The end of May coinciding with the end of a four-day workweek was a pleasant bonus of Memorial Day’s spot on the calendar this year. Another bonus: I had my last client-paid copy for the month filed by 2:09 p.m. Friday.
Patreon readers got one other post, a rant about the woeful UX of a Hilton offer for double points on upcoming hotel stays. That didn’t get published until almost 9 p.m. on Friday–which is still a lot better than the filing frenzy I’ve exhibited in the final minutes of the final days of other months.
5/28/2024: T-Mobile to Buy Regional Carrier UScellular, PCMag
I didn’t notice the name on the credit of the photo of a T-Mobile flag on a golf course that I’d selected from Getty Images to illustrate this post until I copied that metadata to paste into PCMag’s CMS. That’s when I realized that my Georgetown Voice friend Darren Carroll, a seriously talented photographer, had taken that shot during an idle moment at a golf tournament sponsored by the carrier.
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5/28/2024: A Lot of Websites Ask You About Cookies. How Should You Answer?, AARP
My editor at AARP asked if I could write an explainer about those dialogs you see on so many pages that suggest, ask, implore or assume that you’re okay with the site–and, in most cases, advertising networks–writing information about your visit to small text files saved on your device. After talking to numerous experts, I continue to think that your best response to those dialogs, should you not want to be tracked by advertisers, is to use a browser like Apple’s Safari, Microsoft’s Edge and Mozilla’s Firefox that will block ad-network trackers by default.
5/29/2024: Verizon Enlists AST SpaceMobile to Kill Off Its US Dead Zones, PCMag
Verizon’s apparent disinterest in using low-Earth-orbit satellites to provide at least emergency-level coverage in dead zones was looking increasingly weird. Then the carrier signed up the same satellite operator as AT&T to provide that backup connectivity, although it seems to be more conservative in its sales pitch than AT&T.
5/30/2024: Android Update Will Let You Fix Dumb Texting Typos (to Other Android Users), PCMag
I’ve yet to get the update to Google’s Messages app that enables this editing of sent RCS messages–assuming the recipients also have the same update installed–so I cannot yet report on how satisfying it might feel to fix a text typo.
5/30/2024: IRS Direct File App to Return for 2025, Welcome Taxpayers in More States, PCMag
This was one bit of news that I didn’t expect to see coming this week, but with the information-security conference I was attending not yielding any obvious breaking news, I jumped on the chance to write this up instead. And to point out to readers that while the IRS may call this rollout of its free tax-prep app “permanent,” you have to expect that voters returning convicted felon Donald Trump to the White House would soon be followed by Trump scrapping this program.
5/31/2024: FCC: It’s Game Over for Affordable Broadband Connectivity Program, PCMag
The official end of the ACP and the $30 monthly discounts on broadband it provided for more than 20 million American households led to my editors asking me to cover this program one more time.
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