Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

A year ago I looked back at some of 2013’s technology news. Now I’ll peek at some TechTalk topics from 2014.

In January I noted that the Affordable Care Act’s website had been crashier than a demolition derby, at least until they sent in the Geek Marines. This time around the site was ready for prime time, and lots of folks, as POTUS might put it, signed up.

The Farm Show in Harrisburg set me to thinking about farm technology over the years.

TV signals and program content came in for discussion. McAfee did, too—both the colorful company owner and the eponymous company and line of internet and email security products.

Making better flow batteries, key to utilization of solar and wind (and other) power, could involve using rhubarb as a source of quinones. I hoped rhubarb would finally get some respect, as a source of quinones. Now it occurs to me, that would drive the price of rhubarb through the roof. I should have planted a lot of it.

I encouraged people to get onto an operating system newer than Microsoft XP, which would no longer be supported, would lack updates and antivirus programs and definitions. Chances are some readers are still running the old faithful OS and won’t change until their present systems conk out.

IBM’s “Lucy” would seek solutions to Africa’s greatest challenges. Quantum computing would be the Next Big Thing, I speculated, and I pondered quibits at some length. Not QUIBIDS.

I looked at the first ten years of Facebook, and at Mark Zuckerberg, entrepreneur extraordinaire.

I had one of my attacks of the zanies and wrote song parodies in honor of Twitter, and other nonsense.

The Court House should have a better arrangement for letting people use the handicapped entrance, I complained. I probably mentioned the lack of a mail slot, too; I mention it at every opportunity.

Howie’s attempt to retire, after 51 years as a columnist, set me to thinking about technology we have used in the newspaper biz in that period of time. I have been at it for 47 years. Before that I wrote white papers and position papers for various candidates and officials (Republicans, I blush to recall), and sent forth press releases. And of course I wrote lettitors. On a typewriter, although not one like the Remington Noiseless my mother used for writing the Portage Report for Charles F. Boller.

Mt. Gox, the Bitcoin caper and outages in the blabbersphere were fun to write about.

Various call transport and connectivity options will have to be considered as the school system approaches a decision about updating its telephony. I discussed some of the possibilities. I’ll reiterate this advice: Do not let a vendor tell you what you need. Corporations don’t, if they don’t want to lose their corporate shirts.

Not until April 10 did I start exclaiming about 3D printing. I have seldom shut up about it since. Protolabs has sent me a nice, big calendar. The January illustration features a clear lighting lens that was proto-printed.

NSA spying and the Heartbleed bug found their way into a column. Internal and external hard drives and optical drives were discussed after some questions from readers. Another asked about backing up. (Too bad computers don’t have a reverse gear. Another needed feature is a backup warning, a scary claxon that would remind us to do a backup.)

Curly quotes and other typographical niceties were mentioned in May, along with ASCII, HTML and their successors.

Churchill Downs’ enormous ultra-high-def 4K video screen caught my attention when Kentucky Derby time galloped around. The track also has a sound system that spooks some of the horses and makes it difficult for a horse whisperer, or a hoarse whisper, to be heard.

I’m for Net Neutrality, I declared, positively, while I was negative about proposals to slow down some net traffic, and speed up other “tiers” for a price.

Some news must be forgotten, I reported. That is, court rulings indicated that some should not be retrieved by search engines if that news had happened long enough ago to be “old news” and was derogatory concerning an individual. When Marc Antony said that the evil that men do lives after them, he didn’t say how long, and he wasn’t taking into account the future invention of search engines.

Scams that are perpetrated by use of Facebook, Twitter and other social media were mentioned, along with the incivility that we find online that would not be practiced  nor tolerated in print media nor f2f.

I talked about the Talking Moose and my first Hackintosh. Then the new Amazon Fire smart phone blazed a path to our attention, toward the end of last June.