A slice of digital cold turkey: On May 1 of 2012, Paul Miller at the tech site The Verge cut himself off from the Internet. No web, no streaming, no email, no texts or voicemails either. It’s now a year later, and Paul has just woken up. He says we should all be impressed at how well we use something as complex as the Internet, but also describes his own euphoria after cutting himself off. 

A month ago, ‘Google Nose’ was an April Fool’s prank: Sniff your laptop for eau de wet-dog or scent of Egyptian tomb. But it turns out real engineers have been working on smell tech. John Laurenson reports from a film festival in the Austrian city of Linz, where a smelly movie has just premiered. And, when Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer curbed the ability of employees to work from home, she got rapped by those who saw this as old-thinking. Now, the company is trying to make Yahoo a more attractive place to work by, among other things extending maternity and paternity leave.

There’s been a lot of talk online about Jason Collins, the NBA player from the Celtics and the Wizards who came out as gay this week — and some of that talk is offensive. What is appropriate language to use online and in every day life? Janell Burley Hofmann, a mother of five, gives her advice. And you’ve probably heard of the fisheye camera lens, but how about a bug-eyed one? Researchers at the University of Illinois and Northwestern University have developed a unique hemispherical digital camera based on the eye of a fly. It takes photos with nearly 200 tiny lenses to put together one giant wide-angle almost three-dimensional image that is in focus at all depths of field.

It has been six months since the savage storm dubbed Sandy wrecked and flooded a stretch of the East Coast. As people increasingly carry smartphones and Internet-linked tablets, how can digital devices help during an emergency? Developers are creating a growing number of crowd-sourcing disaster apps in the hopes of making a difference during natural and manmade disasters.

Apple and Samsung both reported quarterly earnings last week. Today we hear from the company that makes many of the gadgets they sell. That would be Taiwanese tech giant Hon Hai, or as we know it, Foxconn. And, New York City hasn’t exactly gone easy on teenagers with cellphones. Its city-wide ban on phones in schools is just one example. But what may be a monumental inconvenience for teens has become an opportunity for a growing number of businesses, who are only too happy to store those phones. 

The Internet is powered by vast banks of computers which eat up energy. That’s expensive for the people who run these servers, and it has a cost to the earth, depending on how all the electricity is generated. Aaron Rallo is CEO of TSO Logic, which offers a software solution to this. Another company working to make the net more efficient is Joyent. Its chief technology office, Jason Hoffman, believes the demands are going to get so high on our digital systems — given all the computer chips going into things — that we’ll need some big technological leaps.

Is online retailer Amazon about to do to TV’s what it did to bookstores? A published report says Amazon is coming out with its own box to attach to TV’s. Businessweek says this would compete with Apple TV, Roku and — possibly with cable and satellite companies. And from Britain comes the story of the four-year-old whose parents took her in for therapy when she became “distressed and inconsolable” without her iPad. Research about the early childhood effects of tech is ongoing, but it’s an issue parents have to deal with here and now. 

Twitter can be hacked. Who cares, if Twitter is for fun. But consider this: Somebody hacked into the Associated Press Twitter account Tuesday and sent a fake tweet about a bogus explosion at the White House. Investors were watching and the Dow fell about about a percent before the tweet was retracted.  Some experts believe the hack started with a tainted email sent to some unsuspecting AP employee. The strategy is called spearfishing and we are all urged to be alert for suspicious email. And, a final check-in with Jamie Kitman, New York editor of Automobile Magazine, as he completes his cross-country roadtrip.

Ever type a random search into Google and watch the system auto-complete just exactly what you were looking for? There is now a hint that Google could soon add even more predictive technology to its search page. A sharp-eyed blogger noticed some software code that suggest a Google Now predictive personal assistant could come to any old browser.