Whether you opt for the nerdy designation of SPAM, prefer politically correct euphemisms such as unwanted messages, favor Apple's designation of junk mails or even, as we crazy Frenchmen do, nickname them pourriels, you have most certainly had the joy of dealing with unwanted pieces of data mudding the stream of information you swim in online. It used to be...

When in France, do as Orange does. For the past few weeks, iPhone 3G users in France have suffered intermittent voicemail glitches, often in the form of erroneous outgoing messages. As time goes on, it appears the light at the end of the tunnel is, as my computer would have said a few years ago, the headlamp of a fast...

No matter how much I fantasize myself a man of the world, the embodiment of culture, the essence of charm and knowledge, my friends and family remind me on a daily basis that I am, also and above all, the group's resident technical guy. That means that between my moments of memorable brilliance and subtlety I answer questions about email...

Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are commonly believed to make computers accessible by presenting virtual concepts through visual and spacial metaphors. For every action you wish to undertake in such interfaces, there is a corresponding physical object you can interact with: a button, a slider, a window. Our files and folders are neatly arranged on our desktop or stacked in our...

The future of Apple TV is the subject of much debate and controversy around the Internet. Yet, it seems to be a relatively simple, straightforward question. While Apple calls Apple TV a “hobby product,” this is clearly not an accurate description. No company in their right mind would ever invest the kind of money, time and energy that Apple has...

Of all the technological advances of the past decade, the concept and implementation of DRM is the one that irks me most. As you know, DRM or, to give it its full name, Digital Rights Management, is collectively used to refer to a pot-pourri of technologies whose primary aim is to ensure that the intellectual property of content creators is...

A few months back, my little team and myself were fortunate enough to assist a well-known software company release the latest version of their Mac OS X application. Among the improvements we recommended, and helped implement, was Sparkle-based updating. One of our testing points at the time was to ensure one could not reasonably trick the application, through Sparkle, into...

Now that the iPhone 3G is old news, and that developers are comfortably settling into their new development digs, the time seems ripe to investigate new ways the iPhone and the Mac — or the PC — could interact together. I have previously discussed the disappointing docking system, that seems to provide nothing to iPhone users, apart from the purely...

Now that the iPhone 2.0 firmware has been released, even if unofficially as I write these lines, iPhone 1.0 users have gained the ability to securely erase their devices, through the enhanced "reset" menu item. Since the iPhone tends to store so much in unencrypted form on its internal memory, including some information we may not want revealed, such as...

After spending an entire day installing Windows updates on a friend's computer, I decided to have a bit of good geeky fun by trying out Avast anti-virus for Mac OS X. Whether Mac OS X users need anti-virus at the moment is still up in the air, but regardless of the reality of the situation, knowing our options cannot hurt....