BARCELONA–One of the nicer things about this line of work is having to go here for Mobile World Congress. I’m in this city through Thursday to cover that show and see what it tells me about where the phone business is headed; look for my first take on that Tuesday at Yahoo Tech.

2/18/2014: The Comcast/TWC Merger: As Big Cable Gets Bigger, Your Bill Will, Too, Yahoo Tech

Yahoo got an excellent value for their money with this column–at least in the money-per-word sense. It ballooned to 1,500 or so words as I kept writing; after some pruning, it still clocked in at 1,341 words. Biggest surprise since the column posted: no reader e-mail on this issue at all.

2/23/2014: How to salvage data from a hard drive, USA Today

This week’s question came from a reader I’ve known online since Post days, and whom I finally met in person last year; I was glad I could provide useful suggestions when he asked for help with a failing hard drive. There’s also a tip about using a wireless router to host a backup volume, leavened with a warning about a remote-access vulnerability in one well-regarded model that I happen to own.

On Sulia, I questioned Comcast’s “fastest in-home WiFi” sales pitch, suggested the FCC’s passing reference to investigating barriers to municipal broadband was the most interesting part of its revived net-neutrality agenda, mocked some impressively ill-targeted ads on Facebook, complained about United’s primitive routine for cashing in a discount companion-travel certificate, and then complimented the airline for providing a workaround through its Twitter customer service.