Yesterday somebody shared a cool podcast with me.

Well I should say they tried to, thing is, I didn’t have an iStore account. But whatever, I’ll just make one right? Well … no. That particular podcast is only available in the US due to copyright restrictions or something, or maybe it’s just that most of the store is US only, but whatever. Thing is, I had to make an account and I had to make an American one. Not a Slovene one.

No biggie right, go to the iStore, make an account.

Well no, you can’t choose where you’re from.

So let’s change the language/locale to US and voila, american store. HEY even paypal is available now (yes we’ve got PayPal in Slovenia but Apple is an idiot and doesn’t aknowledge this fact).

Yay, choose paypal, make account. Nope, says I’m not from the US. Fine, I’ll give you my credit card info … well fuck you mister Swizec, credit card says you’re not american. Fail.

This is the process I had to go through to have a valid US Apple ID and iStore account.

1. Find a free App.
2. Download App.
3. Create account
4. Choose without CreditCard (they can’t demand payment info for free downloads, some legal stuff afaik)
5. Enter some US address found on google maps (I used M5 Industries because Mythbusters is made there and I love Mythbusters). Btw this isn’t identity theft because you use your own name.
6. Rejoice, you have a valid US iStore account

Great! I can now download FREE stuff that is, for some strange and utterly absurd reason, only available in the US. Why have region restricted copyright when the content is bloody free is … can anyone explain this at all?

Tags: Apple, Business, life, United States

Yesterday I finally installed my pirated version of Snow Leopard and thus bringing yet another large kitten into my bedroom. It was a shame that I had to go out and buy a dual layer DVD, but such is life when no external hard drives are available to burn the .dmg to and install from there.

So far I must say I haven’t noticed much difference between Leopard and its fluffier cousin. It’s obviously more responsive, something I’m particularly fond of since the old install was getting a bit sluggish for some reason. The fact they managed to trim the operating system’s footpring by almost ten gigs is simply mind blowingly awesome as well. But as a certain mate put it, that only means the previous version had a serious flaw.

Another thing I really love about the new OS is that … I don’t notice it’s there! At all! When you move from XP to Vista, Vista to 7, everything is so vastly different and horrible. Even moving from one Ubuntu version to another can be quite a shattering experience. But updating to Snow Leopard … nothing. The installer made sure to transfer all of my Time Machine backups and everything is as I left it. Down to the tinniest of settings. Awesome! Even all the software migrated properly

But despite the update being quite unnoticable, there are small jars here and there. Things that aren’t exactly as you’d expect and make you go “Whoa!”. I think it’s a bit of an uncanny valley problem, the changes are so subtle you don’t expect them and it makes you queasy.

One such example is that dock menus are now black and transparent, wtf? It honestly startled me when I first saw that, simply wasn’t expecting it. Another is that expose’d windows now get a jarringly fugly blue border around them upon mouse-over. Another wtf. The fact they now have their names spelled out under the screenshot is rather useless as well, makes ‘em look like desktop icons … but not quite! I preferred the old way when the window simply highlighted (became brighter) and there was no name, it’s essentially usless information anyway.

Perhaps the most noticable of changes is that everything, absolutely everything, is more saturated now. Can’t quite say whether I like or dislike this GUI tweak …

PS: I only pirated because Apple is so stupid as to not sell their software in my market and, worse still, not allowing shops in nearby markets to ship to me. So fuck ‘em.

Tags: Apple, Operating system, review, Time Machine