Sneak never liked Blue Peter when he was a child - all those fresh-faced eager-beaver up-and-at-em presenters gurning at the camera enthusing kids to "give it a try" just struck him as annoying.

His hardline stance has softened over the years - time does that to a man - but he can't say he ever finds himself watching the show now, obviously.

However, he may well take time out of his oh-so-busy schedule on Saturday morning to see Apple's head design honcho Sir Jony Ive on the show.

This is because Ive is to receive a very special golden Blue Peter badge, for his efforts in designing products like the iPhone and iPad, joining a very special list of people to have received this accolade, including David Beckham, JK Rowling, The Queen and Sneak himself. Ok, not Sneak, that's a lie.

"Sir Jonathan Ive is an inspiration to children around the world and we were ecstatic to hear his comments and design advice to our viewers who will remember such feedback for a lifetime," gushed Ewan Vinnicombe, acting editor of Blue Peter.

Ive, in return, gave the team an aluminium Blue Peter badge crafted by this team - perhaps it's a new iPeter product. Or should that be iBadge?

We think Vinnicombe and the rest of the staff must really have been hoping for iPads for all, and maybe a few iPhones thrown in as well.

Zut alors! Le Sneak was shocked to zee zat thieves in ze French capital of Paris (That's enough faux French accents now - Parisian Ed) have stolen around £1m of Apple goods in a New Year's Eve heist.

The Gallic assassins used the cover of fireworks and drunken revellers to mask their thieving ways and cries of, "Quick, grab the Pomme iPads and iPhones!" (see those French lessons stuck!), to make off with some serious loot.

"They were well prepared," said the brilliantly-named Christophe Crepin from the police union UNSA, according to numerous reports.

"As the majority of police were busy watching the Champs Elysees the robbers took advantage of this opportunity."

The heist is estimated to be worth around £813,000 which given the pricing of Apple goods means they probably got three iPads, four iPhones and five new iMacs in total.

According to the French newspaper Le Parisien (no idea what that means) the thieves were able to first gain access by threatening a security guard at a back entrance.

Typical, a back-door exploit; see those closed ecosystems aren't as secure as you think.

Apple has made an unlikely ally in its push for next-generation interconnects.

According to filings uncovered by Patently Apple, the company recently inked a deal with the Harley Davidson motorcycle company gain control of the trademark for the term "lightning."

The news site reported that Apple on 24 November finalised an EU deal which gave the company control over the "Lightning" name as a trademark.

The deal is an important legal manoeuvre for Apple, as the company uses "Lightning" as the name for the new interconnect on the iPhone 5. The system is paired up with the "Thunderbolt" interconnect platform on desktops to give Apple its "Thunder" and "Lightning" connection platform for next-generation desktop and notebook systems.

While Harley fans may have lost a trademark, the biker crowd will be pleased to learn that Apple has brought the complete catalog of heavy metal icons AC/DC to the iTunes store.

This is not the first time Apple has had to cut a trademark deal with an unlikely partner. In the 1980s when the company was developing its Macintosh operating system, The Beatles and their Apple Corps recording label took notice. Eventually the two firms settled on a 1991 deal.

The two firms engaged in a back and forth, and it was not until 2010 that Apple was finally able to bring the Beatles to iTunes.

In honour of Steve Jobs Day, news site Motherboard asked a psychic to get in touch with the ghost of the Apple luminary. So while most everyone else forgot that California had an annual day of remembrance for the technology iconoclast, deputy editor Sean Yeaton was headed to The Twilight Zone.

Yeaton got a hold of New York psychic Betsy Cohen to perform the ghostly séance. Unfortunately for the living, Cohen was unable to gleam any Steve Jobs-style wisdom about the current state of affairs in the technology world.

Cohen did, however, get a chance to chat with ghost Jobs about what he's doing in the afterlife. The psychic said that ghost Jobs told her he was learning to be less competitive and harsh in the afterlife.

To quote Cohen, "[Jobs] is learning survival of the fittest is a made-up thing." In other words, kind of like psychics or a successful Zune product.

While a happy Steve Jobs ghost sounds wonderful, we'd probably say the same thing if we were pretending to communicate with famous dead people.

While Sneak thinks psychics don't actually exist (just ask ghosts) Yeaton's video was one of the more original Steve Jobs tributes to pop up in the man's honour. Not only has Jobs received a day, a statue, and a movie within the last year, but he also received a pseudo-psychic reading.

