copilot, passkeys, and the new Outlook app. And then there were many dozens of smaller additions.

Among the latter is a feature called Dynamic Lighting, which Microsoft tested over the summer and then released in late September. This feature aims to provide a single, centralized dashboard for gamers and other users who purchased RGB peripherals like mice, keyboards, game controllers, displays, and whatever else from a variety of manufacturers, each of which to date has provided unique proprietary software for managing how their devices display colored, dynamic lighting. It is to RGB devices what Matter is to smart home devices, basically.

I’m not really in the target audience for this kind of product, though I hope that the market will expand to include ambient lighting as we see in some video podcasts, and I could imagine doing something similar in my office, where I record my podcasts. And so I scanned through Microsoft’s official list of supported devices, visited the websites of each hardware maker, settled on Razer, which has its own list of compatible devices, and purchased two of the least expensive of them—the Razer Ornata V3 TKL keyboard and the Razer DeathAdder V2 Pro mouse—so that I could write about this feature in the book.

Neither works. I mean, both work fine. They just don’t appear in the Dynamic Lighting interface in the Windows 11 Settings app, on any of the several PCs I’ve tested this on. I’ve done everything I can do—the devices have the latest firmware, I configured the Razer Synapse software to give precedence to Dynamic Lighting, and so on—and neither works. I kept trying, but this morning, three weeks after I originally purchased these things, I arranged for their return to Amazon. And when I’m feeling up to it, I’ll go through this process again and try with some other RGB devices. That chapter isn’t going to write itself.

Related to this, I also had passkeys on the to-do list for the book, and in writing what I thought was going to be a straightforward overview of this security technology and how it works in Windows 11, I realized that this topic was much bigger than I originally thought. Anything security-related is by nature both complex and important to get right, and because I’m not a security expert, I fell into a curious form of writer’s block in which nothing I wrote was adequate, and I had to keep adding material. In time, I realized that I had gone down a rabbit hole with no bottom.

Something happened I’m sure I’d never experienced before. I wrote a few thousand words for a new chapter about passkeys. And then started over, rewriting it from scratch. And then again. And then I walked away from Visual Studio Code, which is what I use for the book, opened Typora, a more standard writing tool, and wrote it all yet again. And again. And again.

That chapter turned into two chapters and three separate posts for the site, and I’ll go into more detail about that in a coming article about password managers, a topic that also came out of this work. The point, for now, is that I still have all these weird separate versions of my passkey writing, and I can see, looking through them, what I experienced at the time, which is that I was struggling to find a way to explain this topic in a way that was both technically correct and would make sense to a mainstream, non-technical reader. And I must have felt pretty good about it because those chapters are part of the book now, and, as noted, I did write three separate but related articles for the site. After all, getting security right is important. And I want to help others overcome the issues I had when I first tackled this subject.

But have I?

It’s clear from some reader comments and emails that this topic is as clear as mud. And that the issue isn’t just the technical nature of the topic, but also perhaps what I wrote. And despite sweating the details of the process and my descriptions of it, maybe it needs another go-over. This is not what I want.

But that unique experience, suddenly, isn’t so unique. This past weekend, I spent most of my waking hours working on that password manager article—a topic that won’t be in the book—something I had expected to publish on Saturday and then, failing at that, surely on Sunday. But I ran into a blocker, again and again, that neatly straddles the issues noted above. I wasn’t getting consistent results across PCs and other devices—shades of Windows 11 and Dynamic Lighting—and because of this, the point of the article kept shifting, forcing me to rewrite it again and again and again.

And I gotta tell you, for this writer, there is nothing more frustrating than writing many words and not publishing any of them. This past weekend was a miserable experience, one that extended well into Sunday evening, to the point where I finally told my wife that I wouldn’t be able to watch a movie at 8 pm, as we had planned, and would need more time. I finally gave up on it after 9 pm, frustrated, and then spent the next few hours not watching whatever true crime thing we settled on, and then not reading whatever was in front of me on my tablet as I lay in bed, still seething. Suffice to say, I slept poorly last night.

If writers become experts by writing, as I believe, then I’m left to wonder what happens to writers who spend days writing unsuccessfully. Do they go mad? Give up and move on? Or do they just “Groundhog Day” it and keep trying, over and over again? I’m going to find out. But I’m hoping that the latter approach pays off because this topic, like anything related to security, is important. And I want to get this right for me. But I also need to get it right for me before I can even begin trying to explain it to others. And I am a mess right now.

I’ve often sarcastically noted that “technology has never failed me,” which is why I settled on that for the title. The reality is that technology has often failed me. Maybe even failed me more than it’s worked. And I would like to even the score on this, turn things around.

Speaking of which, here’s the perfect end-cap to this story: I pulled the boxes for the Razer devices out of the closet so I could drop them off at the local Whole Foods as part of the Amazon return process. After packing up the mouse, which is so like-new no-one would think otherwise, I plugged the keyboard into my office PC for the heck of it. This was one of the PCs I had tested it with before, of course, and I had not updated the keyboard’s firmware or changed anything with my PC’s configuration. But as soon as I plugged it in, I got a Dynamic Lighting notification. It does work.

Of course it does.