You can get all sorts of free downloads from the iTunes Store, ranging from podcasts to songs to audiobooks, game demos, movie trailers and TV episodes, but every now and then they let go of a nice and out-of-the-ordinary treat. This is one of those times.

If you check, there is something pretty interesting being offered for free download at the moment. It’s a short film called Raving, part of the Elle Magazine Fashion Story Series brought to us by Plum Pictures. Raving stars Zooey Deschanel and Bill Irwin, and is directed by Julia Stiles. Yes, that Julia.

Raving premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year. It runs fullscreen at 23 minutes, and is a 272 mb download. Never mind what it’s about, it’s free, just get it. Go direct to the iTunes Store by clicking here. Grab it soon before they take it down.

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the Federal Communications Commission of the United States has finally given approval to Apple’s iPhone, removing the last hurdle for its coming release in June.

The iPhone was granted the required FCC certification milestone late last week and is on track to sell next month, according to Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris. A lot of critics have cited this delayed FCC approval as a sign that all was not well, and that the iPhone would not be able to ship as scheduled, if at all. With the approval, pre-selling can begin, along all sorts of long-delayed (and unnecessary) marketing and selling campaigns.

It’s real, folks. It’s definitely coming. And on time, it seems.

Curious, this problem I now have with my 2nd generation iPod shuffle.

A couple of weeks ago it began to just blink back at me, yellow-orange-yellow-orange, instead of the comforting steady yellow it usually does when it’s playing my podcasts back at me on the train. Then after a bit of this, it shuts down, refusing me my daily MRT fix of Buzz Out Loud. At first I thought it needed to get charged, but even when I hooked it up overnight to the Powerbook, I got the same blink blink blink the next day. Uh-oh.

I restored it and reloaded the files, and it worked for about a couple of days, and then blink blink blink again. So I gamely did the restore routine once more, and it steadfastly refused to play. I thought it was some problem with the laptop, so I restored it on the desktop Mac, and while connected on both computers it seemed to work fine, unplugged it was blink blink blink. I did it several times over until I gave up for the meantime. I resorted to carrying the bigger 5th gen while I figured this one out.

Did I drop it somehow, crunch it underfoot? Did I leave it in the coin pocket of my jeans and let it go through the laundry? Did the dog ingest it and return it from the other end and the maids just cleaned it up and didn’t tell me? No, it had been just where it usually was - on my ID lanyard.

At the office, Clarissa Concio, Editor-in-Chief of our music magazine Burn told me her beloved iPod had gone bad too at around the same time, and she was afraid our iPods were exhibiting the Blink of Death, also known as Error 1418, which apparently had been happening a bit more often than was comfortable. This notorious problem, also known variously as Error 1415, Error 1417 and Error 1428, attacks any model iPod when upgrading to iTunes 7 or later. Even Apple seems dumbfounded, as evidenced by their page on the problem, and advises people to “attempt to restore your iPod.” Helpful.

What I did try out of desperation was restore the thing on the Thinkpad T43, effectively changing the nationality of my shuffle to Windows whether he liked it or not. Lo and behold, it started working again! So thinking the thorn, whatever it was, had been pulled from the paw, I went back and restored it again on the Mac.

Blink blink blink. No dice.

At least it isn’t a permanent hardware problem, I thought. Just some software snafu with iTunes. At the risk of driving the shuffle insane, I shifted it back to Windows, authorized the T43 on the iTunes Store, resubscribed all my podcasts (and even added a few) and resynced everything. I had no choice. Now it works fine, only it thinks it is a Windows iPod now, which essentially, for all intents and purposes, it is.

Poor thing.

Let’s get this out of the way first: I don’t hate the iTunes Store; in fact I love it. For instance, I love that you can buy tinge style, song by song, a Filipino quirk that even foreigners love. Which makes it all the more irritating that the niggles are even there - in comparison to the rest of entire service, the mistakes are glaring and magnified.

I’m just glad I can even purchase from it, although “purchase” is a big stretch. I do buy occasionally, but like most folk hereabouts, I’m mostly after the weekly freebies: songs, TV episodes, audiobooks, a game demo now and then, and of course the wealth of podcasts available on the site.

This isn’t to say they haven’t been working hard to make the site a good one. Some time ago they modified the downloading rules to allow you to get discounted rates if you purchase a complete album where you’ve previously bought individual tracks from. That’s one less on my list now.

What am I talking about?

1. I don’t like it that the Store doesn’t make any obvious and up-front distinction between audio and video content. I use a 2G iPod shuffle exclusively for audio podcasts, and I sometimes go fishing for new and interesting content when I get tired of my staples Buzz Out Loud, Filmspotting, TWIT, Cranky Geeks and so forth. It’s damned irritating to find something interesting, drill down the pages to get to it and discover at the end of it all that it’s a big fat vidcast, which makes it useless for my 1gb screenless shuffle. Can’t they just say so right off so I don’t waste my time?

2. The Top Songs and the other”Top” lists on the first page of the store don’t seem to really reflect the top anything, as in most popular or most purchased - it’s more like the newest additions and recommendations for the week. Eh?

3. The 30-sec previews seem to be selected automatically, without any intellectual intervention as to which 30-sec portion should be made available so you can make an informed choice whether to buy a song or not. Thus you sometimes end up with a 30-sec tuneless instrumental intro which cuts out just as the vocals start. Or maybe some boring random, out-of-context stanza rather than the catchy hook of the refrain. It’s just plain marketing common sense.

4. They don’t update or warn people that certain podcasts have died a natural death, i.e., the creators have disappeared from the face of the earth and there hasn’t been a new episode for months and months, yet they’re touted as subscribable still. I’d rather they’d just be archived and us told that it’s a dead end.

5. They nag you to death on iTunes if they see you haven’t listened to a podcast for a while, and automatically withhold downloading new episodes. Sometimes I just can’t get to the episodes because of work, and then when I do update, there are a half-dozen shows undownloaded and marked with an exclamation point. I have to deliberately activate the subscription again, and after I do it just starts to download the latest one, forcing me to click on each episode I’d missed one by one to get them. Argh.

6. The free tracks are only available for a week. Sometimes I forget, and they’re gone forever - at least as free tracks, making me feel bad. Hey, I’m OC that way.

7. There is officially no iTunes Store for my country. Still.

8. The search feature isn’t thorough and a bit wonky. There have been times I can’t find a track with the most basic and logical search argument, and I have to figure out alternate ways of looking for it.

9. I wish the games can be played in iTunes on your computer. Sometimes the small iPod screen gets to me.

10. I wish there was a way that when you delete the songs from a playlist, there is an option to delete it from the library for good at the same time. You have to muck around the lib to clean up stuff you don’t want anymore, and going through that massive pile is tough. While we’re on the topic, it would be great if the software was intelligent enough to root out duplicates right off at ripping time and keep you from wasting space with multiple copies of the same exact song. Wishful thinking, I know.

For all I know there are existing solutions to these niggles already, I just haven’t discovered them , or I’m too lamebrained or lazy to figure it out. If so, chime in and enlighten me, or add your own complaints to the list. Maybe Apple might take notice somehow and correct them, if not in Leopard, in the next iTunes update. It doesn’t cost anything to hope, right?

Heads-up!

Apple just upgraded the MacBook line with faster processors, 1gb RAM and larger drives today. Everything else remains the same. Specs:

2.0GHz White MacBook, 80GB, 1GB RAM: $1099
2.16GHz White MacBook, 120GB, 1GB RAM: $1299
2.16GHz Black MacBook, 160GB, 1GB RAM: $1499

More on the Apple website. Time to upgrade? Again?