Well, I haven't done much in the past two months, due to some annoying health issues. So, most of my spare time (vegetating) had to be spent on things that are not too mentally exhausting, yet I dislike TV in general. So, what did I do as forms of "passive entertainment"? Note that everything I talk about below is free unless otherwise noted.
First, I listened to a lot of audio and video (podcasts). For audio podcasts, it helps me relax my eyes, which I enjoy doing on my daily commute. I mostly listen to "
The Young Turks" (even though I'm not an American), as it fills up easily 3 hours. Also, some audio netcasts from the
TWiT network, including "
this WEEK in TECH" and the "
Daily Giz Wiz". Also, "
Today in the Past" a "page-a-day" audio calendar by John Hodgman read from his latest book (it's part of his audio book that I already own, but I'm too lazy to pause it every day). Also I listen to the
Engadget and
gdgt podcasts for more tech news. When I want to watch something, I usually watch video podcasts on my iPhone as I somewhat find it more bearable to my eyes than my 17" laptop screen. The video podcasts I watch are mostly from
Revision3:
Diggnation,
The Digg Reel and
AppJudgement. I also watch Robert Llewellyn's
CarPool, a British series of interviews done while Robert Llewellyn gives a car lift to somebody else, and
SuperNews, a comedy animated series shown on the "
current" TV station and given for free as a video podcast. By the way, one clear advantage the iPod Touch and iPhone have over the iPod classic (and even iTunes) is that all audio podcasts can be played at twice the normal speed (without increasing the sound pitch like on tape), which is great when your listening queue is over 10 hours...
Second, I also started to listen to a few audio books. There are some good free public domain audio books at
LibriVox, but most books I listened to came from the iTunes store or
Audible. For individual books, it's cheaper on iTunes, but on Audible with a "plan" of one book per month or 12 books per year it's a lot cheaper, and Audible offers CD-quality audio of higher quality than iTunes' audio book quality.
Third and last, when I still want to read rather than listen or watch, I do most of my reading from my iPhone. I use
Aji Reader PDF for technical books or web articles saved in PDF format, and
Stanza for ebooks. Sometimes though some public domain books on the
Project Gutenberg site are not well converted in ebook format, so I use the cross-platform desktop application
calibre to convert my books from HTML or text to ebook. By the way, calibre is an excellent tool to manage your (DRM-free) ebook collection.
Published on February 23, 2010 at 15:51 EST
Older post: Semantic Search Engines
Newer post: Open-Source WarioWare