I just got back from CeBIT, which means I’m about ready to curl up and sleep for three and a half days straight — and that’s after attending just the first half of the monstrous Hannover tech show.

While sitting in the conference centre listing to keynote speeches, I was stuck by how many of the talks were stressing the benefits of the cloud, always-on-connectivity, and accessing data where ever we go. Amazon, Google, Salesforce, Adobe and more went on and on about it.

Then, I went to separate talk, held by SAP at their own conference-within-the-show (CeBIT is that big that it swallows other events whole). There, speakers were talking about linking up all aspects of a city, so traffic and air quality and energy use could all be monitored to improve systems.

The overriding idea is that we must — no, will — be connected all the time, and it will make the world a better place. I don’t have the energy to agree or disagree with that, but only want to note this: finding a wireless connection at CeBIT was a pain in the ass.

I carried my lovely little Eee PC everywhere I went, balancing it on my knees to take notes. The Press Centre had a connection, but it frequently fell over or stalled out. And while the conference centre itself had a wireless connection, the rest of the campus didn’t. If I went to go see the Future Parc or SAP’s World Tour, I struggled to get online.

Sure, the show is massive, with some two dozen aircraft hangar style halls, and sorting that out is no easy thing. But if you can’t connect up one of the world’s top tech shows, how in the hell to you propose to link up a city?

TalkTalk wants to talk to the nans of the nation.

The phone firm has launched a free new service dubbed We’ll Call You for its 250,000 customers who are older people who live alone. Basically, should those lonely older folks be desperate enough to sign up for it, TalkTalk will give them a five minute call every week just to say “hi”.

Promising TalkTalk won’t use the call to sell more services to such lonely folks, communications director Mark Schmid said:

The nature of the calls, which will last no more than five minutes, is up to the person being contacted. They can use them to discuss the news, gossip about the week’s TV or just to have a chat about whatever takes their fancy. They can also ask their TalkTalk caller to look up information for them about local services. At the very least the caller will check that everything is all right.

This is oh so very patronising — not least because “friends and family” can sign up the old people in their lives for the service, presumably without even telling them. Don’t want to call mom anymore? Just get TalkTalk to do it for you. Now that’s customer service. Take that, BT.

I hope this takes off. Really. Then we’ll have the rival telcos battling for our custom by offering to listen to our problems, making sure we’re okay, keeping us happy.

Maybe it’ll spread. Tesco will start cooking for me. iTunes will go to gigs for me. Waterstones will call me up each night to read me a bedtime story. I’ll never have to leave the house. But don’t worry, I won’t get lonely — I’ll have TalkTalk to talk to.

OMG, this is like so totally cool: Barbie has become a geek.

Okay, that first line sounds a bit sarcastic, but I genuinely think this is cool and adorable. The famous plastic doll has her 126th career — and it’s as a Computer Engineer.

She has a binary themed shirt, pink — of course — laptop, bluetooth headset and geeky looking glasses.

According to the press release, Geek Barbie was designed with help from the Society of Women Engineers to ensure her “accessories, clothing and packaging were realistic and representative of a real computer engineer.”

I’ll try not to get too distracted by the idea of an engineer’s packaging, and instead focus on the comment from Nora Lin, president of SWE.

“Girls who discover their futures through Barbie will learn that they – just like engineers – are free to explore infinite possibilities, and that their dreams can go as far as their imaginations take them… As a computer engineer, Barbie will show girls that women can design products that have an important and positive impact on people’s everyday lives, such as inventing a technology to conserve home energy or programming a newborn monitoring device.”

It’s the usual argument, that little girls need more than just princesses to inspire them. I don’t disagree, but I know if I took my three-year-old niece to the toy store, she’d still be begging for the doll with the fluffy pink dress, not the laptop.

In fact, when talking about self-esteem and inspiration, I think this particular Barbie might have more to offer adult women working in the sector. No, I’m not saying female engineers are all dying to dress in head-to-toe pink and straighten bleached hair every morning, but it’s kind of nice to encourage the idea that it’s okay to be an engineer and still be girlie, too.

Hopefully most don’t need telling to know that, but I do have a feeling that when these are released later this year, more will end up on desktops than in playrooms.

I’m Canadian and the Winter Olympics — those are the cold ones no one cares about — are currently running in Vancouver.

Thanks to the glory that is the internet, I can watch highlights and view live streams online, without having to disturb my flatmates’ viewing habits or upgrade our television package to something that actually airs sports.

