As Kodak gently slips out of view, reader Rob Kaye sends a screenshot from his daughter’s Kodak printer installation. Before she installs her ESP 5250 drivers the software advises her to print the instructions.

We’ve sometimes covered “Reply all” email errors in the past on the understanding that any organisation that lets them get out of hand must be laughably incompetent. We are reassessing this point of view after email slowed to a crawl in the German parliament last week, perhaps the least laughably incompetent location on the planet. 

Someone called “Babette” accidentally mailed 4,000 fellow staff to ask “Please bring me a copy of the new directory”. Hundreds took the opportunity to post replies to everyone to complain, ask 4,000 people where all the complaints were coming from, or just make silly jokes. 

One staffer posted that the mess was so much fun that they should do it every month – handily rescuing the German parliament’s reputation for efficiency by suggesting that, in future, it schedules its chaos.

Those of you with an interest in politics and 50 minutes of spare time might want to investigate the latest largely pointless use of technology. 

“President Obama sat down for a discussion with a group of Americans from across the country in a Google+ Hangout,” says the White House blog. “It was the first online conversation to happen at the White House in real time – ever.” 

As democracy in action, it proved to be a complicated way to ask the president exactly the questions that he’s asked every time someone asks him questions. On the other hand, historians will mark this as an important moment in politics: the first step towards the inevitable election of President Google in 2020.

Bangalore’s bus drivers are cracking down on a mini crime wave. The perpetrators: overexcited software engineers. Banaglorean buses have been equipped with touch-screen computers, connected to the internet, in an attempt to encourage local techies to take the bus to work. 

Some of those techies have been so impressed with the devices that they have filched them from the buses. Bus drivers have been warned to be vigilant, and last week caught programmer and first time thief Sagar Reddy, 32, with a screen in his bag that he just couldn’t resist. 

“It is also the responsibility of commuters to bring such incidences to our notice," said bus company cop B H Amaresh, who has the delightful title of chief vigilance officer.

Kim Dotcom, the 21-stone founder of Megaupload, is currently on remand in New Zealand, waiting to see if he will be extradited to the US to face charges of internet piracy and money laundering. But, unlike most geeks, he has no trouble at all getting the attention of the opposite sex – even in prison. 

Last week he told the court that he has had a deluge of letters from women who want to be his romantic pen pal. He’s on remand as a flight risk – but, as his lawyer points out, it would be hard for a 6ft 4in Finnish-German man-mountain to escape New Zealand unnoticed, even if one of his female fans sneaked him out of jail in a very large handbag.