I hope this week and next involve a minimum of actual work for you all. But if your jobs have any connection to CES, I know that’s not going to happen.

12/23/2014: Smartphone Location Tracking: How to Turn (Some of) It Off, Yahoo Tech

This was a pretty wonky topic, and I don’t know that I addressed it to my own satisfaction. But if it got even a small fraction of my readers to log into Google or Facebook to see their own location-history records–and then think of the equivalent data AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon keep but won’t display–then it was worth the trouble.

12/28/2014: Lost iOS passcode plus no backups equals lost data, USA Today

I was worried that a column on a holiday weekend about a problem most users don’t experience would get zero readership. Instead, there’s a lively if not always coherent debate in the comments. It includes one complaint (rudely phrased but not off-base) that I didn’t note that you can tell your iPhone or iPad to trust a given computer–which should let you run a final backup cycle to iTunes without unlocking your device before doing a complete restore that will remove that screen lock.