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Best Free Stuff on the Web

Our eighth annual extravaganza uncovers 101 essential sites, services, and tools you didn't know you couldn't live without.

Robert Luhn

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Arts and Entertainment

Tune In

When it comes to Web radio, ease of setup and number of tunes are paramount. For our money (none), the pick is Yahoo's LaunchCast. Personalizing your "station" takes a minute: Pick areas of interest and artists you like, click a button, and the hits start coming. You can also get lyrics and share the link to your station with someone else. You get few controls, however, and at start-up you must see ads. BBC Radio Player is a quirky companion. You can listen to BBC Radio programs covering all music genres, and better yet, local stations such as Radio Wales, along with the soap opera The Archers and intentionally funny (?) documentaries, such as "The History of Psychedelia."

All Music, All the Time

The ultimate music reference site for most genres is All Music Guide. Search by artist, album, song, style, or label, and you receive detailed bios, discographies with user and AMG experts' ratings, and superior suggestions for similar artists to check out. When we examined the site, the listings covered 589,466 albums and 4,711,160 tunes. While the emphasis is on available albums, you'll find a lot of out-of-print titles, too. The user-run MusicMoz is a good flip side. This discography-cum-metasearch site whips through billions of Web pages looking for info on your favorite artist. It also has a gangbusters Yahoo-like catalog with links to MP3 sites, musician resources, shopping sites, composer's tools, and more.

Veg Out

The standard reference for television programming is The Complete Directory of Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows, but TV Tome comes pretty close. For each listed show you get summaries; air dates; episode lists with specifics; cast listings with links to bios; notable goofs; reader forums; and cross-links to related material. The site is hardly complete--at the time of this writing, it has 1400 guides available, with over 2700 new ones in development.

Art on the Internet

Forget all that paint-and-canvas stuff. Thanks to the Web, interactive digital art is all the rage. And the Whitney ArtPort is your portal to electric, eclectic, and Webcentric art. The site has five areas: gates (entree to artist Web sites), commissioned work (a recent show: interactive art generated by code that could not exceed 8KB), exhibitions, collections, and links to other digital galleries, museums, and similar sites.

Primo Puzzles

Here's an old wine in a new bottle--The New York Times' Crossword Games site. To get new puzzles and multiplayer tricks, you gotta pay. But slide down to the Classic Puzzle link, and you can summon a challenging crossword from the paper's archives, updated weekly. Puzzle fanatics should check out Ray Hamel's Crossword Puzzles page. Hamel's site lists 250 puzzle sites, foreign language crosswords, solver sites, articles, software, and anagram generators.

Truly Weird Omnibus

For fans of twisted music, there's no better place than Otis Fodder's 365 Days Projects, which features daily downloadable MP3s of the most baffling audio around, from corporate minimusicals that push photocopiers to Barbie-and-Ken duets. It's so addictive, you'll need a second hard drive just to hold all the files you'll download. Good tagalongs: Incorrect Music from WFMU radio, featuring "an asylum of crackpot and visionary music," and Miserable Melodies, where Travolta, Shatner, and others sing!

For boob tooberie, we suggest Modern Television, which distorts TV coverage (especially news) for comic and political effect. Some of the topics can be a little dated, though. For a frivolous diversion, try The Oracle of Starbucks to get an analysis of your personality based on your beverage selection. Demented science fans should roam the Annals of Improbable Research, a site devoted to "genuine, and genuinely funny, research." Marvel at such (real) studies as "Feline Reactions to Bearded Men" and "Nano-Pasta--Thin Film Realization of Ultra-Fast Cooking Pasta Using Glancing Angle Deposition." Sign up for the newsletter and get the madness delivered to your in-box.

Robert Luhn is an El Cerrito, California-based freelance writer. He can be reached at pcwluhn@aol.com. Special thanks to Jim Aspinwall, Saul Feldman, and Stan Miastkowski. Christopher Null is a San Francisco-based freelance writer, and Dennis O'Reilly is a senior associate editor for PC World.
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