My wife, Cida, is in Brazil visiting her family but due to some great Apple technology we've been in touch every day almost like she wasn't actually 4300 miles away. Now, before the Android fans jump all over me, this isn't the only way to do things. It just happens to be the way we're doing it.

The last time she went to Brazil without me things weren't nearly this good. I was reduced to guessing where she was, calling her sister's house, and hoping that whoever answered the phone could understand me well enough to go find her (my Portuguese is awful and most of my wife's family's English is non-existent.)

Fast forward to this trip and Cida's iPhone 4S. I was able to unlock the phone through AT&T so she could buy a local SIM card in Brazil rather than paying exorbitant roaming rates. When she first got to Brazil, though, she just popped the SIM out and got on the airport's WiFi. She called me with FaceTime, which worked remarkably well, especially for free. No international phone calls at ridiculous rates. And we got to see each other.

If the Internet connection isn't great FaceTime still usually works but sometimes the audio and video get a little choppy. If it gets really bad then the video drops out. Sometimes we will intentionally pause the video just to get better audio.

One interesting thing we have noticed - there's virtually no delay with FaceTime. Cida calls Brazil using various VoIP systems for inexpensive phone calls but there is often a delay or bad audio which makes the conversation flow difficult. We had very little of that with FaceTime.

We also did a quick experiment with the fairly new Facebook "free call" feature in Messenger. Interestingly, Cida didn't have the free call button but I did and was able to call her. The phone call had no video but it was crystal clear with no delay.

We have also been able to text each other via iMessage over the Internet, also for free. I set her up to iMessage from her email address rather than her phone number since that number would be changing when she bought a Brazilian SIM card. Texting internationally is usually quite expensive and I don't even know how well it works. But via iMessage over the Internet it works great and lets us keep in touch extremely well.

Another interesting Apple technology is Find My Friends. Usually when I look up my wife she's at the mall, but it also worked when she was online in Brazil (and yes, I did spot her at the mall down there, too!) Find My Friends works via GPS location and Internet and has been helpful for me to see what she's up to. And not in a freaky stalker kind of way - she knows I'm watching.

Finally, we've been having fun with Photo Stream. Cida left her iPad here but it's connected up to the same iCloud account as her iPhone. So when she takes pictures in Brazil they get uploaded to her iPad automatically the next time she's on WiFi. I check the iPad a couple times a day to keep up with her trip.

So technology has been a huge help with this trip. Between iMessage, FaceTime, Photo Stream and Find My Friends it's almost like I'm there. Except that it's 90° there and another major snowstorm bearing down on us here. I think next time I'm going to Brazil with her!

Specifically, Lotus Notes and MXLogic

No one likes junk email, commonly known as spam, but it's a huge part of what gets delivered to mail servers every day. Estimates peg spam at 80-95% of all messages. Effectively dealing with that mess is important to make sure you don't miss important messages or get deluged with bad ones.

Until recently Postini was at the top of the heap for mail protection. Google bought Postini in 2007 and didn't do anything more with it other than integrating it into Google Apps, mostly behind the scenes. Managing Postini was something of a nightmare, but the end results were pretty good. However, now that Google is shutting down Postini for good most users have been moving to MXLogic, owned by McAfee. So that's what I'm going to discuss today.

First, mail protection is very complicated in the back end. How do they know what is good mail and what is bad? It's not an exact science, that's for sure, and there is a lot of tuning that can be done as every company and every individual has different needs. A couple of methods that scrape off the worst of the obvious spam are DNS real-time block lists (RBLs) and Delaying. Spamhaus is one of the best known lists. The IP address of incoming mail is checked against the live list of known spammers maintained at Spamhaus. If the IP address is on that list the email is denied and you'll never even know about it. Another obvious group of messages to deny are those coming from dynamic IP addresses, often someone's home computer that has been infected with a virus. Delaying is quite effective too - a new mail server is refused the first time it connects. Legitimate servers will come back a few minutes later while spammers will just move on.

Other methods of detecting spam include lists of key phrases and words that trigger either rejection or quarantining. Again, definitely NOT an exact science here, which is why a good message sometimes gets flagged as spam. Configuring and tweaking the mail protection gateway can take days or weeks to get it tuned just right for each individual company and user. There are 10 main tabs with many sub-tabs on the default inbound policy so you can see there are a lot of adjustments that can be made.

