I'm a huge fan of independent and college radio stations, but even then, most of these stations are "programmed" by genre, and I would rather listen to a station that is completely unpredictable, where you might hear the Dead Kennedys followed by Jurassic 5, followed by Johnny Cash, etc. IOW, true "Freeform Radio".
KEXP radio in Seattle, I have found, is one of the best freeform stations in the world. They even have an UNCOMPRESSED stream of their broadcast available (sure, it's Windows Media format, but it's still a neat idea), in addition to WMP, MP3 and RealAudio streams.
Also dig the real-time playlist!. This is a great way to discover and document cool music that you've never heard before.
Man, I was a pretty pathetic kid back in the Creative Computing/Compute!/Family Computing/Nibble days. Being that I couldn't afford to buy the magazines, I would ride my bike 4 miles to the supermarket, and plant my ass in front of the magazine rack, copying the BASIC source code by hand, with a pen and paper, straight out of the magazines. Then I'd come home or go to school and type them into the Apple II+/IIe's, C64/VIC-20's and IBM PC-jr's. Whatta dork, eh?
There was also an Apple focused magazine, whose name escapes me, that printed thier BASIC sourcecode in every issue using some wierd, scannable black and white "strip", which would save you the effort of manually typing in the programs. Of course, you had to buy the paper-strip scanner, which was around $100 IIRC. Cute idea though. Definitely way ahead of its time.
Telex makes a PCI card system called the "EDAT Zing" that allows you to digitize audio cassettes at highspeed (up to 8x) directly to WAV files.
It's expensive (between $2400-$4000), but when you consider just how much time it can save, it's well worth it.
Short of that, I concur with a previous poster that college interns are the next best thing to overseas sweatshop labor.
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I'm a huge fan of independent and college radio stations, but even then, most of these stations are "programmed" by genre, and I would rather listen to a station that is completely unpredictable, where you might hear the Dead Kennedys followed by Jurassic 5, followed by Johnny Cash, etc. IOW, true "Freeform Radio". KEXP radio in Seattle, I have found, is one of the best freeform stations in the world. They even have an UNCOMPRESSED stream of their broadcast available (sure, it's Windows Media format, but it's still a neat idea), in addition to WMP, MP3 and RealAudio streams. Also dig the real-time playlist!. This is a great way to discover and document cool music that you've never heard before.
There was also an Apple focused magazine, whose name escapes me, that printed thier BASIC sourcecode in every issue using some wierd, scannable black and white "strip", which would save you the effort of manually typing in the programs. Of course, you had to buy the paper-strip scanner, which was around $100 IIRC. Cute idea though. Definitely way ahead of its time.
Telex makes a PCI card system called the "EDAT Zing" that allows you to digitize audio cassettes at highspeed (up to 8x) directly to WAV files. It's expensive (between $2400-$4000), but when you consider just how much time it can save, it's well worth it. Short of that, I concur with a previous poster that college interns are the next best thing to overseas sweatshop labor.