But the downside is that when something incredibly cool happens and I want to share it, it’s not so easy. For example, yesterday the US women’s hockey team — and yes, that’s ice hockey — played the Chinese team. The Americans won 12-0.

Now such a blowout might sound like boring hockey, but there was one astonishing goal. Whether you get that hockey’s the best sport ever or you just think it’s crappy football on skates (idiots), Jocelyne Lamoureux’s goal is a thing of absolute beauty.

So I would love to link to it. But the BBC’s clip can’t be viewed by North Americans — the only ones I know who would care about such things.

And while I think this is the right NBC clip, I can’t check it, because it can’t be viewed by Britons.

Odds are, given the way filming happens at these events, it’s the same clip, the very same footage. How inane is this?

(As an aside, a similar thing happened with a show a Canadian friend recommended, How I Met Your Mother. She couldn’t send me DVDs to get started on it, because they’re region one, and the UK is region two. Instead, I got low quality videos ripped onto a collection USBs, which was a rather weird thing to get in the post.)

I’m not trying to get around the system or screw the content makers over. I’m just trying to watch their stuff. If they keep making it so difficult to do legally, they can hardly be surprised when pirate sites pop up… or when we all just go back to TV. At least then I can record things to VHS and mail them around as I like, right?

Google this week unveiled Buzz, it’s take on social networking — which seems to involve irritating the hell out of Gmail users by integrating updates and photos while displaying private data for the world to see.

I say “seems to involve” because I haven’t actually tried it out yet (if you want to know the thoughts of someone who has actually used it, read our reviewer’s thoughts here).

I jumped on Wave to try that, and still haven’t got a clue what I’m supposed to do with it.

Based on the gossip across websites, blogs and twitter, Buzz isn’t much better — it’s in fact intrusive, annoying and possibly a privacy concern. All of that is rather discouraging me from even bothering with Buzz.

In fact, it’s making me a bit annoyed with all social networking. Why can’t I send a message to a friend without all their friends being able to comment on it? Why can’t I post photos online and share them with just a few people, instead of everyone they’ve ever met in their lives getting to look, too? Why can’t I check my messages without getting updates on all the stupid things my contacts have done today?

Oh wait. I can. It’s called email.

Remember that, the thing Gmail used to be, (way back on Monday)? I think I’ll stick with that for now.

An anti-Google Street View group in Berlin had some fun this weekend, according to the Guardian tech blog.

Noticing that the Street View camera car was parked on a nearby street, members of Free Art & Technology (FAT) attached a GPS device to the car, so they could follow its progress as it drove around snapping pics for the Berlin edition of Street View.

What exactly that proves remains to be seen, but it did let the group follow the car around — and plot its travels on a map. To the amusement of many posting comments on the site, FAT used Google Maps to do so.

While the group seems generally anti-Google, one commenter noted: “GoogleMaps ist good, like every other map. But Streetview is only bad.”

Check out the map here. It looks like Google’s found the GPS device, as it hasn’t updated in a while.

Wikileaks is in trouble. The award-winning whistleblower site is out of cash, and needs more to keep going. It’s suspended operations since December, until donations save it.

According to a note on the site, Wikileaks’ publisher Sunshine Press has raised $130,000, but needs $200,000 just to cover costs. To pay staff, they need $600,000. It’s unclear how much of the difference has been made up over the past several weeks.

The site runs entirely by donations, as taking money from government, corporations or other organisations would hurt its “absolute integrity”.

Remember the climate change emails, the hacked Palin emails, the BNP membership list? You likely saw stories about them on the evening news and in the daily papers. None of those were down to clever investigative reporting. They were all the result of documents leaked to Wikileaks.

Remember how we all applauded the Guardian and Twitter for getting the Trafigura report made public? Wikileaks posted it well before they did. A month before.

So now that the site’s down, what are we missing? According to the note on Wikileaks:

“We have received hundreds of thousands of pages from corrupt banks, the US detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN and many others that we do not currently have the resources to release. You can change that and by doing so, change the world. Even $10 will pay to put one of these reports into another ten thousand hands and $1000, a million.”

We all applauded the UK government — and the US administration, before that — for putting their data sets online. Wikileaks is one of the few places willing to host the data they and others don’t want you to see. You can donate here.

UPDATE: And a mere day after blogging about Wikileaks’ woes, and the group has apparently found enough funding. While the site remains offline at the moment, Wikileaks tweeted this a few hours ago:

“Achieved min. funraising goal. ($200k/600k); we’re back fighting for another year, even if we have to eat rice to do it.”

