Buying Apple American App Store applications from Canada

Here’s a quick tip that originally came from @binarylibrarian. Buying Apple App Store items for your iPhone or iPad requires a credit card from the appropriate country, so if you want to purchase items from the US store you must have a credit card with an American address (at the time of this writing certain iPad applications are only available in the US store, including iPad iWorks applications). As a Canadian this is a problem, since most credit cards require identification checks. However, there is a loophole.

If you purchase over-the-counter prepaid credit cards you can type in any reasonable address and the App Store accepts it (this is probably technically fraud, but it seems like an innocuous white lie). I have personally tried the Vanilla brand of Mastercard purchased from Shoppers Drug Mart and had great success. There is a $5 charge for the card, but otherwise you have a normal pre-paid credit card with any arbitrary address.

Combine this tip with a US VPN (like BlackVPN), and you can download Pandora or ABC Player, set up the US VPN on your iPad, and listen to free music, and watch free TV, as if you were an American (but without the unfortunate politics).

My changing computing patterns: iPad and KDE

Even thought I’ve never even seen it, I’m going to purchase the Apple iPad. I’m just that kind of guy. But, rather than just another example of my technolust, I think this latest purchase will begin to mark a change in my computing patterns.

Over the last few year I’ve become increasingly busy (or perhaps less willing to have my idle time infringed upon by less-than-productive matters), and I’ve become increasingly technical. I always had something of a silicon thumb, but I’ve been getting paid for this one-time hobby for the last two years and this means I do semi-professional web development and very professional information and process management daily. Further, with the advent of easier development tools I now build the thing I need, instead of merely wish for them (the rise of interpreted languages has been a boon to my tweak-and-iterate non-professional development style). One trajectory of my computing experience is increasingly technical, and increasingly powerful. I may still not allocate memory blocks or worry about pass-by-reference versus pass-by-value, but I typically can make the computer do what I need, albeit often in a rather rudimentary fashion.

The other trajectory of my computing experience is in many ways opposite. Instead of working in that last 10%, I let the Pareto ratio sort most matters out for me, and simply get by with what is in front of me. This computing pattern is not concerned with cutting out new methods, it is only concerned with form, and to a much lesser degree, content. Form is vitally important to me because I am busier and I am less willing to waste time. These computing patterns are becoming habitual—even if they do not always use the same vendors or websites, they do take the same path. For me, Facebook and Twitter are essentially the same (although Facebook is more private, and Twitter more public), and my interactions require the same strategies (notifications, platform independence, mobile). Content is important simply because in this trajectory I am looking for inputs, not outputs. Social sites, news, and the occasional idle distraction are inputs, and the only outputs are basic replies and comments, with the occasional post.

This brings me to the iPad, and actually, KDE. My computing pattern is now thoroughly bifurcated: on the one hand I want an appliance (my iPhone currently performs this duty). All it needs to do is parse content and create paths that shape a latent form. On the other hand, I need a “development” platform, and for this the new KDE looks like a champ. I still want to be able to root my operating system and fill out that custom, last 10% of my life, but much of what I do will be of a simpler form, on the iPad and iPhone.