The awards are being hosted by afront at The Pansentient League, who also maintains the Spotify Resources page at Spotify.com. You can vote for Spotiguide, or any other Spotify community website, at The Pansentient League’s Spotties page.

And by voting you could win yourself a free subscription to Spotify Premium. Spotify Ltd are offering three 3-month Spotify Premium subscription vouchers, which will be awarded at random to three lucky Spotties voters. Voting closes at the end of March. Good luck!

Vote for Spotiguide here!

Spotiguide is a brand new website that helps you get more from Spotify with the latest music, news, technology, tips and tools.

The aim is to make Spotify even better, with a hand-picked selection of the best new and classic music to help you navigate Spotify’s huge catalogue, and regular beginners and advanced tools and tips to make Spotify even easier to use.

Spotiguide will also bring you the latest Spotify news, and reviews of Spotify-related technology, such as Spotify-compatible phones.

Check it out at www.spotiguide.com.

The Rocketbelt Caper was selected as one of ShortList magazine’s 25 greatest summer reads for men, alongside books by Antony Beevor, Irvine Welsh, Chuck Palahniuk and Malcolm Gladwell. “What happens when you mix three men, a crushing ambition to build a Buck Rogers-style jet pack, murder and a $10 million lawsuit?” asks the mag. “The sound of Hollywood falling over itself to snap up the film rights to this bizarre story.” If only…

Russ Routledge got to see his friend Muhammad Ali on the Champ’s final visit to the UK. He showed Ali his photos, and handed out copies of my Ali feature, but was saddened by his hero’s declining health. My account of Russ’s friendship with Ali is here.

Spotify is now available on the iPhone (and Android, and soon on S60). As expected, it features an offline mode that allows users to store 3,333 tracks on your phone. The iPhone app has just been updated, and Spotify have also added an offline mode to the PC version. You’ll need to be a premium user, but £9.99 a month for virtually unlimited music seems a small price to pay.

Lots more content has been added to the TV Ad Music website, including this interview with Slow Moving Millie, who provides the music to the Virgin Media backlot advert, and an explanation of why the track on the Land Rover advert is NOT by Noah and the Whale. See the latest ads here.

I’ve yet to receive my free copy of Free, the book by Chris Anderson. Almost 3 months on it doesn’t look like I’ll be reviewing it any time soon on these pages.

In related news, the Rocketbelt Caper free ebook download offer will be ending in the near future, and if you haven’t yet downloaded it for free you can do so here.

The game is also a crucial qualifying match for some tin pot competition to be held in South Africa next year, but obviously the player’s minds will be on the UFWC…

Scotland are the all-time UFWC champions, having won 86 UFWC title matches – more than any other nation, ahead of the likes of England, Argentina, Russia – and the Netherlands, who have won 38 title matches and are ranked fifth overall.

Scotland have not had an easy time of things in UFWC competition in recent years. The Scots last held the title in March 2007, having ended a 40-year drought by beating Georgia, only then to lose out just four days later to official world champions Italy.

The UFWC website has all the build-up to the game, and will cover the action on Wednesday night. The game will be shown live in the UK on Sky Sports 2.

If you have no idea what the previous 200 words mean, you can read an explanation of sorts at www.ufwc.co.uk.

Usually this works out OK. I’ll write a post mentioning the iPhone or Sky TV, and Google will serve ads relevant to the iPhone or Sky TV. (And if readers click those ads I’ll get a few pennies – hooray!) But recently, particularly over at TV Ad Music, the AdSense units have been overrun by Scientology ads. This seems to be happening across the web, and some website owners are having problems filtering the ads.

Up until today, none of my websites had featured any content that was in any way relevant to the Church of Scientology. And so there was no reason for Scientology ads to appear here. Also, like a lot of other website owners, I don’t want to use my webspace to promote this organisation.

If people want to believe in a religion founded by a science fiction writer – with the specific intention of making money – and based on sci-fi staples involving past lives, UFOs and alien overlords, then I have no particular problem with that. Each to their own.

If people want to believe in a space ruler called Xenu and ancient extraterrestrial societies called the Helatrobus and the Marcabians, and that when people die their souls go to the planet Venus to be re-planted into a new body and then dumped back on Earth in the ocean off the coast of California, then that is their prerogative.

But I would rather they did not attempt to recruit members via my websites.

If you’re an AdSense user who is being plagued by Scientology ads, here’s how to block them using the competitive ad filter and the AdSense Preview Tool:

1. Find the ad URL. To block specific ads you’ll need to determine the display or destination URLs. It’s not sufficient to use the organisation’s main URLs, for example scientology.org and dianetics.org. My Scientology ads don’t show display URLs, and clicking on your own ads violates Google’s policy, so this method uses the AdSense Preview Tool, which works with Internet Explorer.

