... renting DVDs

Confession time. I still rent DVDs. I like the reliability of the closed format. Sound doesn't suddenly leave the building halfway through the performance, 'For your consideration' doesn't pop up every five minutes to break the flow, audio tends to stay reliably in-sync with the actors lips, subtitles work every time and artifacting and sudden stops aren't part of the experience. Essentially, I know where I am; my expectations of watching a film uninterrupted are met with DVD and I feel it's worth the £2.50 I pay at my local video shop where a cat wanders round your legs as you browse the racks. However, you may have noticed it's 2012. Things have changed. Sometimes films find you.

A friend of mine (we shall call him Tim) had a copy of Drive, palmed to him on a memory stick that his mate had shoplifted from the internets. Upon telling 'Tim' how much I was dying to watch it, he told me what a good copy it was and, Here you go, take it, it's yours. Long story short, I took it, watched it and was blown away by it. Ryan. Gosling. For the pleasure it cost me nothing. However I was left feeling not the 100% fulfilled I should have been. 89% to be exact. How had I lost that crucial 11%? I had a pretty good idea how. So for my sins, I came up with a solution to a problem which I imagine probably only exists in my wretched little conscience: pay back the £2.50 I would have spent at my friendly local video shop.

Here's my guide to paying it forward:

Go to Poundland and buy some of those tiny little brown wage packet envelopes. As we've already established, it's 2012. You'll be as surprised as I was that they're still making them.

Write a brief anonymous confession on the front of the envelope. Don't tell them your name. As grey as this area already is, you have after all watched a film 'illegally'.

Under the cover of dawn, take the wage packet to the video shop. I'd avoid the cover of night, it makes the whole operation a bit creepy.

Pop the happy package through their letterbox. Don't run away or it could attract the unwanted attention of early risers such as paper boys/girls, milkmen/women, dog walkers, bakers and pensioners.

I realise £2.50 stuffed in a brown envelope won't prevent the diminishing returns on hard formats such as DVD and BluRay but for me at least - in my own selfish little way - I've strived to put right what once went wrong and hope that my next leap, will be the leap home. Take it away Al! [Cue Quantum Leap theme tune].

...channeling negative energy using typography and breathing exercises

...a flow chart to identify if you're British

Trying to understand our national identity outside of closing our eyes and picturing red post boxes and the BBC logo is something the British do, I say, on a regular basis - daily, around 11 o'clock, with a slice of Victoria sponge cake and a cup of tea. But what exactly defines one's nationality? Is it tradition? The food we eat? The customs which we inherit? Three colours on a piece of cloth billowing in a spring breeze? If you're having a national identity crisis, just follow the simple flowchart below.

...asking Siri the whereabouts of my nearest Homeless Hotspot

In this late curve of human evolution, we've harnessed technology to provide a way of dealing with most tricky or problematic situations. I have this orange; how on earth am I going to automatically get the sweet juice out? With TECHNOLOGY. I have the latest feature film hidden away on a cigar box size cassette; how am i going to watch it tonight? With TECHNOLOGY. My heart has just failed; how will somebody pull my lifeless body away from my exquisite subconscious dying thoughts? With TECHNOLOGY.

Anyone unfortunate enough to lose their keys back in the 80s can testify technology is great. If you needed to pop out in the Sierra to buy a packet of Raisin Splits and a can of Tab Clear, but couldn't remember where you put the damn keys, the wife could literally tell you to whistle for them - the attached keyring would then respond by playing a tune to alert you of their whereabouts. Technology, you see, provided a handy way to always return keys back to their rightful owner, like a trusty metallic homing pigeon. And when I say trusty, I mean drunk. Because the homing pigeon didn't always return. A caveat of the technology was that you had to 'just put your lips together and blow' in the *correct key*. A trip to the shops would often start with what sounded like a sloppy budgie execution. Expectant Labradors would leap from baskets as the misconstrued sounds from their owners suddenly imbued new meaning. No longer did a whistle signify 'come on Nettles, walkies!' but instead 'I'm slowly surrendering my brain to a fob that hates me'. If you couldn't whistle in tune, FUCK YOU! Now of course, keys are being replaced with cards, retina scans, gestures and voice control. Voice control! Now there's an excellent idea. Despite its foibles I miss the subservient whistling-for-keys of yesteryear, we need something like that for the teenies. Who can we, the humble masses, rely upon for envelope-pushing technology that makes life so easy we leave common sense at the door with our keys?

