This time it’s the BBC’s Children In Need appeal. Okay, so CIN isn’t meant to be seen outside the UK, but what with Channel BT and YouTube, it should be no surprise that bits of it (such as the superb Doctor Who short) have been seen around the world.

And I decided I wanted to donate. ‘Cos it’s a good cause and the dollar’s going well against the UKP.

A quick Google and I figured out what they were talking about when they asked about Gift Aid. Something for UK taxpayers only, alas.

But the billing address caught me out. Okay, let’s put my state name in the County field. That should work. Country… well they only seem to have continents, not countries. Australasia is it I guess. Dunno what the credit card company will make of that.

Submit… ah, it seems to be doing something. Uh oh, it rejected the postcode. Wrong length. Uh no, my four digit postcode is all I have. Tell you what, I’ll stuff it with zeroes. 0000003204. That would crack Aussie Post up, I’m sure.

Resubmit and… oh. It thinks it’s already running. “Your request is being processed….. Please be patient….”

Well I am normally, but at time of writing it’s been giving me this error for 20 minutes.

Has it gone in? Maybe, maybe not. I’ll check my credit card transactions in a day or two, and hope the Children In Need don’t need my donation that much.

(Oh what the hell, you might as well enjoy it here too.)

Sony’s PS3 will be available from March 23rd in PAL territories such as Australia and Europe. The Age reports it’ll retail for A$999 in Australia, and it’ll be the 60Gb hard drive version — the cheaper version won’t be sold. The BBC notes Europeans will also get the more expensive model.

Now, how many people are umming and erring because they want a PS3, but are still officially boycotting Sony because of the rootkit debacle?

Apple has opened new iTunes stores in… Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, with a free track for every Swiss citizen. (Großmutter! Schnell! Was ist Ihr voller Name und Geburtsdatum?)

And Australia? Well The Register says It was claimed this week that only major label troubles prevented the company from opening ITMS Australia last month as planned. Damn labels.

Meanwhile Apple continues to dominate in sales of music players, with new stats showing the iPod Shuffle has more than half of the US flash player market, and iTunes recently sold its 350 millionth song download.

All this is good news for the continued availability of non-copy-protected music. While Apple continues to sell and support MP3, but not WMA, and remains dominant in sales of hardware, MP3 will remain strong.

I don’t want a music format that’s copy protected. I don’t want to pay for music and have it die with my player. Like CDs, it has to last (I’ve got 17 year old discs that are still going strong) and be copyable, so I can move the music onto whatever the Next Great Device for my music is — whether it be a replacement iPod when my battery eventually gives up, or some other new and shiny device in a few years when the iPod seems old and clunky.

Though of course, in Australia at present, even just ripping your CDs to MP3 is illegal.

PS. 11pm. Actually I should probably use iTunes Store before blessing Apple too much, since there seems to be a lot of rumbling about whatever DRM they use.

AppleInsider has found the icons for the new iTunes countries, thereby confirming iTunes is about to start in Australia, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Not before time for those AU-ers among us. I’m seeing more and more of those white earplugs on the train to work.

It’ll be interesting to see how it goes. So far all the Australian online music stores have concentrated on selling protected WMA files. These haven’t been setting the world alight, partly of course because the files are useless for legions of iPod owners, and from observations, there are hardly any non-iPod portable music players out there in userland. And for myself, I’d refuse to buy files that won’t live beyond the (hopefully long but inevitably limited) life of my player.

Record companies must surely be waking up to it by now. They can’t copy-protect conventional CDs properly — it either breaks the Red Book standard (and thus compatibility) or it doesn’t work. Anything they try is either useless or has been hacked. So you might as well just sell MP3s. They’re no more vulnerable than CDs. And it’s better to be selling copyable songs than no songs at all.

And the reported Apple price of A$1.80 per track is competitive. A quick scout of some WMA-selling stores showed a typical price of A$1.89 per track, with top ten hits at A$0.99.

The other thing this week for Apple fans is the OS X “Tiger” release, though I’m sure they all already know that.

Okay in theory I’m all for reining in companies when they’re being monopolistic, but this decision of the Europeans to make them ship a copy of Windows without MediaPlayer strikes me as just a tad silly. Microsoft are about to launch this version in Europe, which they’re calling — wait for it — Windows XP Reduced Media Edition.

From the sounds of it, it’s basically XP (in Home or Pro versions) without MediaPlayer. SoundRec and the movie making thingy are still included.

Why would anybody choose to buy this? Unless it’s cheaper… in which case, couldn’t you just go and download MediaPlayer from Microsoft later?

And bear in mind the major competition here is… well, it’s RealPlayer, isn’t it. Ah yes, that mob whose web site sneakily tries to steer you to the paid version when you’re looking for the free one (and there’s no direct URL to the free one), insists on an e-mail address they can send advertising to, defaults to including a useless applet that sits in your icon tray, splashes advertising over itself when you start it, and sends lots of juicy info back to home base. (I do use RealPlayer, for all the BBC webcasts… I really must check out the alternatives at free-codecs.com. Thankfully the BBC have their own licensed RealPlayer freebie download which isn’t quite so objectionable.)

Now the ruling on opening up the interface code, that sounds like the sort of thing that is more likely to level the playing field.