stuart test blog

PC World NZ has the details (via Public Address | Hard News) on the pricing for individual DRM-free tracks from Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Turns out NZ’ers will be paying $2.49 per track, which is a 39% premium over the DRM-crippled tracks that currently sell for $1.79. This is also 9% more than US and European customers will pay, and 14% more than UK residents will be paying. The strong NZ dollar has obviously been forgotten about in this pricing so I threw together some stats…

The following spreadsheet (original from Google Spreadsheets) shows the pricing for DRM and DRM-free tracks in USA, Canada, UK, Europe, and NZ with all prices converted to USD on the current exchange rates:

Luckily we don’t live in the UK who pay the most for both crippled and DRM-free tracks, but we have jumped ahead of Europe into second place for paying the most for DRM-free tracks. No mention of the pricing for full albums so hopefully Apple haven’t changed their mind about providing EMI DRM-free albums at the same price as current, crippled albums.

Does anybody else find it strange that legally purchased music that isn’t crippled, is something that we have to pay extra for..?

Update: An Australian Economics Professor has created an iTunes Index, which is based on the principals of the Big Mac Index. He’s updated it to include NZ, and it would be interesting if he updated it to include the DRM-free tracks too.

Not sure if anyone’s interested, but drop me a line if you want a Joost invite. I haven’t been too impressed with the service so far. They have regionalised the content (which really annoys me,) the quality of the video isn’t that great, and it chews up a lot of bandwidth too.

MiramarMike started work on getting Trademe’s member listings as an RSS feed in Yahoo! Pipes after Rowan’s post about Trademe and APIs. He laid down the challenge to improve on the solution, so I managed to get some more information into the description field of the feed. Here’s the RSS feed for Movieshack’s current listings.

I had to use the tricky Regex module to get the additional info, but unfortunately, when you run the Pipe in Yahoo’s interface it strips out the HTML used for the line breaks and to display the links and images. Hopefully someone else can build on this now.

Rowan Simpson from Trademe continues the discussion about why Trademe doesn’t have an API. As I mentioned in his original post, I personally don’t have a need for an API but what I would love to see is RSS feeds throughout the site.

Trademe already uses an RSS feed for the latest Trademe site announcements. They also recently created a feed that allows you to track a single seller’s listings, but this isn’t promoted anywhere on the site, it’s just available through the Trademe gadget.

I just received an email alert from Telstra Clear saying that I have gone over my 20GB traffic limit for the month. Seeing that we’re only ten days into the month it seemed strange, so I jumped on to the Telstra Usage charts (which I check fairly regularly.)

The screenshots below show my usage for the month – the reason why it looks like I only have usage on the one day is that the previous days’ usage doesn’t show up on this scale. And yes, that’s 2 million megabytes listed for today or, 2 terrabytes. The raw data you can download from Telstra shows that up until two hours ago, my usage was just average, but in the last two hours I’ve downloaded about 2 terrabytes of data! That’s impressive…

(By the way… it’s obviously a mistake. I’m on the phone to them now.)

I’ve got a bit of blogging to catch up on, but I couldn’t resist posting this funny story…

Social news site, Digg, recently deleted some news stories that were posted containing the encryption key required to unencrypt HD-DVDs. They also apparently (I can’t confirm this) banned the users that posted these stories. Unfortunately for Digg, the loyal Digg readers banded together and if you have a look at the front page of Digg (screenshot below) right now you’ll see the result of their rebellion.

One of the Digg founders has tried to explain their side of the story, but many Digg readers have pointed out that Digg’s podcast, Diggnation has HD-DVD as one of the sponsors. It’s interesting how quickly Digg’s loyal subscribers can turn on the site so quickly.

Via: Juha

Update: Kevin Rose, just posted an interesting response to the madness…

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Update 2: Digg.com is now down, I wonder if it’s to show the Digg readers that they need the site more than the site needs them?

I’ve been quietly working on the Blogtown NZ site for the last few months, and it seems to be shaping up nicely. It’s a free, hosted, blogging service for Kiwis and everyone else living in NZ. It’s based on WordPress MU which is the multi-user version of WordPress, the famous blogging software.

If you don’t have a blog yet, feel free to create one for yourself. It only takes a minute to sign up and doesn’t cost anything. Your blog address will be something like “mycoolblog.blogtown.co.nz”

Read more here: http://blogtown.co.nz and sign up here: http://blogtown.co.nz/wp-signup.php

Google recently released an update to their Image search pages. I hate it!! You now have to roll-over each image to see the dimensions and the domain name. Matt Cutts blogged about this recently and most of the comments he received were very negative towards the redesign.

I’ll admit that the interface now looks cleaner – but that’s only because they have hidden the useful information. Please fix this soon…

I meant to blog about this last year when I discovered it, but this appears to be the little-known Holy Grail of syncing applications. SyncMyCal is an Outlook plugin that synchronises your Google Calendar with your Outlook calendar – and both ways too!

If you search for “Google Calendar sync” you’ll find lots of people searching for the perfect tool to get two-way syncing happening between Google Calendar and Outlook. SyncMyCal comes in two versions, both versions provide full, two-way syncing, but the limitation on the free version is that you can only sync a range of 7 days of items, whereas the full version ($25) allows unlimited syncing.

This definitely works, although I have only used the free version so far. I was reminded of the tool after reading Jon Udell’s blog where he outlines the difficulty in getting multiple calendars synced.

Link to SyncMyCal – Share Outlook Calendar Free, Google Calendar Sync

Looks like Yahoo! have once angered the Flickr users by using photos on one of their new websites which violates the license agreements of those photos. Yahoo!’s new wii.yahoo.com site shows the latest Flickr photos tagged with “Wii” on the home page. This led to an angry discussion in the forums about how Yahoo! are stealing photos against their own terms and conditions. The result of the discussion was that a number of users tagged all their photos with “Wii” and some other posted photos like the “Yahoo is Poo!” image below, and this image of an angry user showing the bird: http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035785985@N01/368161449

Originally uploaded by ellectric.