AUSTIN–I’ve been here since Friday morning, and somehow I have not eaten any brisket yet. If you choose to regard that oversight as a character issue, I can’t blame you.

3/7/2016: How to recover from iPhone update gone bad, USA Today

I made a mistake in this column–I misread an Apple tech-support note about restoring an iPhone in an Apple Store as evidence that you could also borrow a computer there to backup your iPhone and then restore it. That’s not the case, as two people pointed out, so I’ve asked my editor to correct the piece.

3/7/2016: Your ISP might not be spying on you now — but you’d be crazy not to worry that it will, Yahoo Tech

This post started life as a simpler, shorter unpacking of a report about the limits to Internet providers’ visibility of their subscribers’ online activity, but the topic and the word count expanded a bit from there.

3/8/2016: Ransomware on the Mac: Turns out identify theft is a problem for apps, too, Yahoo Tech

After this ran, a friend commented on my Facebook page that he uses the Transmission app but had chosen to skip the update that had been contaminated with a ransomware payload. Yikes.

3/9/2016: Great Wedding Registry Gift Ideas, The Sweethome

As part of this long guide to wedding presents, Casey Johnston interviewed my wife and I about the stand mixer that (I think) some of her parents’ friends gave us, and which I use to make bread every week.

3/11/2016: FCC proposes new broadband-privacy rules — and your ISP probably hates them, Yahoo Tech

Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler proposed some not-too-sweeping proposals to limit what your ISP can do with the data it collects about your online activity, and Big Telecom is not amused.

3/13/2016: How to give your email a security checkup, USA Today

I was pleasantly surprised to see some large Internet providers support IMAP syncing and TLS encryption–but others have horribly obsolete and insecure setups. Think about that when you hear somebody insist that the only way to get a good and reliable service online is to pay for it.