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I was overjoyed to learn that no one was nominated for entry into the Baseball Hall of Fame this year ("Voters shut out players," Jan. 10). A few nominees, including Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds, were shunned in their first year of eligibility. I have been patiently awaiting this: We are witnessing the backlash of negativism toward former ball players who allegedly abused steroids. The really lamentable thing is that these men would have likely traipsed into the Hall without the assistance, if you will, of steroid use. Those players who used or abused steroids put themselves above the sport, and that is why I am happy to see these men suffer the consequences and futility of not gaining entry at Cooperstown.

Facebook may have a lot of uses for social networking and time-wasting, but lately it's been offering a creative outlet, too. A new comic-making application called Bitstrips is popping up more and more on Facebook updates. And after just a few months, Bitstrips has turned into something that everyone seems to be talking about. "Basically, it's an app that turns you and your friends into a cast of cartoon characters," explains Jacob Blackstock, Bitstrips' chief executive and creative director.

The Baltimore Sun will begin charging frequent users of its website a subscription fee Oct. 10, joining several news organizations that have recently established price tags for online information. The Sun will allow users 15 free page views a month on baltimoresun.com. But for unlimited access, users will pay either $2.49 a week or $49.99 for six months. Those who already subscribe to The Sun's print edition will receive discounted rates of 75 cents a week or $29.99 a year for unlimited access to the website.

Baltimore's oldest cab company and the Maryland Transit Administration are updating their fleets for wheelchair-using customers, replacing small buses and minivans with an SUV-like vehicle that provides a smoother, more civilized ride. The MV-1 is designed specifically to transport disabled passengers and already is in use in cities such as Pittsburgh, Chicago and Dallas. Built in Indiana, it is the only production vehicle that meets Americans with Disabilities Act guidelines. Yellow Cab and sister company 1010 Sedan purchased 10 MV-1s and began using them this week.

If you've ever needed to wipe your hard disk completely clean and didn't have a Zip drive or other offline storage device for stashing the information, you already know what a hassle it is to back up all that data onto floppy disks.Now there's a way to get 300 megabytes of storage for free. You can use it for whatever you like, and the uses are limited to times when you need to reformat the disk.This storage is furnished by a Web site, so that means that your most precious information would remain safe, even if your computer were destroyed by fire.

These are sobering times for Internet users who value their privacy. The government has expanded its online surveillance authority in the wake of Sept. 11. And Web users are bombarded almost daily with warnings about cyberterrorism, hackers, worms, spyware, identity theft and cookies. Fortunately, there are myriad tools for those who want to reclaim at least some of their privacy. Encrypted e-mail, "anonymous" Web surfing, and software that crushes cookies and eats spyware, can all reduce your online exposure.

Facebook Inc.'s latest capitulation to offended users offered another reminder of the social network's power for self-criticism. The Palo Alto, Calif., company rescinded a controversial change to its terms of use late Tuesday after thousands of members protested that Facebook was claiming ownership of all photos and other material posted to the site. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said that wasn't the intention. But Facebook reverted to a previous version of its legal user guidelines that didn't include the disputed clause.

On election night, computer users got news of the lates returns as quickly as the newscasters did. A modem gave citizens access to news wire services -- including the Associated Press -- and up-to-date information on the voting.And now that the election is long past, citizens can remain politically active with the help of their computers and modems.Compuserve's "candidate-gram" service allows users to send telegrams ($1.50 each) to the candidates directly from the computer. The service provides a form for writing the telegram and automatically addresses and sends the messages by the postal service.

THIS COLUMN WAS was supposed to have covered a clever new product, but the clever new product wasted most of my day in a futile attempt to get just one of its features to work. Substitute topic: If you wonder why productivity gains from computers have been so hard to measure, try counting up the hours of fussing, fuming and frittering their users have squandered through no fault of their own.In the computer world, as in horseshoes, close is good enough. In the computer world, products are considered perfectly acceptable when they almost work the way they are supposed to. The computer world often seems to be run by arrogant idiot savants who understand everything about their products except how they behave when human beings try to use them.

USERS OF CELLULAR PHONES in Anne Arundel County are getting a free ride at the expense of those who use traditional wired telephones. Cellular customers are exempt from the small monthly fee for 911 emergency service that regular phone users have long paid, even though they use the 911 system, too. State legislators recently passed a law allowing local governments to eliminate this inequity, and several jurisdictions, including Howard County and Baltimore City,...

