So Australia’s iTunes music store has finally caught up with the USA, we now have movies, once again, the catalogue is quite small, but it’s a start. Not real happy with the pricing though. $5.99 for a new release rental, $24.99 for a new release purchase, $3.99 and $12.99 for older movies. Just a tad too expensive for me for the new release stuff. I’m more interested in the older stuff though, I might think about buying something if it was an obscure movie if it was hard to find elsewhere on the intertubes.

Not much more to say than the headline - the Australian iTunes store finally has TV downloads just like the USA and UK. There isn’t a whole lot of content up there right now, but I am sure it will grow. Episodes seem to be $2.99 ea - season prices vary from show to show. Some series are not complete and some just have the latest season.

read more | digg story

Coolies! Not heaps of really good content on there, a bit of South Park, my fav would be all scrubs episodes up to season 6.

So me and my friend Ben replaced the LCD panel of my Macbook last night, and it went pretty damn smoothly. There were some scary bits where we had to pull out plugs that didn’t look like plugs and strange plastic tidbits, but all in all, we simply followed the guide on ifixit.com and it worked quite well. AU$419 for a 120GB hard drive and a 13.3″ LCD panel, not too shabby, bought from Macfixit.com.au. Here’s some piccies.

Before

After

So, as per an earlier post, I broke the LCD panel of my beloved Macbook. At the time I was thinking, way too expensivc to replace, just buy a new Macbook. But a couple of factors have come to play since then. For one, I didn’t want my next Mac to be a Macbook, I wanted a Macbook Pro, and 2, I found a place called Macfixit Australia, who sell LCD panels for DIY install for AU$379, which is damn cheap, you can get them to install it for you for $179, but that (however small) extra fee just makes me think I might as well go buy a new one for $1449. There’s an awesome guide at ifixit.com which has a 23 page guide in replacing the panel, which is quite involved, but me and a mate were thinking we could do it, so long as we follow every single step. The only tools I need is a screwdriver, a spudger and a beer to cool my nerves. And hopefully the DIY gods smile down on me.

So I got my copy of Leopard Friday arvo at around 6:30, started installing at my mate’s house in Melbourne at around 8:30, went out on the town, got rightly pissed got back around 2 and we spent till about 9am playing with Leopard anf reformatting my Macbook rather than sticking with the general upgrade. It was a fair nerd session, justified though due to the amount of cigarettes and beer consumed throughout. I’m pretty bloody impressed with it, the showed off features that most know about are all good; Quick Look, Spaces, Cover Flow, the new Dock, it’s all very pretty. Time Machine has annoyed me a lot though, only through the fact that I can’t use my iPod as a backup device, which is just silly, I can only assume that someone will release a fix for this. The new photobooth stuff is rather fun, there’s some nice new screensavers, iTunes comes with some extra visualisers, which I think were already there in the same version on Tiger but I never noticed. It’s definitely spaces that’s the standout, I use to use Virtuedesktops in Tiger but this is much smoother and the way the desktops change is much more stylish, and it works seamlessly with Parallels. Definitely worth the buy.