Apple Canada has started the "Levy" refund program for those who purchased an iPod in Canada between December 13th 2003 and December 21 2004.

More information at Apple Canada

Edit: A classy touch on Apple's part:

"Money that is unclaimed by December 31, 2005 will be donated to the Canadian Red Cross"

Some more or less random tidbits for this week:

- If you mouse over an HTML link in an email message in Mail, you'll see what's commonly referred to as a tooltip which shows you what the actual http address is that you're going to get sent to if you click on the link. This is particularly interesting when you get what looks like a "phishing" message, because you can see very visually that it isn't https://ebay..something that you're going to load, it's some hacked web site.

- Windows Mobile 2005 units are now shipping, yet the development environment (Visual Studio .Net 2005) is still in beta. Is it just me or is there something wrong with this? Or are all the 3rd party developers happy trying to produce the expected upgrades for their customers with non-production development software. Honestly, I do expect at some point that Microsoft will completely and utterly dominate the handheld/mobile market, but it's going to be through a war of attrition rather than through, say, quality software and business practices. It's tiring because it's been the same story for the last few Windows Mobile upgrades.

- Steve Jobs calls the music industry "greedy for considering a hike in the price of digital downloads" (link). I'm not sure if he's out to protect the consumer, Apple or both. But it feels like he's protecting us, so I say "good work".

- Microsoft released on update to Office 2004 (for Mac OS X) which, amongst other things, claims to provide significant enhancements to Exchange Server support. I actually use Office on my Mac and have only minor complaints with the Exchange support (mostly that I seem to get messages duplicated quite often) but I'm hoping this update fixes them.

No details on how to get the refund yet, so keep watching...

Canadian iPod owners to get tax refund: "Late yesterday Apple Canada announced that iPod owners in Canada will be getting their money back for a tax the Canadian government levied on the music player, reports the CBC..."

(Via MacMinute.)

A good article today at AppleMatters relating to the new cell-phone-with-iTunes-on-it and the iPod Nano. The phone is pretty disappointing, but is about what I expected given that it's a Motorola phone with iTunes support crammed into it rather than hardware actually designed by Apple.

iTunes Phone Falls Flat, nano Goes Huge