The Australian iTunes store is now open – songs seem to be AUD$1.69 each.

One day only – get DivX Create for free.

So, Apple still can’t get my iPod to synch my contacts and calendar even after an upgrade to iTunes they now seem to be charging me a premium for living in Australia.

If I wish to purchase QuickTime Pro in the US it will cost me USD $29.99. That translates to AUD$39.37 at toda Discus Care Made Easy y’s exchange rate. So why, given it’s a download and there’s no shipping or media involved, is the Australian apple site charging me AUD $44.95 for the same product?

Before the Appleites (you like, it’s yours to use too) get up in arms, yes, Microsoft do the same thing, as do Macromedia, Adobe and probably most major software houses but it happens that I want an Apple product now and they want to charge me more for it because I’m not in the United States and right now that’s really annoying me.

Discus Care Made Easy

By now everyone on the planet should be using Firefox in place of Internet Explorere but if you’re too cool even for Firefox then it’s good news, Opera has just announced they are making their browser free.

Try ‘the third browser’ now – Opera Web Browser Free Download

E=mc² turns 100 this year, and PBS has some great info on it. (Thanks Patrick)

Ren on what happens when somebody buys an iPod but has no idea how it works — Yep, one of my music nut friends who doesn’t have a computer keeps asking me about them.

Tim Berners-Lee on where the web is going.

Jakob Nielsen on designing web sites for international use — Previous rants on this topic: MSN Weather (F vs C); Web site globalisation (date and address formats)

CNet on ten sorely missed technologies — I knew a couple of guys who had Newtons… I wonder what came of them?

The Google Blog has just announced you can now subscribe to Google News feeds via RSS. They provide their standard categories or you can set up a search on any news topic, eg ‘Vancouver Canucks‘. You can choose your feed format too, RSS or Atom.

Okay, this is a long shot but if Robert Scoble is listening is there anyway you could post the audio of your videos as podcasts? I don’t have time to sit and watch a video at my PC for half an hour but I’d love to listen to it in my car on the way to work, especially the OneNote guys interview.

Google Map’s satellite pictures are now available for Australia, you can see my place on this page. Judging by empty blocks that are now houses the pictures were taken in the past six months or so.

Yesterday after a browser crash I suddenly lost the ability to cut and paste anything to, from and within Firefox. A little hunting told me my initialisation file, user.js, must have been corrupted and that it was – so corrupted it had disappeared completely.

The solution to not being able to cut, copy or paste in Firefox is thankfully simple. If you have a user.js file simply paste the following in to it :

user_pref(“capability.policy.policynames”, “allowclipboard”);
user_pref(“capability.policy.allowclipboard.Clipboard.cutcopy”,
“allAccess”);
user_pref(“capability.policy.allowclipboard.Clipboard.paste”, “allAccess”);

If you don’t have, or can’t find, your user.js file download the ChromEdit extension from http://cdn.mozdev.org/chromedit/, select the user.js tab and paste the above in to the box.

Of course, if you’ve found this page via Google you probably have the problem and can’t cut and paste from here so you may need the IE View (view this page in IE) extension.

I just got a spam, yawn, we all say – but I noticed this one in the Outlook notification has a message ‘Get a decent capable HTML mail program’.

Not only are they spamming me, but now they’re insulting me too.