Musician Jackson Browne's managers were so excited when they heard Maryland's high court had struck down Ticketmaster's unpopular user fees in Baltimore that they promised free lifetime tickets to the city resident who had filed suit alleging he'd been ripped off by "exorbitant charges. " The Ravens, Orioles and Baltimore concert venues - along with city politicians - didn't share the singer's jubilation. Concerned that Ticketmaster and other ticket vendors might refuse to handle events in Baltimore, the City Council is poised to carve out an exception to its long-standing anti-scalping law, which bars companies from charging fees in excess of 50 cents on top of a ticket's stated price.

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I was overjoyed to learn that no one was nominated for entry into the Baseball Hall of Fame this year ("Voters shut out players," Jan. 10). A few nominees, including Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds, were shunned in their first year of eligibility. I have been patiently awaiting this: We are witnessing the backlash of negativism toward former ball players who allegedly abused steroids. The really lamentable thing is that these men would have likely traipsed into the Hall without the assistance, if you will, of steroid use. Those players who used or abused steroids put themselves above the sport, and that is why I am happy to see these men suffer the consequences and futility of not gaining entry at Cooperstown.

More than three years ago, I was just a newly minted tech reporter at the Baltimore Sun when I met Bill Anderson, who demo'ed some software and hardware that blew my mind. At the time, in the spring of 2009, Anderson was still prototyping his Chameleon software but already it could work magic. He could use software to direct a computer to identify a user's eye gaze, and scramble the screen for anyone else who tried to steal a look. I wrote about Bill's efforts here , and blogged about it here . A video we produced at the Sun actually went viral on all the tech blogs, including Gizmodo, which featured it . (The video was watched nearly 100,000 times and was the most successful online video I ever produced.)

Jill Babchak, 34, of Columbia, has joined Weight Watchers before, but this time around she's dropping pounds with the help of the organization's mobile application. “I like it because it has all the restaurants, all the foods, right at your fingertips,” says Babchak, a senior marketing specialist at DP Solutions in Columbia. “You can actually scan a food right there in the grocery store, and it brings up the amount of points it is worth,” she says, referring to Weight Watchers' system of assigning different point values to foods based on their nutritional content.

We all have fixed expenses of one kind or another, but are we now going to be charged for things we don't use as well ("PSC may limit fees during outages," Sept. 25)? Maybe they plan to charge users both ways all the time (a use and no use bill). We eventually could be charged for food we did not eat, water we did not drink, etc. How can we be asked to conserve when there is a chance we will be charged for it? BGE and the people who would allow that are just plain crazy! There is a cost to doing business, as we're told that all the time.

The reasons PCs outsell the Mac 10-to-1 are numerous, but let's focus on two key issues: choice and price.All sorts of people need to use personal computers, and they have all sorts of requirements, budgets and experience levels. The PC marketplace offers any imaginable combination of price, service and selection; the Mac marketplace is dictated by Apple. PC users can buy a preconfigured Windows system with no installation needed or build one from scratch. There is a choice!A mildly experienced PC user willing to install Windows (it takes about 20 minutes)

Last week, the Microsoft Corp. introduced DOS 6.0, the latest major revision of the most widely used personal computer operating system software.The new DOS adds a variety of new features, including data compression, that until now have been available only as add-on utilities from other companies.For people who are buying a new computer, some form of DOS 6.0 will probably come already installed on the hard disk. That makes the decision to use DOS 6.0 easy. And for most veteran PC users, the new DOS 6.0 features are an attractive bargain.

Katie Moody, the Baltimore-based Patriots fan, who is known on Twitter as @katiebrady12 and who has caught major heat after firing off an insensitive tweet to Ravens wide receiver Torrey Smith, has issued a formal apology. "I profoundly regret my thoughtless, tasteless, and completely inappropriate comment, and I deeply lament the pain that it has caused. I would like to apologize to Torrey Smith, his family, friends, and everyone who was distressed by what I said. I should have been offering sympathy and compassion for such a terrible and heart-breaking loss.

If you've paid attention to Internet news over the past year, you might know that the notion of a "free Internet" has been hotly debated and seen by many as under siege. Internet activists recently stopped SOPA and PIPA , two bills that would've given broad powers to government and companies to shut down copyright infringing websites. Now, a U.S. Congressman, Republican Rep. Darrell Issa , is stoking an online debate on what a potential "Digital Citizens' Bill of Rights" could look like.