Apple's latest UK TV advert for Siri, iPhone 4s' terrifying voice butler, is an incredible piece of work for an incredible piece of technology which makes human beings look incredibly dull. Having played with Siri, I'm suitably impressed with the panoply of technology involved and my mind, should I allow it to wander into such incendiary territory as wondering how it works, gets blown to bits. But the way in which it's being advertised is both hilarious and creepy in equal measures. In the latest UK television  advert we see a nice lady talking to her iPhone, asking Siri - our middleman - if her mum has emailed her that recipe. Is not everybody shouting at the telly 'check your email?!'

Or in another scene a friendly chap sitting lonely at a football match asks Siri Is my brother here yet? 

Again, look left and right. Is your brother there? No. Maybe call him? You are holding a phone, not the portable backup drive of Hal-9000. I understand that Apple have a technology and lifestyle proposition to sell in 30 seconds flat but according to California's favourite technology giant, it appears that human beings have, in a lax moment of common sense, let the once friendly blob of technology into our building, shake hands and then absorb common sense itself. Like the Body Snatchers just got real. It's maybe no coincidence the software to which we ask these daft questions is, basically, called 'Sir I', a nod to how subservient our smartphones are making us.

Another wonderful piece of life-affirming technology usage appeared in a news item from Wired whereby a homeless person can - for a suggested donation of $2 - be used as a Wi-Fi hotspot at 2012's SXSW. Like The Day Today never existed, It's actually not a joke at all but a way in which to utilise people as assets rather than human beings. Apparently, anyone who's having trouble with their bandwidth can use their £400 smart phone to hook up to a hobo (sorry, if we're reducing people to objects then I may as well just call them by a nasty, derogative term - nobody cares!) and, in exchange for money and precious human interaction, check yourself in at the local tramp (again, tramp, who cares!). Just like the fantastically successful Big Society campaign which David Cameron trumpeted from his featureless visage a couple of years back, it will be a great success. Except the Big Society idea was a load of rightwing bunkum used to slice benefits from people more needy than the restofus, and was very much as far from a success as you could get without losing the gravitational pull of the original idea. So herein lies the problem. Very few people, except those wiring up the homeless, will benefit from the whole peculiar exercise. I find it hard to imagine anything other than a few people milling around in khaki carrot top trousers sending tweets after a few dollars and cents have exchanged hands. I can see how the idea came about, that somehow technology would be able to free those living in poverty from their situation, but its enrobed in a misguided idealistic fog of love for technology that's skewed the idea of helping people.

I'm not saying we shouldn't help those in more need than ourselves, or, heaven forbid, stop buying iPhones. I'm just saying it's important we don't make technology into some sort of panacea for not only every problem we face - such as socioeconomic ills - but also problems that don't even exist; like trying to locate a member of your family instead of just having patience. Like Kip in Napoleon Dynamite, I love technology. But it can only solve some of the problems some of the time, and the sooner we accept this the better.

I asked Siri if he thought people were stupid and he answered 'I respect you'. If the technology we create has an inbuilt self-respect mechanism which reflects our opinions of ourselves - that we're actually not a bunch of nugatory idiots - then there's hope for us all yet.

Read about the iffy origins of the Homeless Hotspot project here.

A massive thank you to Judge Nutmeg on TheAnswerBank who located the Apple Siri advert on YouTube. Damn I wasted a long time trying to dig that out.

...Instagram

...a slice of cake

...a calling card to appease a designer's needs and/or insecurities