Could Apple potentially be taken to court because of false advertising? If you visit Apple’s UK website (this), and then navigate to the App Store page for the iPhone, it lists several apps including the eBay application, Loopt, and Super Monkey Ball.

Sure, Super Monkey Ball is fun, and for £5.99 it provides plenty of entertainment if you’re in need of a game. However, that’s where it ends. Because both Loopt and the eBay app are not available on the UK App Store. Now, if Apple had one global website for the whole world, this might not be that much of an issue, but they’re advertising two things, for the UK market, on their UK website, that are not available here.

Sure, there are alternatives, such as an application called “GarageBuy”, which you can use for eBay, but Apple aren’t advertising that. They’re advertising the not-available-in-the-UK official eBay app. Now, shouldn’t this be considered false advertising, to which pretty much any company can get in serious trouble for from the government section in charge of this type of stuff? I’d be interested in seeing if someone take Apple to court over this issue, as it could very well be that Apple are doing something wrong. I know that if, say, I purchased the iPhone 3G in the UK, and I needed the eBay app for my business, and found it wasn’t available, I’d be very angry.

What do you think?

The Apple Airport Express. What is it? Well, simply put, it’s a WiFi access point with two additional features. First, it has a built in printer server (and USB port), so you can plug a printer in and run it off that. Secondly, and this is why I purchased it, it has a 3.5mm audio output.

Now this may seem quite odd to you that a WiFi access point has a 3.5mm audio output, but it’s not. Because, once you setup the Airport Express from within OS X (or Windows…if there’s a compatible utility, which there should be):

You then get a new option in iTunes:

So now, you can choose where you want to send your music. It’s as easy as that. You just plug the Airport into an ethernet cable, and into your speakers, or in my case, AV Receiver, then run the setup, and you’re done! You can use either an analogue connection, or, an optical cable.

It’s really easy to setup, and awesome if you want to pipe your music to another room in the house. Plus you can add as many Airport Express’es to your home network as you like, and they’ll all show up in iTunes. And if running an ethernet cable to the back of your garden so you can listen to music while having a BBQ isn’t convienent, you can set it up to connect via WiFi - it’ll then connect to your current WiFi network, and does the same thing. Actually, you have several options:

• Connect via ethernet and create a brand new WiFi network.
• Connect via ethernet and merge with your existing WiFi network, to extend the range.
• Connect via WiFi to your existing WiFi network, and extend the range.

Overall, if you already use iTunes and need a way to send your music somewhere else in your house, the Airport is a very useful device, and it’s nice and small too. If you don’t want to spend the whole £65 that Apple charges for it, pick one up on eBay - I got the older 802.11b/g model for a mere £35 (the new ones have 802.11b/g/n).

Now all I have to do if I want to listen to music downstairs, is send it to the Living Room speakers, go downstairs, and hit “AirTunes” on the Logitech Harmony remote.

The interconnected home. I has it. It’s brilliant.

Placed a small order tonight for a few titles…

Well…to be fair it’s all the way into March 2009, I’d probably buy that many discs by then anyway, right?

I thought I’d write an article about the Firefox extensions that I used, after totally coming up with the idea myself. It’s my idea, I swear!

All the extensions below are fully compatible with Mozilla Firefox 3, unless otherwise stated.

Customize Google

This handy extension adds some additional options to tweak Google to your liking, one of which I find very useful is to bypass Google’s annoying click tracking - basically, you can’t right click a link from within the search results and copy the path, instead, you’re copying a Google-based URL which then redirects to the page you want to visit. Plus, it adds some extra options such as removing ads, adding additional links to stuff like WayBackMachine, showing favicons in the search results, and so on.

Favicon Picker

If a site you visit doesn’t have a favicon, yet you visit it often and want to put it in your bookmarks toolbar, it won’t have a favicon visible. This annoys me, so, I generally always change the favicon if it’s either ugly, or doesn’t exist. Sadly, this extension does not work on Firefox 3, last time I tried, which is a pity (enabling it crashed Firefox for me). If anyone has a fix, please do share it.

Update: Just found out there’s actually a Favicon Picker v3, which can be found here.

