A.    Apple should be a lot more worried about its latest bug than it appears to be. Scheduling the Do Not Disturb function in iOS has been broken since New Year’s Day and as with any error from Apple, it’s got plenty of press. The bug, caused by the way the underlying operating system handles the change in year, will fix itself by January 7 but the inconvenience is a sign post to something bigger. This isn’t the first time iOS has suffered from date-related bugs. In November 2010, iOS 4 got confused by the switch to Daylight-saving time, left alarms unadjusted and caused users to oversleep. Then in January 2011, iOS 5 suffered from a bug where non-repeating alarms set before the New Year failed to ring. Apple’s response then was the same as to the Do Not Disturb issue now – wait and it will fix itself. When something goes wrong with an Apple product, the company’s tone is often one of weary surprise that anyone is bothered, as if faults are just features you haven’t noticed before.

B.     Many people have felt the awful sensation of something they thought was private on a social networking site going public. Facebook’s privacy settings are pretty secret, and frequently shift without notice. When you try to set things below the absolute maximum, it becomes difficult to work what is or isn’t private. Can friends see it? Can friends of friends see it? What I may have wanted to share as a 19-year-old student I may not want to have seen as a 24-year-old user. Without extreme, painstaking attention, it’s very hard for long term users to clean their old potentially embarrassing posts; indeed, the recent flap about private messages being shown online publicly was all traceable to old but very private posts that older users couldn’t believe they had shared openly five or six years ago.

C.    The Government’s attempts to computerise the chaotic Job Centre system have taken a turn today, with the announcement that in future it will use online cookies to follow job seekers around the Internet, and make sure they are actually looking for jobs. The Job Centres will know how many searches you’ve done on the government jobs website, and if you’ve turned down any good opportunities. You can turn off the cookies, but that takes away low-skilled jobs, making it even harder for people to get out of being unemployed.

D.    Vodafone subscribers were unable to send and receive emails or access the web on Friday morning following a technical fault. The outage lasted for part of the morning with Vodafone customers taking to Twitter to complain about the problem. A BlackBerry spokesman said that the problem was with Vodafone. "All BlackBerry services are operating normally but we are aware that a wider Vodafone service issue is impacting some of our BlackBerry customers in Europe, Middle East and Africa. We are supporting Vodafone’s efforts to resolve the issue as soon as possible.” Vodafone said the outage was caused by a router error and that services were being restored.

E.     Apple could launch a cheaper version of the iPhone later this year, according to reports. A cheaper iPhone has been rumoured for years but, according to reports, Apple could launch the device later this year. The cheaper handset could be similar to the current model but with a cheaper, less expensive body, the Wall Street Journal reports. Apple is considering an iPhone with a polycarbonate plastic case, which would be cheaper to make than the glass iPhone 4 and 4S or the aluminium iPhone 5. The paper says Apple might still decide not to launch the device but that a cheaper iPhone is needed to help the company compete with cheap smartphones running Google’s Android operating system.

F.     The world’s biggest technology companies come to Las Vegas every year hoping the products they launch will become international hits. The Japanese giants that used to dominate the industry are now rarely jackpot winners at the international Consumer Electronics Show. In an industry increasingly dominated by Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft – Sony, Sharp and Panasonic have all unveiled more misses than hits. As a consequence they are between them battling losses that will top £12bn this financial year alone. Sony hopes that its waterproof, and class-leading, mobile phone will help it turn the corner. Sharp, if it survives its admitted "material doubt” that it can service its debts, thinks big TV screens are the way forward.

G.    In the land of the coffee maker, the pod is the king. Led by Nespresso and George Clooney, millions of pounds is being spent on machines that meld the convenience of quality coffee in pods with our unending love of coffee. Yet Starbucks, the chain that support that fascination, has not had a machine of its own. Until now. The Verismo 580 is a £149 machine, putting it squarely in the mid-range. Cheaper models are available, but the build quality needed to maintain the required pressure for decent coffee means this is the sort of price where good quality becomes an expectation. Indeed, with some of the excellent Nespresso machines from companies such as Magimix available for less, the Verismo ought to be fantastic. Sadly, it’s not. On the plus side, it heats up water in just 15 seconds, and is quickly ready to use.

