Tech Talk/By Martha Knight

Remember movie rentals? We went to the video store and rented videotapes of movies.

Hundreds and hundreds from which to choose, racks and aisles, shelves full, some jackets with spines facing out, some showing the whole front with the iconic scene we would associate with that movie and that would make the theme music start playing in our heads.

Popular movies, timeless favorites would have quite a few copies; less popular ones would have one or two. We would get our ration in a bag.

What if we didn't have our own VCR? We'd rent one at the store! We'd buy some Orville Redenbacher microwave popcorn and some sodas. All set for the weekend.

Seemed as if there was a place to rent videos in about every block. Videos morphed from VCR tapes to DVDs,  which took up hardly any room. We could buy them the way we used to buy paperbacks, from racks. Or we could order them online.

Blockbuster realized we would like to rent movies online, and Netflix came along and bested them. Blockbuster acquired a promising company called CinemaNow.  Some of those stores are still around, even though Blockbuster closed many of their flagship brand shops.

Players were undergoing their own transformations, from the portable, self-contained kind with their own screen to those that hooked up to the giant screen TV.

Rent the disks, play them, ship them back. What else could be made easier about the delivery of movies to the consumer? Could media become smaller, thinner? Could the aspect ratio be altered again? Could resolution become more resolute, definition get higher yet?

How about the media evaporating, and floating up to the cloud? That's where movies and much television content are now.

We want streaming movies, and whole seasons of TV shows without commercials and having to wait until the next episode.

And we have come to expect everything to be available all the time and everywhere.

As for having to choose among the various purveyors of all this content, this endless variety of entertainment, now we are being offered linked subscriptions. The competitors seem to have decided that competition wasn't all that helpful to Blockbuster and Netflix, so it might be better to encourage consumers to link to several vendors. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If you can't stomp your rival into the ground, join him in the cloud.

Cinema Now was acquired most recently by BestBuy. It has a promotion in which consumers are urged to choose ten free CinemaNow movies when they link to their UltraViolet account. Sign up for UV for free. Sign up for the CinemaNow account for the same round number. Pick from 22 free movies.

The biggest deal about this is that you can watch your 10 free movies (and all the others you will pay for later one way or another, if you continue as a subscriber) any old time and any old where, on a game console, an iOS device, a tablet, a TV, a computer or a smart phone.

Well, not just ANY time or where. Please, not while driving. Not on your smart phone in its car cradle, no. Let the rear passengers watch on their devices.

So Google around, get free UntraViolet and CinemaNow accounts and check out the free movies, and then see where all you prefer to watch them.

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Bridging the generation gap with technology can be fun.

Someone donated what people were calling a “weaving machine” to the Senior Center. Turned out to be one of those Bond knitting machines that were so popular a while ago. It has a lot of hooks and its main chassis and a leaflet of instructions. But no information about the company was with it. Also, a key part was missing.

Fortunately one of the center's ace volunteers is an ace pilot and even acer airplane mechanic. He can fix about anything. So he was fixing to fabricate the missing part. He would have liked to see an illustration of it, though, so he tried ordinary means of locating the company, but to no avail.

The ordinary means to some of us, though, are Google or some other search engine. Happens this ace mechanic has an aversion to computers. He does use one to write chapters of his latest book, but if the computer isn't online, fine with him.

The knitting machine is a medium tech machine, actual hand-held knitting needles being low tech, and computer driven knitting machines being high tech. But we used some communications tech to Google for “Bond knitting machine” and soon had the company's website.

Our mechanic pal happily captured its phone number. The computer was doing some accounting, and he had places to go, so he did not do any more online research. Anyhow, he'd rather use the phone. Possibly the cell phone he manages to tolerate.