Yes another iPad post.  But those of you with an iPad or planning to buy an iPad who reside outside of the US, you’ll want to know this.

I never bothered to see if my VPN service worked with the iPhone.  But I did decide to set it up on the iPad.  It takes just a minute or two to do.  And it works!  By “works,” it means I’m now able to stream TV shows from the US using the ABC Player app and able to stream music on Pandora.  I haven’t tried the Netflix app yet because I haven’t gotten around to setting up an account with them but presumably that will work as well.

I don’t expect to be streaming ABC TV shows very often but this was the first time I used Pandora and I loved it.  If you haven’t tried it, it’s a custom-built radio station.  You type in the name of an artist you like and it builds and streams a playlist of songs by that artist and others in a similar vein.  Of course I started with Bruce Springsteen and my subsequent playlist included tracks by Van Morrison, Tom Petty and Bob Dylan as well as Da Boss.  A friend decided to put it to a tougher test and suggested Ginger Baker – after a track from one of Baker’s solo albums, subsequent songs veered from African jazz to 60s psychedelic pop.  Pretty damned nice.  And all of this is free – Pandora will provide you a link to the iTunes store for purchasing any song that you like.   (So now I’m going to set up the VPN on my iPhone so that I can have Pandora there too.)

So how do you get a VPN?  To the best of my limited knowledge on the subject, there are no reliable free VPN services – you need to subscribe.

As it happens, I subscribe to a Usenet service in the US, Giganews.  If you get Giganews’ “Diamond” Usenet plan, they include their VyprVPN service free.  You can configure it so that it appears you’re in the US or the UK.  I won’t say it works flawlessly, but it does work well enough.

There are probably countless VPN services out there to choose from.  As it happens, one of my steady readers is involved with setting up a new VPN service in the US and I’ve done a little bit of beta testing for him.  His service seems to work at least as well as VyprVPN and of course it’s still in the beta stage.

At any rate, should you decide that you want to check out Giganews for either their Usenet service or their VPN service, I would greatly appreciate it if  you would check them out via this link.  You’ll get a free trial of the service and if you decide to convert to becoming a paying customer, I get a small kickback.

I can tell you that Giganews is probably the best Usenet service out there – I’ve been a subscriber for more than 8 years and their service (and their customer service) is first rate.  Their retention for binary newsgroups is over 600 days and it’s over 4 years for text newsgroups.  They offer SSL and a mirror server right here in Hong Kong.  I don’t think any other Usenet provider offers this level of service.  I’m just sayin’, if you’re interested, please click this link and check it out for yourself.

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