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$44.99 |
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$56.72 |
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$38.99 |
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$43.99 |
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$5.00 |
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$14.00 |
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$10.00 |
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$38.99 |
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$51.99 |
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$46.99 |
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$45.99 |
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$44.99 |
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$48.99 |
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$46.99 |
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$44.99 |
Listen to a World of Radio Stations on the Internet
Listen to a World of Radio Stations on the Internet
Back when I had more hair, there was a great independent radio
station called KFAT in Gilroy, California, that played western swing, blues,
and other genres of music that you rarely heard on other stations. KFAT went
off the air 20 years ago (the call letters now belong to a Top 40 station in
Anchorage, Alaska), but a bunch of KFAT onair personalities started up a new
stationKPIGthat broadcasts exclusively over the Internet from kpig.com. Now
I can still get my heapin' helpin' of "fat" tunes even though I dwell in
faroff Colorado.
Lots of AM and FM radio broadcasts can be heard on the Internet,
many providing programming from the quirky to the sublime to listeners who are
beyond the reach of the stations' local transmitters. Some stations broadcast
only on the Net, pumping out great jazz, the latest trance
and techno mixes, and news and talk in just about every language. To hear them,
all you have to do is tune in using a streaming audio player.
My favorite is Nullsoft's Winamp, but othersMicrosoft's Windows
Media Player, Musicmatch's Musicmatch Jukebox, Apple's QuickTime, and
RealNetworks' RealOnewill also do the job. You can download these players
from PCWorld.com's
Downloads
library.
So Many Stations
Each of these audio players lets you browse Internet radio
stations (see
FIGURE
1), though most promote broadcasters that feature the player
manufacturer's technology. For example, Winamp's minibrowser lets you browse
Nullsoft's Shoutcast directorya list of stations that broadcast using the
company's Shoutcast Server streaming audio software. Windows Media Player's
Media Guide lets you peruse stations broadcasting in Microsoft's Windows Media
Audio format; QuickTime and RealOne offer similar indexes that spotlight
QuickTime and Real Audio formats, respectively.
Luckily, you're not limited to one format or anotherhaving all
these players installed simultaneously is no problem. What you really need is a
directory that lists every station regardless of format.
RadioLocator
is a good place to start, especially if you want to search for foreign
broadcasts by country. The site lists thousands of Internet stations, as well
as AM and FM broadcasters, but it doesn't show which formats the stations
broadcast in.
BRS
WebRadio includes the digital audio format information for
many stations, and it lets you search for stations by location, call letters,
or programming.
RadioTower.com is similar, but
it also lets you rate stations on quality and posts those ratings in its
listings.
Connect Instantly
Once you find a station you like, you need a way to find it again
without having to search an online directory. Like Web browsers, most streaming
audio players let you save station bookmarks that connect to the audio stream
instantly.
To bookmark a station in Winamp 2.79, click the
Control menu in the program's upperleft
corner and then choose
Bookmarks,
Add current as bookmark. In RealOne, choose
View,
Favorites,
Add To Favorites. In Windows Media Player,
click
Radio Tuner on the left side of the player,
then click
Recently Played Stations, select the station
you want to remember, and choose
Add to My Stations.
The bestsounding Internet radio stations broadcast their audio in
nearCD quality, usually at 128 kbps. That's too much data for a telephone
connection, but that doesn't mean streaming audio is only for broadband users.
Most stations offer lowerbitrate streams for dialup users and for specific
media types. Most 28kbps MP3 streams sound like AM radionot that great, but
perfectly fine for news and other speech broadcasts. Interestingly, the Windows
Media Audio format sounds noticeably better at lower bit rates. For example,
London's JazzFM.com Windows Media stream sounds great at only 20 kbps, though
not as rich as a local stereo FM broadcast.
