One of the most common images of this week’s hurricane is power-sharing: People huddling with their phones and laptops plugged into power strips set up in bank foyers, coffee shops, or dangled helpfully out windows. But the storm hasn’t just shaken up the East. We got a note from a listener a thousand miles from the flooding in New York and New Jersey. Katryn Conlin designs websites in Minnesota, but she and her clients were using Squarespace — a web company with its bank of computers in power-starved Lower Manhattan. Squarespace employees have kept a blog of their valiant efforts to stay online, including a bucket brigade to get diesel fuel up 17 flights of stairs to a generator.

There is nothing like a superstorm to make two cellphone competitors play nice-nice. AT&T and T-Mobile say they have temporarily jury-rigged their network in parts of the Northeast so that customers who can’t reach their normal cellphone connection can use the rival’s tower without extra charge. It is a response to the hurricane, with the FCC’s latest assessment showing more than one in four cell sites remain offline from Virginia through Massachusetts.

With the city’s mayor warning it could be days before subway trains are restored, a key question is what are other options for the 5.3 million people that use New York’s system on a typical day? Turns out, the Los Alamos National Laboratory has transportation simulation software that can help cities get the planning down to a science. And, how a shakeup at the top of Apple might affect the electronic device in your pocket. The senior executive deemed responsible for the company’s clumsy mapping software is out.  after reportedly refusing to sign a letter of apology for the maps.

In the teeth of a not-so-perfect storm savaging the East Coast, the freer the flow of digital news, the better. So concludes the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Both papers have temporarily taken down their paywalls so that anyone with an internet connection — not just subscribers with a password — can use their sites. When the power goes out, computers and internet go out, but many people can still browse news sites with their smart phones, at least until the battery goes.

When a monster storm roars out of the Caribbean as Hurricane Sandy has, lives and billions of dollars can hang in the balance. So what technology is in the pipeline to help us react quicker? And what about predicting the big storms? Weather scientists are working on new “scavenger” satellites. The satellites, which are reportedly only the size of four loaves of bread, will harvest reflections coming from the radio waves already bombarding earth from the legions of existing satellites in orbit, in order to look inside hurricanes for the first time.

This weekend marks the opening of the much anticipated sci-fi film Cloud Atlas, and a lot of people are planning on seeing it. Many have already watched a good chunk though — seven minutes worth. Not through illegal downloads, mind you, but with the help of a giant trailer released online by the film’s studio. It’s part of a growing strategy in the movie making business: use every technology possible to hype a film.

In a given day, you probably spend more hours gazing at Microsoft than you do your lover. Think about it: Microsoft controls the desktop of more than 80 percent of computers, and many of us have grown accustomed to that face. So when Microsoft proposes to radically change things, as is the case with Windows 8, it is time to pay attention.

Do you need Apple’s new iPad Mini, a shrunken version of the iPad? No you don’t need it. What you need is love, fulfillment, security and good health. So the question should be, will you want the iPad’s smaller sibling? Apple stresses that the smaller screen is still the same shape as the bigger iPad. This means apps for the regular iPad will fit fine. Plus Apple claims web pages fit better on its screens than they do on rival tablets which look a little squeezed by comparison. What the Mini iPad does squeeze is your wallet.  They want $329 for the base model. That price tag is at the tippy-top of predictions.

The fact that hackers are lurking is no surprise, but what about news that 185 million users might be vulnerable to thieves who want to steal your data? They won’t divulge which ones, but European researchers say some apps on Android smartphones leave passwords, bank accounts, credit cards, and other sensitive info vulnerable to theft. Eight percent of apps downloaded by the researchers from the official Google Play store were found to have security flaws.