Maybe next year someone can get Jony Ive to attempt a séance. After all, Jobs once called Ive his "spiritual" partner at Apple.

Apple is the coolest brand in the world - fact. That's according to the cool dudes at CoolBrands, and they should know (the clue's in the name).

This is no doubt why five million punters handed over shed loads of cash to get their greasy paws on the new iPhone 5 when it came out on Friday, so all five million of them are now as cool as each other.

Apple has the coolest reputation in spite of some recent issues - such as its new mapping software which is actually the latest hilarious problem to get the Tumblr treatment, while riots at its manufacturing partner Foxconn are definitely not cool.

But then maps and riots are never cool at the best of times, so this probably won't have much impact on Apple's attitude to how it conducts its business - which is most decidedly cool - not answering phones, referring to themselves as geniuses and the like.

Sneak always thought he was cool. His mum told him he was. That was until he once met some bigger boys who laughed at him and called him a "dork". Kids can be so cruel.

Still, Sneak had the last laugh - he's now a prominent member of the technology world, while the mean boys are nothing but city brokers, lawyers and rock musicians. The jokes on them.

Surely it's only a matter of time before Sneak is on the CoolBrands list, right guys?

Apple's Siri virtual assistant is in many ways a breakthrough technology.

The voice-activated system has taken the concept to a new level in commercial devices, allowing users to not only dictate simple phone commands, but also run web searches and receive locational information.

Just don't ask it to identify any poisonous plants.

Siri is catching heat in the press after a major gaffe was spotted in a recent iPhone ad by a professor of botany. The ad, which ran in The Economist, featured a user asking Siri about poison oak, to which the iPhone displays an image of the plant in question.

The ad was spotted by Lena Struwe, a botany professor from Rutgers University. Struwe noticed something strange about the poison oak image Siri had displayed. Turns out it wasn't poison oak Siri displayed, but an image of poison ivy.

According to Newsday, the origin of the image used for the ad remains in question. Struwe said that the picture returned on her own iPhone is different than the one in the advertisement, and there's some doubt as to whether the picture is an actual Siri result or an enhanced image inserted into the photo by the advertising agency.

Either way, the incident is an embarrassment for Apple and will hardly inspire confidence in anyone who takes their phone hiking and comes across a strange berry bush.

At VMware's recent VMworld conference in Copenhagen, a colleague of Sneak's happened to notice that a fellow IT journalist was carrying two phone handsets; one was an iPhone, the other an old-fashioned looking Nokia.

It turns out that the iPhone is so bad for making voice calls that the guy decided to keep his Nokia for this purpose, presumably holding on to his iPhone for other stuff such as music, emails and running apps.

With all the bad publicity that Apple got over poor signal quality after the launch of the iPhone 4 last year, this set Sneak wondering if it is a widespread phenomenon.

We have all heard people complain that their iPhone has terrible reception, or it cuts out in the middle of calls, or that it has to be recharged every single day, or some other flaw.

With all this going on, how come the iPhone is still one of the bestselling handsets on the market? Is it possible that people don't generally use their iPhone to make voice calls, but instead use it as a kind of glorified iPod touch while making calls from an old Nokia, like that journalist does?

If this is the case, then it is quite ironic. The whole reason the smartphone evolved in the first place was supposedly because people were tired of lumping multiple digital devices around with them, and wanted one device capable of doing everything.

In other words, Apple hasn't built the most successful smartphone in the world. Instead, it appears to have reinvented the PDA.

The notoriously strict application gatekeepers at Apple appeared to let their guard down on Tuesday when they approved a game called Phone Story for download on the firm's ever growing App Store.

However, the dozy staff should have looked closer, as the game is a none-to-subtle dig at the way smartphone factory workers are exploited in less well-off nations.

One level of the game involves the player trying to catch workers attempting to commit suicide, a reference to the fact that several staff at Foxconn, Apple's notorious manufacturing supplier, have done just that.

Eventually the staff at Apple realised their mistake (See? People at Apple do make mistakes) and pulled the game from the store, but not before countless thousands of iPhone owners had no doubt downloaded the game to see what it was all about.

Sneak thinks the developers should now make Phone Story 2, in which a disgruntled customer has to overcome levels such as The Inept Shop Worker, The Unfathomable Contract of Doom and The Fiddly Sim Card of Death on their way to getting a new phone.