Posts Tagged ‘card’

American iTunes Store Account

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

iTunes StoreFor those countries which have iTunes Stores, setting up and purchasing items from the store is simple and easy. You just click sign in, create account, and off you go. But for countries without iTunes Stores, or iTunes Stores which only have certain content, getting the content you want is not so easy.

I doubt there will be anybody who will deny that out of all the iTunes Stores in the world, America has the best selection. So everybody wants an American account, even those that have iTunes stores in their country. For millions of people around the world, piracy is their main music and movie distributor. iTunes provides a simple paying alternative and because of the great content and ease of use many people prefer it to pirating their music. Unfortunately the studios, record labels and governments of the countries around the world don’t seem to see the benefit of making iTunes access a priority when it comes to fighting piracy. So some countries end up with no stores, and others have very little in their stores.

We found a way for anybody, from anywhere, to get an American iTunes store account and buy their music from the best music store in the world. Although what is being done does seem to be a loop hole in law and Apple’s policies, it still feels a little underhanded.

The best acceptable way to get an account is to get an American friend to create one for you with their address and details. If your credit card is not from an American bank you will not be able to register. So the way to get around this is to purchase gift vouchers for the iTunes store account and use those to pay for your music.

It sounds simple enough, but not everybody has a friend in the states, and getting gift cards on the internet can lead to scams. So what do you do? Step in tunecard.biz. A legitimate company that you can buy iTunes gift vouchers from. If you want, they will even set up an account for you.

UPDATE: tunecars.biz has closed down. This may or may not be due to Apple or dodge behavior, or maybe both. The only other way to get the vouchers is to buy them from ebay.com. If you do this, we recommend only buying from Top sellers. Look out for the Top Seller logo next to their name.

iPhoneAll you need is a paypal account and you’re on your way. We decided to give them a test run and see if this was all real. We had to set up a paypal account and get our credit card confirmed which took two days. After that we went through to their site, clicked on the amount we wanted and paid them through paypal. We were then directed to a page which asks for your details so that they could either set up your new account or put money into your existing account. After completion we received a confirmation e-mail from the site, thanking us for our payment. In just two hours we had an e-mail with our new account details. After logging on, our account had already been credited with the amount requested and we were free to download music.

It was simple, easy and the service was fantastic. If you want to pay for your music and have quality albums for great prices this service is your golden ticket. But I can’t stop wondering how legal this process is. After looking into Apple’s policy you can’t begin to deny that this process is not accepted by Apple. Their very first clause is that you must be in the United States to use the service. Here is the excerpt:

U.S. SALES ONLY

Purchases or rentals (as applicable) from the iTunes Store are available to you only in the United States and are not available in any other location. You agree not to use or attempt to use the iTunes Store from outside of the available territory. Apple may use technologies to verify such compliance.

After further investigation it seems there are very different and confusing tax laws in the different countries. This reason alone is probably good enough to stop outside buyers. So, unfortunately those of us who want to obey the rules have hit another brick wall. Although I think Apple is simply covering themselves from law suits, they can block your access if they catch you. It’s back to the drawing board for those of us who are too impatient to wait for our own great stores.

A Boy & Math

Tuesday, August 12th, 2008

MathA ten-year-old boy was failing math. His parents tried everything from tutors to hypnosis, but to no avail. Finally, at the insistence of a family friend, they decided to enrol their son in a private Catholic school.

After the first day, the boy’s parents were surprised when he walked in after school with a stern, focused and very determined expression on his face, and went right past them straight to his room, where he quietly closed the door. For nearly two hours he toiled away in his room – with math books strewn about his desk and the surrounding floor. He emerged long enough to eat, and after quickly cleaning his plate, went straight back to his room, closed the door, and worked feverishly at his studies until bedtime.

This pattern continued ceaselessly until it was time for the first quarter report card. The boy walked in with his report card — unopened — laid it on the dinner table and went straight to his room. Cautiously, his mother opened it, and to her amazement, she saw a bright red “A” under the subject of MATH.

Overjoyed, she and her husband rushed into their son’s room, thrilled at his remarkable progress. “Was it the nuns that did it?,” the father asked. The boy only shook his head and said, “No.” “Was it the one-on-one tutoring? The peer-mentoring?” “No.” “The textbooks? The teachers? The curriculum?”

“Nope,” said the son. “On that first day, when I walked in the front door and saw that guy they nailed to the ‘plus sign,’ I just knew they meant business!”

Windows Vista Review

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

Windows VistaAfter using Vista for almost a year I am now in a reasonable position to critique it. As with most software, time is needed to fix start-up kinks and iron out any small problems. Their time is up.

Many people have criticised Vista on many levels. The fact that a full hardware upgrade is often necessary, it was missing many critical drivers and it didn’t have full backwards compatibility, gave critics the ammunition they needed to destroy perceptions of Vista before it had really gotten off the ground.

After almost a years use I could not go back to XP. Vista is different but essentially simpler. Finding files and documents is quick and easy, the control panel is even easier to use after a while, and it looks very nice. On a fast enough computer Vista runs smoothly and easily, loading times over the year have become shorter and it adapts to my computer needs.

My favourite positive on Vista is that when something goes wrong, Vista not only reports the problem to Microsoft but it reports back when a solution is found. Something that simple makes a huge difference when faced with a problem that could take hours of research to fix. If there is an official fix, you will be notified almost immediately and be able to correct it.

Although Vista has gotten some undue criticism a lot of it is warranted. Visible bugs are still apparent; I always get errors with video drivers and .avi (video) files. And to add insult to injury my graphics card is supposedly Vista compatible. Just two days ago, after months of no major problems, I received a blue screen and the computer had to restart. I was surfing the internet when it happened which hardly drains any resources.

Although Vista does have some great updates and improvements over XP which I can no longer use a computer without, its continuous bugs and random crashes are unacceptable. This after a year on the market place and service pack one released. If Microsoft wants to keep its huge share from the seemingly always working, always better and simpler Apple, then it’s going to have to step up its game. If it wasn’t for their large XP following and people’s lack of Apple knowledge, they would not be doing very well right now.