When a dork has extra time on his or her hands, an audio book in the trusty personal audio player can be a wonderful escape. But where does an interested dork find dork-friendly audio books?
Audiobooksforfree.com, of course!
As the founder of ABFF says, "Several established publishing companies have been trying to sell audiobook downloads over the internet, but most ignore the reality of the Web and attempt to push their own non-MP3 formats. Although strictly complying with all copyright laws themselves,
Audiobooksforfree.com is very sceptical (British spelling) of the effectiveness of copyright protection on the Web."
Audiobooksforfree.com offers free downloads of thousands of books in a computer voiced, 8Kbps format. DORK ALERT - some personal audio players can't cope with such a low bit rate so a dork might be limited to listening to the free versions on the PC. Or, a curious dork can visit the
dorkware sites and pick up a free MP3 transcoder to move the bitrate up to an audio player friendly value. Uh-oh, this post might have crossed the line from dork to geek - must... be... careful... not... to... cross... over... to... the... dark... side...
television. You would need to look pretty hard to find something worse than the 1953 version of Flash Gordon of the Galaxy Bureau of Investigation. 27 episodes of this gem were filmed in, of all places, post-war Berlin Germany. Three Americans were imported for the lead roles and the other parts were played by locals, complete with German accents. A presentation of the DuMont network, three episodes have survived on the Internet Archive.