Foxmarks Bookmarks Synchronizer

An invaluable tool (saved my owned bookmarks several times in the past from ‘accidents’), which backs up your bookmarks to either Foxmarks’ site or your own FTP server. Also very handy if you have multiple PCs, and don’t want the fuss of keeping them updated all the time.

FxIF

My latest extension, thanks to Pandya’s aforementioned article, this shows EXIF data for images - stuff like the camera model, apeture, and so on. Pretty simple really. Example photo used can be found here.

Greasemonkey

This highly useful extension enabled the modification of various web pages, to enhance them or change the layout or feel. I use a couple of Grasemonkey scripts including Flickr Rich Edit, Flickr Buddy Icon Reply, Flickr Camera Images, Flickr Multi Group Sender, and deviantART MCF Bypass.

President Bush Countdown

Not really useful, but it shows that he’ll be kicked out of office soon. Hurrah!

Server Spy

Shows what software the server is running. For example, on my blog: Apache/2.2.8 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 OpenSSL/0.9.7a DAV/2 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635. See the above President Bush screenshot to see what Server Spy looks like in the status bar, too.

ShowIP

Another server tool, this shows what IP address the server is that hosts the site. Again, as an example, my blog is on 91.186.27.166. It’s also intelligent, and shows any additional IPs for that site if you require so. See the above President Bush screenshot to see what ShowIP looks like in the status bar, too.

Stylish

Similar to Greasemonkey, but more for modifying the look and feel of sites then adding features. I use a couple of Stylish scripts including Firefox 3 Mac OS X - Favicons on Bookmark Bar, Flickr Vista Fonts, and IMDb - dark blue redesign.

User Agent Switcher

For stubborn sites that refuse to let me in because I use Firefox / OS X.

–

Anyway, that’s all I use, feel free to suggest any more, or, post your own in the comments.

Sorry for last night’s downtime. Turns out trying beta versions of software isn’t a very good idea (even more so when you don’t backup first), I somehow managed to mess up the permissions (I think), and overwrite the themes and plugins, which made the site unvisitable for about 24 hours.

Should all be working again, thanks to Minthost’s backups (and Jonathan’s help). >_<

Update (17th July 08): Sucessfully updated to Wordpress 2.6 final.

I seem to have switched to dialup.

Which is odd because I KNOW that I can get more:

Perhaps I should move to a datacentre:

Stupid BT.

I reached 100,000 views on my Flickr account in the past couple of days, and I didn’t even notice until browsing my account’s stats today.

Crave has seen all manner of sadistic alarm clocks, from models that emit sonic booms and electrical shocks to those that fly and roll away. But the appropriately named “Tyrant” from Taiwanese designer Alice Wang takes sleep disruption to a disturbing new level.

If you don’t turn it off, this little monster will randomly dial numbers programmed in your mobile phone every three minutes, according to SlashGear. That’s right–not calls to yourself, but to others who surely won’t be amused. Mercifully, this is only a concept so far (we hope).

Source: c|net Crave

*do want*

What I hate about Digital TV, in this case, a DVB-T signal, is that it either works or it doesn’t. When I was in London I purchased an EyeTV for DTT stick, which is a small USB based TV tuner for Mac. It comes with a very nice software package called EyeTV.

Next up, where I live. I’m around 30 miles from the Sutton Coldfield transmitter, which, according to a couple of sites I searched for, is 1) uber powerful, spitting out 1000kW of analogue power (and I think about 50kW of digital power), and 2) services a ton of people, including the whole of Birmingham.

Except that doesn’t help. Because annoyingly, our house can’t even pick it up. Basically, we get average analogue reception, and really crap digital reception. Both the TV and an old Freeview box I had manages to lock onto most of the BBC channels, and some of ITV, plus a few others, but that’s it. Channel 4 and 5 and a lot of the other channels were extremely dodgy and dropped out wayyy too much to be watchable. Still, I only really wanted to watch the channels that we do get, so I got the EyeTV thing anyway.

I bring it home, plug it into both the upstairs and downstairs jacks, and, nothing. Not even the BBC which works fine downstairs.

So our antenna is either broken, not plugged in, pointing at the wrong place, or not big enough. I wonder if that means I need to get one of those ultra high antennas that are 10 meters high and need to be attatched with long steel cables so they don’t blow away?

Otherwise, I basically have a spare EyeTV here now doing nothing.