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"

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.)

iFill (currently in beta) allows you to capture Internet radio stations and store the resulting songs on your iPod, with fairly good delineation of the individual songs.

I'm pretty pleased with this technology: basically you tell iFill what stations you're interested in, how much space you're willing to take up on your iPod and just let it go.

iFill is currently free (with registration required) and is definitely worth checking out - just be careful if your ISP has a bandwidth cap.

iFill @ Griffin Technology

I remember, with great fondness, spending hours upon hours playing Zork and Adventure...

New Interactive Fiction For The iPod: "Those of us who recall the arrival of the home computer back in the late 70s / early 80s remember a type of entertainment software that was available for every make and model. Interactive fiction. ..."

(Via iPod Hacks.)

I got a kick out of this project to create a RAID array out of a set of iPod Shuffles. This is one of those things that, of course, should work, but it's always kind of fun to see it actually done.

I had a chance to play with an iPod Shuffle for an extended period of time recently, after a colleague purchased one. I'm always amazed at Apple's attention to detail (and so was my colleague, who isn't an Apple person). The sound is outstanding as well.

M3U2iTunes is available for download for both Macintosh and Windows. This is a small "helper" app for iTunes to put downloaded M3U playlists in a convenient location in iTunes.

You can download M3U2iTunes here.

MusicBrainz.org falls under the category of "useful apps", making use of acoustic signatures on your song files to match against its database and retrieve reasonably accurate tag information.

You can search the database from the web, or better yet, download a tagger utility either for Mac or Windows.

iEatBrainz, the Mac utility, operates wonderfully, correctly identifying and semi-automatically correcting a number of mp3 files in my collection that were consistently misidentified by Gracenote (see screenshot)