By the time email gets delivered to your server it SHOULD be legitimate mail, but how should you deal with messages you don't want? Those fall into three categories - obvious spam that slipped through, semi-legitimate marketing messages and lists that you don't want to be on any more. For spam that slipped through, just delete it. Don't write back to the person or block the address - if someone's email account got spoofed or someone has a virus chances are you'll never get email from that person again. If you added every one of those emails to your junk mail rule you'll end up with a huge list of addresses that are never going to email you again anyway. If you have a huge list already my suggestion is to delete it. Also, never block an entire domain. If you got a spam message from a hotmail.com account and block the domain then you'll never get email from anyone at Hotmail again - not a good idea. To clean out this list in Lotus Notes go to your Junk folder and click the Manage Junk Mail Senders List.

The other two categories, marketing messages and lists, should normally just be unsubscribed. While you do need to be careful about what links you're clicking on, if you get a message from an old vendor or from a list you subscribed to long ago, chances are it's ok to just go ahead and click on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email. That's the first thing I look for when I get a marketing message. It's much better to just stop the messages like that at the source rather than dumping them into your junk mail folder every time. If you unsubscribe but continue to get emailed then sure, go ahead and block it, but give them a chance to unsubscribe you first.

Finally, some messages will be quarantined. You'll get an email every day that you get new quarantined messages. From that email are links to view the suspect messages, release, always allow, or deny. Chances are you don't need to do anything with quarantined messages but if you do the choices are obvious. If a message you're waiting for never shows up it might have gotten caught in your quarantine. All you have to do is go to your Control Console to check the quarantine, although most users will never have to do this. If you have not logged in there before or if you forgot your password just click the link at the bottom of the sign in box to set up a new password.

So, while mail protection is very complicated behind the scenes, with good protection you shouldn't have much to worry about. Enjoy your spam-free Inbox!

I've had many iOS devices over the years, most jailbroken. Most with flaky Home buttons at some point too. There are a number of reasons for Home button problems. I definitely confirmed that a jailbreak or jailbreak app messed me up at one point. Blowing out the button and charging port has also helped.

There are a lot of articles about "recalibrating" the home button by going into a stock app, holding the power switch until "slide to power off" shows up, then holding down the Home button until the app closes. I thought it sorta kinda seemed to work but it turns out that is apparently a myth as well - it does nothing.

There are some workarounds for flaky Home buttons. On my iPad I usually use the 4/5-finger pinch to close apps anyway. You can do the same thing with a couple different apps for jailbroken iPhones too. Finally, there is also the Accessibility option that puts a virtual home button on your screen.

My jailbroken iPad 2 Home button recently died fairly abruptly. I'm pretty sure it worked a few days ago, then it went to about working about 1% of the time. Pretty frustrating until I found an actual solution that definitely works. Apparently this was a hardware failure, probably the contacts got misaligned somehow. The easy fix was to jam the charging cable into the iPad and push on it pretty hard while tapping the Home button. Voila, the Home button is back to working normally again. I'm not sure how everything is connected in there but apparently I was able to realign the contacts again.

Got an old Apple product you would like to get some quick cash for so you can upgrade? The new iPhone and possibly iPad are going to be announced soon. eBay is probably the best way to get the most money, but if you're looking for easy look no further than Apple itself: http://store.apple.com/us/browse/reuse_and_recycle.

I'm not one of those techie geeks who thinks that everyone should be using only Firefox. I do think it is more secure than Internet Explorer but to each his own - I have had clients get viruses through each of the major browsers and don't really have significantly different experiences with clients who use Firefox. When Internet Explorer breaks, though, I usually switch over to Firefox, which is why I started using it years ago. What has kept me on it is AdblockPlus, a free addon that, well, blocks ads. And annoying flashing graphics stuff.

So it was with sadness that I almost had to abandon Firefox a while back. Downloads were randomly coming down corrupted, which was annoying. Eventually an update somewhere seems to have fixed that but then Firefox started slowing to a crawl and became difficult to use. I recently changed my email system over to Google Apps from Lotus Notes (that will be the subject of another blog post) and have been using Chrome extensively for that, but I wanted to keep Firefox alive too. Enter SpeedyFox, a free download from CrystalIdea. Firefox profiles are stored in a SQLITE database that becomes fragmented over time. A quick run of SpeedyFox cleans that up and now Firefox seems as good as new. Whew...