Best free stuff online: Leisure time

From...

By Kim Zetter

(IDG) -- There seems no end to the amount of information and useful advice available on the Web today. Fortunately for those less productive folks, there is also no shortage of games, music, and other diversions to help pass your leisure time.

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Digital made the radio star

Got a longing for that cheesy, all-80's radio station you used to listen to back home or the Moscow rock station you discovered on your last vacation? RadioTower links you to over 1300 online radio stations from 80 countries, including news, sports, and financial/business stations. Simply download the free RealPlayer or Windows Media Player and browse by station name, country, or music category. With free radio like this, it's no wonder that fee-based Net music hasn't caught on yet.

Change of face

If you're tired of a world dominated by Times New Roman and Courier, FontFace, Larabie Fonts, and Pizzadude will brighten your days with hundreds of inventive Windows-compatible typefaces for any mood. Most are free, and many that do charge a small fee have freeware versions available. FontFace features such typefaces as Takeout (Chinese restaurant lettering), Blood of Dracula (with dripping letters), and Star Jedi (inspired by Star Wars).

Culture club

You'll feel smarter just adding this erudite site to your Favorites list. A brilliant collection of ideas on subjects from Laurel and Hardy to Freud and Jung, Arts & Letters Daily mimics a 19th-century broadsheet, and is jam-packed with fascinating articles culled daily from publications around the world. Witty teasers like this one pull you into the stories: a wood without pigs is like a ballroom without women (for an article on animal husbandry). There are also links to 19 newspapers from around the globe, 74 journals and magazines, radio stations, and columnists -- from the prickly Molly Ivins to the patrician George Will. Make it your home page and you'll never lack for interesting party talk.

Fenced in

Hell hath no fury like a British cyclist scorned. It all began when the stuffy owners of an iron fence in London posted a sign warning commuters not to lock their bikes to the fence. So the outraged author of What Should I Put on the Fence? has been locking everything but his bike to the fence ever since: a tricycle (not technically a bicycle), an ironing board, even a pot of tea (for the haggard handyman who has to trim away the items daily with a hacksaw). This kind of quirky, personality-driven site is what helped make the Web popular in the first place. See the photos and read the author's engaging narrative ("Wife worries about fence obsession") documenting the Keystone KopsA-like shenanigans; then nominate your own offering to the fence gods.

Gittin' jiggy wit it

You love jigsaw puzzles but hate doing the same ones over and over. JigZone has over 800 photos and 32 puzzle shapes to choose from. Pick from categories like art & architecture and travel & culture, then choose the number of pieces and their shape, such as 91 pieces shaped like lizards or 247 triangular-shaped pieces. A timer tracks how long it takes you to solve the puzzle. If you get frustrated, click the "solve" button to see the pieces fall into place. Think it's child's play? Try the blue shark puzzle (in murky water of varying shades of aquamarine) with 247 triangle-shaped pieces, and you'll be hitting that Solve button pretty quickly. If crossword puzzles are more to your taste, pay a visit to Puzzle Choice, which has printable puzzles for solving offline, plus interactive versions.

By the book

Many free e-book sites promise a lot of titles but then deliver only obscure material you'd never want to read. But MemoWare has over 10,000 PDA documents for reading on Palm, Pocket PC, and other handheld computers. And the quality is as impressive as the quantity. Among the wealth of offerings are literature (classic and contemporary novels, children's stories, and mysteries), business, philosophy, and religious titles. In addition, you'll find files that are useful for everyday tasks, such as ones containing worldwide airport codes and airline 800 numbers, medical information from the National Institutes of Health, dictionaries in various languages, sporting event schedules, area codes for the United States, and the IRS's list of per diem rates allowable for business travelers in various cities and countries. The offerings go on and on. There's even a file containing an episode guide to three seasons of The Sopranos. Now that's useful.