How often have you wished that you had people? I've always wanted people, so that I could get my people to talk to other people's people, and make important things happen. Like film deals, and book contracts. I bet Brad Pitt has people. And I bet Stephen King has people. That's why they're successful A-list celebrities, while I still have problems getting served at the local dive bar and never even have enough time to manage my woefully overdrawn bank account. It's just not fair, I tell you. Now, though, we might all be able to have people - or at least, a virtual equivalent thereof.

Technology seems to follow a pattern. At first, when things become available for free, people wring their hands and predict the demise of an industry. Then, it turns out that making stuff available for free somehow doesn't make any difference - or if it does, then it's a positive one. Remember when it happened with music? File sharers were going to kill the music industry. Then it turned out that file sharing hadn't hit legitimate sales at all (and in some age groups, it actually boosted them). Now, it seems as if the same is happening with free courseware.

The best use of technology, like most things, is to help others. Sure, sitting on your backside for four hours playing Mass Effect 2 is edifying in some ways, but there's nothing like a bit of philanthropy to feel truly fulfilled. When the Haiti disaster struck, thousands of geeks across the US got together for code hacking workshops in an initiative called CrisisCamp. They built, on a voluntary and unpaid basis, software systems to map resources in Haiti, to help reunite families, and to aggregate news for aid workers.

You'd think that a tech-savvy IT writer would be able to master technology. But between you and I, hi-tech makes me feel stupid all the time. I once reviewed a mobile phone that had so many bells and whistles that I couldn't actually work out how to answer it. So I wasn't surprised to see a news story circulating this week suggesting that technology is making us all look just that little bit less intelligent - especially the young, who tend to use it more than us older fogeys.

How easy is it to track a person online? Perhaps you're tech savvy enough to turn off your browser's cookies, in the hope that any websites you visit won't be able to remember who you are and how often you go back to visit. But a project by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) put that in perspective. Panopticlick tells you just how unique and trackable your browser is.

How unique is your laptop? Back in the day, they all looked broadly the same .You could get any colour that you wanted, as long as it was black. Or maybe silver, or grey, if you were lucky. Personality-wise, the laptop was the equivalent of your monosyllabic cousin - you know, the one with the social anxiety problem - at a funeral.

Is that a battery in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me? Oh, your whole pocket is actually a battery? Well, maybe not yet, but clothes that function as capacitors might be on the horizon.

So, it looks as if Avatar is now set to be the highest-grossing film of all time. According to the Hollywood Reporter, it fell just $2m shy of Titanic's $1.843 billion record after this weekend, guaranteeing it place in the history books. The biggest news, of course, is that Avatar is a 3D movie.