Six days after I departed for the IFA show in Berlin, I’m back. You can imagine my excitement at coming home to my family… and, to a much lesser degree, at seeing that the arugula seeds I planted last weekend have sprouted and are now the way to delivering a second crop for the year..

8/29/2017: The Trump Administration’s IT Challenge: Do More with Less, FedTech Magazine

I shared what I thought was good advice about making federal computing more efficient from a fellow at Harvard’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, the deputy CIO of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and a veteran of the successful effort to fix the Healthcare.gov site who had earlier offered some insight on how a for-profit company could make a complete mess of its customer site.

8/30/2017: Samsung challenges Apple Watch with its new Gear Sport smartwatch, Yahoo Finance

I covered Samsung’s Wednesday-evening event in Berlin at which it unveiled three new wearable devices. After seeing its presentation, spending time inspecting these gadgets in the hands-on area, and gobbling down some appetizers, I filed the post well past 8 p.m. local time.

8/30/2017: Hate and violence around the globe? There’s an app for that., Yahoo Finance

I should have written this post weeks ago, since I sat down to interview the the PeaceTech Lab’s director at the start of August. But various other projects got in the way, I had trouble getting comments from other groups working on this problem, and August was in general not a productive month.

8/31/2017: Segway wants to do more than transport tourists and mall cops, Yahoo Finance

I attended Segway’s press conference without much expectation that the company would commit news, but my editors thought its move to start selling electrically-powered kick scooters was worth a post.

9/3/2017: Apple Watch faces new smartwatch competitors, USA Today

In this column, I offer some forecasts about how Garmin’s vivoactive 3, Fitbit’s Ionic and Samsung’s Gear Sport might match up against the Apple Watch. The most important angle to me: Two of those three look to offer far better battery life.