Peter the Great

Born in Moscow, Russia on June 9, 1672, Peter the Great was a Russian czar in the late 17th

Stop talking rubbish about 3D printing

Pick up any technology magazine, and you’ll find sentimental articles about how the world is going to be completely transformed by 3D printing – everyone from Wired to the Economist has speculated on changes to society that 3D printing will bring. The ability to turn objects into data – to copy physical things – has led many people to predict an attack of 3D piracy. It has been written a lot about the criminal possibilities connected with the machines. Yesterday, the founder of Makerbot came out to say his product will "fuel the next industrial revolution”.

Having talked to a bunch of manufacturing engineers, I’m not so sure. All the enthusiasm for the "revolution” seems to come from journalist observers of the 3D printing scene, the companies offering the "revolutionary technology”, and a handful of Lefty academics thrilled by the idea of abolishing property. People actually involved in manufacturing are not so sure that it’s magic. Let’s take a British example.

There was a huge internet furore a few months back when Games Workshop, a British toy soldier manufacturer, felt it had been the world’s first victim of digital piracy, and issued a takedown notice on a 3D printing pattern for a vehicle similar to one from its Warhammer 40,000 game. A huge wave of copying, a minefield of intellectual property issues, was predicted.

In actual fact, very little of that has happened.

Patterns for model soldiers exist on file-sharing sites like the Pirate Bay. However, the economics just don’t support pirating on that scale. Unlike, say, pirating music, where the act of listening is free, printing out models costs money. A box of model soldiers goes for about £20 online, about £25 in the shops – but the plastic to print them out at home currently costs around £35, and the most common printer – the Makerbot – costs about £2,000. So an epidemic of piracy seems unlikely. Printing is also a fairly exacting process – it takes time, effort, and often you get a pile of goo at the bottom of your machine rather than the thing you wanted. Widespread physical copying won’t happen, in the same way that photocopiers didn’t lead to an epidemic of photocopying books.

The technology just isn’t there yet – even successful prints create models that look like they’ve been left on a radiator for a few hours. And if it’s not good enough for model soldiers, it’s certainly not good enough for things with complex moving parts. One engineer told me: "You have to appreciate how expensive and how specialised most factory tooling is. You can run a 3D Printer for six months and never make the same item twice.”

He thought it would be 10 to 15 years before printers able to create factory-quality products would appear, and those ones able to do in metal would probably never make it into the home. He did, however, confidently predict being able to print out parts for his BMW on the factory level ones in a few years’ time, but pointed out that those machines weren’t going to drop below a million pounds a piece any time soon, and that even if they did, the materials to make the parts at the right tolerance for a car were incredibly expensive to buy.

None of the current methods of home 3D printing – the thermal fusing of plastic filaments, using UV light to cut polymer resin, depositing glue to bind resin powder, cutting and laminating paper, or even using a laser beam to fuse metal particles – are even close to reaching the standards a machine would require. It’s all very well to upload weapon parts to the internet, but without the means to do metal you’ve printed yourself a cool accessory for your Halloween gangster costume – and if you’re stupid enough to press the trigger, it’s more likely to take your arm off than actually fire a bullet.

It strikes me that 3D printing is the microwave of manufacturing. If you look back at newspapers from the 1970s, people predicted that microwaves would be the only device in a kitchen, and that every dish would be microwaved. That never came to pass. Like microwaves, 3D printing will be important, but this isn’t the industrial revolution that techno-libertarians would have you believe.

A 7          It seems 3D printing has been spoken and argued a lot about in the press.

                1) True                    2) False                       3) Not stated

A 8          According to the founder of Makerbot 3D printing will make copying physical things possible.       

                1) True                    2) False                       3) Not stated

A 9          The revolutionary technology of the 3D printing will take place in the 21^st century.

                1) True                    2) False                       3) Not stated

A 10        3D printing will definitely encourage pirating objects.

                1) True                    2) False                       3) Not stated

A 11       The quality of 3D copied objects is rather doubtful.

               1) True                     2) False                       3) Not stated

A 12       It will take a quarter of a century to make 3D printing successful.

               1) True                     2) False                       3) Not stated

A 13       3D printing is technologically so difficult that it will never come home.

               1) True                     2) False                       3) Not stated

A 14       3D is comparable to microwaving in its history and development.

               1) True                     2) False                       3) Not stated