Congratulations to them, but they surely need help all through the year, so see above for the link to donate.

I wasn’t lucky enough to be in San Francisco yesterday — I bet it’s sunny — for the launch of Apple’s iPad, but lots of others from the world of tech were.

A few sites have videos up… TechCrunch has a few up, including this one:

There’s also this from Engadget:

And Slashgear has this one:

Initial reaction to the much-awaited device seems to be “meh, it’s a big iPhone,” but an early review from Engadget says the device is impressively fast, as does Gizmodo, who have a video up here.

As far as over-hyped nonsense goes, it’s a tech story that’ll make you want to pack it all in and start following an industry made up of calmer, less excitable people.

Here’s how it goes: Details of the much-hyped Apple tablet have been revealed over much-hyped Twitter, by a well-known web entrepreneur (no, I’m not going to call him hyped).

It’s almost like an Onion story, except it’s true.

To save you clicking to Jason Calacanis’ feed and having to decipher his Twitter speak, here’s the story. Calacanis was given an advanced copy of the device, so he’d be all ready to talk to media as an expert about it following the launch. His non-disclosure agreement (NDA) apparently up (seems weird, that the uber-secretive Apple would screw up dates?) he’s let a few details spill out.

The device will cost $599, $699 or $799, depending on size and memory. It has two cameras — front and back, like most smartphones — as well as built in HDTV tuner and PVR.

Thumbpads on the sides offer mouse-like controls and also read fingerprints for security. You can set up five profiles to be accessed using fingerprints.

As we all already know, it’s a slick e-book reader and is apparently “really amazing” for newspapers. It uses an OLED screen and has a solar pad for recharging, which Calacanis said was a bit gimmicky and doesn’t work that quickly.

You can connect a wireless keyboard to it — though doesn’t that kill the point? — and it has an output for TVs. It runs an iPhone-flavour OS and battery life is good in “e-book reader mode” but only offers two to three hours of life using wifi or playing games.

Calacanis seemed quite happy with the chess game, and very excited that Facebook-fave Farmville would also hit the tablet. “Farmville for Apple tablet is a huge game changer,” he tweeted. Why that’s a big deal is beyond me, but then all I know about the game is that it clogs up my Facebook feed.

To sum: “Most of all that this is best gadget ever made and NOT overhyped.” So says the guy who gets free stuff from Apple… But such a gadget would be the best ever, especially at that price, so take it all with a grain of salt, so to speak.

So is it the iPad, iTab, iSlate or something else? That’s the one thing he wouldn’t disclose. So you’ll have to wait until 6pm tonight to find out either way. I’ll be live blogging the event, so head here at 6pm to get the news first… well, first after Twitter, anyway.

Have more than 150 friends on Facebook? Well, they’re all not really your friends, according to an Oxford researcher.

According to the research, we’re only really capable of managing real, meaningful connections with 150 or so people. So whether you’ve got 151 or 999 names on your list, you’ve pretty well got the same amount of “real” friends. (If you’ve got fewer than 150, you’re clearly a loser. Sorry, not my opinion, it’s science, all right?)

While my initial response was an to think “well, that’s obvious, isn’t it?”, I think the researcher is actually missing the point. I’ve got more than 150 people on Facebook, and some of them definitely aren’t really my friends. I’m aware of this; I don’t think it makes me the most popular girl in school. In fact, I’d be surprised to think that 150 really were my “real” friends.

No, the rest are people I used to know, but don’t really speak to that much, or contacts made at events or while travelling — people I’d like to keep in touch with, but without putting any actually effort in. Friends take effort; casual acquaintances, not so much. Using Facebook to keep track of these people is sort of what the site’s about, expanding your networking options without having to keep a rolodex or whatever those flippy business card holders are called.

I wonder what would happen if they studied mobile phone contacts or email address books. A quick glance through my handset’s phone book shows I have about 170 or so phone details (not counting the random numbers that get saved every time I forget to lock my keys — apparently KJDe;ueasdfj is reachable at 09238513182, if you were wondering.)

I doubt I speak to the vast majority of my 170 or so contacts; in fact, I doubt many are even still valid. I don’t even know who some of them are, to be honest, which kind of frightens me.

My email account is much the same. I simply don’t delete contacts — sure, that guy dumped me years ago, but what if I need to email his sister three years from now? Who knows.

While it might mean I need to learn to use my delete key a bit more, it doesn’t mean I think every email, phone, Twitter or Facebook contact I’ve ever added to my many lists is my best friend forever. It’s just someone I met once.