Total CES PR pitches received this week: 193 (not counting e-mails from the Consumer Electronics Association itself). Total news items this week about my own work: only one, but it’s reasonably big news.

12/17/2013: Verizon 4G LTE Broadband Router with Voice, PCMag

I spent more time than usual with this home-broadband option, mainly because it kept failing to work as advertised. Please don’t subject yourself to it.

12/18/2013: 2012 was already a pretty good year for technology. What happened in 2013 will blow you away., Yahoo Tech

One part of Yahoo Tech’s holiday preview was a list of positive developments in tech this year, written as a series of Upworthy posts. My nominations: tech companies getting quasi-radicalized about NSA surveillance (after this ran, Verizon and then AT&T said they’d follow the example of major Web companies by posting transparency reports about their responses to law-enforcement inquiries), T-Mobile dynamiting the subsidized-phone business model, and customers pushing carriers to backtrack on phone unlocking.

12/18/2013: You better watch out: How to set up your Facebook privacy settings the secure way, Yahoo Tech

I wrote about 1,100 words on how to change the default settings on a Facebook account to maximize your privacy (in terms of sharing your information with friends and no farther) and your account’s security. To those who left “just delete your account” comments: Thanks, that’s super-constructive advice to offer people who can’t get their friends to switch from Facebook to a Diaspora pod, the WELL or the local BBS.

12/18/2013: #TabletChat Mobile Security Twitter Chat, IDG Mobility

One last Twitter chat about tablets for the year. I was a little off my game for this one, having woken up at 4:30 that morning to catch a train to New York and then realizing I was coming down with a cold.

12/21/2013: Rob Pegoraro: Making a living as a freelance writer, It’s All Journalism

I talked with podcast hosts Michael O’Connell and Julia O’Donoghue last weekend (hence, no mention by me of my Yahoo gig, which at the time wasn’t public knowledge) about the changing state of the journalism business, what’s worked for me as a freelancer, and the importance of being your own publicist.

12/22/2013: Holiday help desk: Come to the rescue with tech support, USA Today

My editor liked a short bit I’d written on Sulia about how to prepare for the inevitability of providing tech support for the family over the holidays, so I expanded it–and added advice to myself to not get so visibly and profanely exasperated over malfunctioning hardware.

On Sulia, I complimented Bing Maps for noting the reopening of a downtown D.C. street before Google, expressed curmudgeonly exasperation over dumb design choices in higher-end point-and-shoot cameras, wondered what a customer could possibly do to prevent in-store data breaches like Target’s Black Friday debacle, asked why OS X should be so slow to connect to known WiFi networks, and shared consolidated responses to CES PR pitches.