To install the Preview Tool, right-click the link below and save the registry file to your desktop. Then double-click the file from your desktop to install it. You’ll then need to close and restart Internet Explorer.

AdSense Preview Tool

Open your website and right-click anywhere on the page outside of the your AdSense units. Select “Google AdSense Preview Tool” from the context menu.

A window will pop up showing adverts that AdSense will serve to your website. Tick the Scientology ad(s) and click “Show selected URLs”. The destination ad will appear. For example, for an ad offering a Scientology video on my website, the destination was at (Google-owned) YouTube (FYI: youtube.com/watch?v=zgsFh87RCU0). Copy the destination URL, and now we’ll block it.

2. Block the ad URL. Log in to Google AdSense and click “AdSense Setup” and “Competitive Ad Filter”. Paste the ad URL into the box under “AdSense for Content filters”. You might also want to paste it into “AdSense for Search filters”. You can also add Scientology’s main URLs, scientology.org and dianetics.org, to the filter lists. Click “Save changes”.

And you’re done. Google say it could take 48 hours for the changes to take effect, but the ads disappeared from my sites within a few minutes. You can confirm that the ads have been filtered using the Preview Tool again. If the ads reappear for another destination URL you may need to run through the process again.

Like I said earlier, this isn’t an anti-Scientology issue. It’s an anti-irrelevant and/or unsuitable ads issue. I’m sure that all Scientologists are very charming, very good-looking, and not at all bonkers. All I know is I would rather have red-hot knitting needles poked into my eye sockets than ever watch Battlefield Earth…

I have no idea which styles suit me, I don’t even know which “shape category” my face fits into (Round or egg-shaped? Potato-shaped, perhaps?), so I’m randomly trying on scores of frames, bending over and peering into that little rear-view mirror at at the bottom of the display stand, unable to see properly because I haven’t got my proper glasses on, forgetting which ones I like and which ones I don’t, and trying to work out which, if any, of the “unisex” frames are actually suitable for men who don’t have a sideline as a children’s entertainer.

Then the shop assistant turns up. “Those ones really suit you,” she inevitably says. “Let me tell you about our current offers…” I tell her I’ll have a think about it and slink away. And I haven’t even mentioned handling those frames that have been previously tried on by someone with a very greasy bridge. I hate buying new glasses.

Now Glasses Direct may have come up with a solution. Having previously been the first retailer to introduce a “virtual mirror” with which users could upload a photo and virtually try frames, the company has now introduced a 10-day home trial, allowing shoppers to try four pairs before they buy.

It works very simply – you choose four frames, add them to your home trial basket, and pay a £5 charge, reimbursed on purchase. Your chosen frames – with clear lenses – are sent to you in a neat little box, and you get ten days to try them, get the opinions of friends and family, see if they fall off while playing Wii Fit etc, and return them using a provided Freepost label.

If you choose to buy any of the glasses you’ve tried (or, it seems, any other pair from their range) within 28 days, the £5 charge will be deducted from the cost. Glasses Direct’s prices are pretty good, and they have a decent range of frames, including designer.

Worked like a charm for me. I instantly eliminated two frames, and friends and family helped me choose the winner from the remaining two. The only hassle involved was queuing up to hand the box back to the Post Office, but that beats scrabbling around in an opticians any day. And I got a bigger discount, too – a pop-up on the website offered a 15 percent discount on your first order, so I used that instead of the £5 trial rebate.

Success online means coming up with neat ways to solve problems. Glasses Direct have done just that. Hooray for them.

I compiled the list, based on stats for visits, searches and downloads, and supplied pithy comments, with help from TV Ad Music’s Keith. Even if you skip the ads with Sky+ there’ll be tunes you recognise, and the likes of Don Thomas and The Seeds are well worth checking out.

You can see the TV Ad Music Summer Special here.

The site is an interactive review database featuring the UK’s favourite beers, lagers and ciders. New beers are added two or three times a week, and you can post comments and submit your own reviews. I designed the site, and also wrote some of the reviews. Please drink responsibly…

The UFWC pitches real international football teams into a continuous series of boxing-style title matches. Winners of UFWC title matches become title-holders, and move up the rankings table. UFWC history dates back to 1872, 58 years before the World Cup. I run the website and wrote a book about it.

The Netherlands have won 36 UFWC title matches. Norway have never won in ten attempts. Should Norway manage to win the UFWC title for the very first time, they will defend the title in a WCQ match against Scotland on 2 August. If the Netherlands retain the title, they will take it into a friendly match on 12 August against England. So, whatever happens on Wednesday, the next UFWC match will involve a British challenger.