That’s a wrap for another year of columns in this space.
In recent years I’ve written numerous columns related to various ventures run by Elon Musk. I certainly didn’t foresee the chaotic situation that Musk would precipitate at Twitter in 2022 following his $44-billion dollar egoistic takeover of the messaging platform, but I couldn’t resist writing a column around his “let that sink in” photo opportunity.
As this column is written, the unpredictable entrepreneur has unleashed a Twitter poll about his own future as CEO – that followed only a few hours later by a new policy, later rescinded, which for all practical purposes forbade Tweet links to other social media platforms.
I started off the year with a look back at the Boxee Box, a quirky piece of hardware that was essentially a forerunner in the nascent streaming field more than a decade ago. That column dovetailed nicely into one on Netflix raising its prices as ever more Canadians cut their cable TV subscriptions. However, it wasn’t clear that many were actually saving much as households took on ever more streaming subscriptions, for both music and visual media.
A column on moon rocks of all things took us back 40 years to when this writer and a local school obtained one of the first licences to display lunar materials brought back by the Apollo missions. It seems that 2022 rekindled mankind’s determination to go back to the moon. This was underscored by public fascination with the Artemis mission.
There were several columns on Chromebooks, the Google Chrome devices that sold like hotcakes during the pandemic and that seem to have become a permanent fixture for home technology. The most recent Chromebook column looked at buying used Chromebooks and the need to consider the AUE for such purchases, the auto update expiration date.
Ongoing battles and issues with major telcos, whether for home, mobile, internet, or television service, featured in multiple columns, and it certainly appears there is no love lost on these companies by many Canadians.
Underscoring this sentiment was the nationwide Rogers Communications outage, which we covered in an August column. In addition to various credits the company assigned to customers, there is the prospect of a class-action settlement, possibly a couple of years down the road.
Another telco column looked at 5G mobile service, not so much the overblown discussion about the “radiation” from this technology but rather about what exactly constitutes 5G. For now, the conclusion was that the phone companies have really rebranded lower-level frequencies as 5G.
One of the more offbeat columns covered CMEs, coronal mass ejections, outbursts from the sun and the subsequent effects here on Earth, whether that be lovely auroral displays, or, more ominously, widespread power outages from interactions with the large, continent-spanning, electrical grids.
Space featured in several columns during the year. A set of stunning photos of Metro Vancouver taken by astronaut Raja Chari while on the International Space Station led to a column on how such photos can be used by anyone with internet access.
Later in the year another ISS column discussed how I was able to reach an astronaut via handheld radio as the spacecraft passed over Vancouver at an altitude of around 420 kilometres. Also on the space front was a column that arose from B.C. residents spotting a Starlink “train,” a line of around 60 satellites from a recent SpaceX launch.
Around Black Friday came my annual column on the state of digital camera sales in Metro Vancouver. In essence the conclusion was that there are still more than 200 camera models and packages available through various retailers, despite the onslaught from ever-improving mobile phone camera features.
Closing out the year was a reminder that I’ve given multiple times in recent years to have some sort of password management system for all those online accounts you use. After that column went to press, news emerged of a particularly troubling compromise of customer data stored by LastPass, one of the top three companies in this space.
Next year at this time we will likely be looking back at the influence of artificial intelligence and the inroads made by services such as ChatGPT and DALL-E. In the meantime, if you wish to peruse any of last year’s columns, they are all at bccatholic.ca/authors/peter-vogel.
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