Crush Your Own Cookies
You don't need Betty Crocker to bake a cake, and you don't need a
thirdparty cookieblocking utility to take control of who can and can't leave
cookies on your PC. Cookies are small text files that Web sites save on your
hard disk to customize your browsing experience. Though mostly benign and often
helpful (they bookmark your ID for easy return to the site), cookies can be a
threat to your privacy (some track your every move on the Net). Fortunately,
the latest versions of the Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Opera browsers
include cookiecrushing tools that are nearly as powerful as those offered by
thirdparty utilities.
Internet Explorer 6: Choose
Tools,
Internet Options and click the
Privacy tab. IE's privacylevel presets may
be good enough for most of us, but you can also configure IE to accept or
reject cookies site by site. Click the
Edit button, enter the URL of the site you
want to alwaysor neverprevent from writing cookies to your hard disk, and
then click either
Block or
Allow (see
FIGURE
2). When you're done entering URLs, click
OK to save the setting.
In addition to managing cookies site by site, you can set IE to
accept, block, or prompt before accepting all cookies from first parties (which
are the sites you visit) and/or third parties (often the site's advertisers
tracking your browsing habits). Click the
Advanced button under the Privacy tab, check
Override automatic cookie handling, select
your desired settings under 'Firstparty Cookies' and 'Thirdparty Cookies',
and click
OK.
Netscape 6.2: Choose
Edit,
Preferences, click the arrow next to
'Privacy & Security', and then select
Cookies. To block all thirdparty cookies,
click
Enable cookies for the originating web site
only. For moredetailed cookie control, choose
View Stored Cookies. To banish an individual
site's cookies from Netscape in perpetuity, check
Don't allow removed cookies to be reaccepted
later, then select the unwanted cookie from the list and click
Remove Cookie.
The Cookie Sites sheet indicates that Netscape is planning to add
the ability to block cookies site by site in a future version; currently, the
feature is disabled.
Opera 6.x: Opera is the cookie wrangler's browser of
choice, offering tremendous control over cookie behaviorprobably more than
most of us care to have and certainly more than IE and Netscape. Choose
File,
Preferences, then select
Privacy in the settings list. You can create
a list of sites (Opera calls them "servers") whose cookies you want to treat
individually. Click
Edit server filters, choose the action you
want to take on the server's cookies (such as
Refuse from server), enter the server URL in
the field at the bottom of the dialog box, and click
Add. When you're done specifying what to do
with whose cookies, click
OK. On the other hand, to accept only
cookies from the servers you defined as safe in the server list, choose
Accept only cookies from selected servers
from the first dropdown list in your Privacy Preferences. To block thirdparty
cookies, choose
Do not accept thirdparty cookies from the
second dropdown list.
Send your questions and tips to
nettips@spanbauer.com. We
pay $50 for published items. Scott Spanbauer is a PC World contributing
editor.
Revive Dead Connections
Has your Internet connection's heartbeat ever suddenly flatlined
in midbrowse? This can happen when your Internet Connection Sharing server or
hardware router reboots, or when your ISP changes the address of the DHCP
server that hands out IP addresses. Your computer may need a new IP address to
venture onto the Net in this situation. To help it get one in Windows XP and
2000, choose
Start,
Run, then enter
ipconfig /renew in the Open field (note the
space before the forward slash) and click OK. In Windows 98 SE and Me, the
command is
ipconfig /renew_all (with a space before the
slash and an underline before
all).
Revision Control: Latest Software Tweaks
ZoneAlarm Pro
3.0.118; 3.4MB. According to Zone Labs, this feebased version
is faster and more stable than the initial 3.0.081 release. The company also
says it works more smoothly than previous versions with Internet Connection
Sharing in Windows 98 SE and Me, and it fixes an HTML rendering glitch that can
strike when you use the firewall's new advertisementblocking feature.
Agent
1.92; 2MB. Version 1.92 of Forté's Usenet newsreader
adds a trash folder, improves some existing features, and takes care of various
bugs; but more important than the fixes and enhancements is the application's
added support for the YEnc binary encoding algorithm.
Opera
6.03; 11MB with Java, 3.26MB without Java. The latest version
of the littlebrowser thatcould cleans up many minor interface glitches that
were in the initial 6.0 release, plus a file upload security hole.