Prose Hacking

Instead of reading yet another round of squabbling over HBO’s decision to restrict real-time online viewing of “Game of Thrones” to its existing subscribers, why not read my debunking of most of those arguments?

Can you suspend your Internet/TV/phone subscription while you’re on vacation or temporarily living away from home? The answer turned out to be surprisingly and frustratingly complex, depending not just on which telecom company you use but also, in some cases, on where you live. In other news, the “Free public WiFi” hotspot you can sometimes see is still an artifact of a long-since-patched Windows XP bug. 

For this month’s CEA podcast, I interviewed D.C.-area gadget blogger Dave Zatz. We talked about TV cord cutting (he thinks it’s not as big of a deal as I do), trends in flat-panel technology, cable boxes and DVRs and what his experience crossing from gadget blogging to gadget marketing and back has taught him about the business.

Two cable topics in this week’s USAToday.com column: Using the QAM tuner in a digital TV to get local, public, educational and government channels, and ways to avoid watching the SD versions of channels you pay to get in HD.