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> From Sindi:
Before I forget:
http://keesan.freeshell.org/bl/mplay-class.tgz
contains a menu/script mplay-class which lets you
choose from a multitude of mplayer-usable classical
radio stations or select sradio, which uses lynx
to access an html file with sradio.tv stations.
If you don't have lynx, either rewrite one of
my files or symlink it to links.  Unfortunately
most of these stations require broadband.


> Message from Steven
> ===================
> Sindi wrote:
> > Prague's Classic http://sradio.tv/asx/654.asx (32K)
> > Norway Oslo      http://sradio.tv/asx/971.asx (40K
> > RDP Portugal     http://sradio.tv/asx/1072.asx (32K)
> > Otto Opera House http://sradio.tv/asx/603.asx (32K)
> > Otto Baroque     http://sradio.tv/asx/24014.asx (32K)

My apologies, but sradio.tv had nothing slower than 32K
that I could access with my setup.  I appreciate your
problem since I also used dialup until recently, which
is why I included station speeds.  E. Europe and China
had plenty of slower stations but the classical ones I
tried did not work with lynx/mplayer.  It is possible
that some of them were just busy.

http://keesan.freeshell.org/bl/classrad-dialup-2011.tgz
is a collection of stations that don't require broadband.

See 'slowrad' for a script that generates a larger menu of
stations 8-32K, most of which no longer work.
wdav, weku, mbpc still work at 24K - check out the
others yourself.  I think I included all the working
ones in the 'dialup 2011' collection and at least
five more of these work at 24K.

> I don't like 32K and 40K streams.  They take up so
> much bandwidth on my dialup connection that I can't
> do anything else online without exhausting the
> stream.  20K and 24K streams are fine -- as long as
> I fill the cache first, I can do my normal online
> browsing, emailing and googling. I love 8K and 16K
> streams, although they are getting harder to find
> these days.  I have three 16K streams and one 8K
> stream that I regularly listen to.  They are talk
> stations (no music) so the audio quality is fine.
> There used to be a lot more 16K streams, but most
> of them have "upgraded" to an unusable format
> (swf or 48K plus).  My favorite talk station,
> which streamed happily at 12K for many years,
> is now streaming at 128K (talk only, no music).
> Ridiculous.

I agree.  I had to switch from ISA to PCI modem
to even make 24K stations usable.

A lot of people living far from towns here also
still use dialup connections because nothing
else is available (other than 3G cell phone or
satellite, which are expensive).

Have you tried downloading midi files instead?
Classical LPs are 10 for $1 here at our library
booksale.

> The streams get fatter and fatter, the graphics
> get denser and denser, the webpages are filled
> with more and more junk.  This is completely
> unnecessary.  My ears can't hear the difference
> between a 16K stream (non-music) and a 128K
> stream.  My eyes can't see the difference
> between a 100kb graphic and a 1000kb graphic.
> But, what I do notice, what is blindingly
> obvious, is how that useless bloat clogs my
> hardware.

16K sounds better to me than the only classical
broadcast stations we can get in our large university
town, all from about 100 km away and full of static.

Online, a 100K graphic is still overkill unless it
is full page.

The newer browsers are actually better at dealing
with bloat.  Opera 10 Turbo will reduce image quality,
and 11 has a 'clean pages' extension that will
show only full-page text, and various browser
plugins to eliminate ads, flash, etc.  But the
browsers themselves require a fast cpu and lots
of memory (and GTK2 or QT4).

Don't forget 'modern' mail programs by default
sending two copies of every mail, the second with
html tags added.  (Office is even worse).

> My first computer was a great wordprocessor,
> had some wonderful games, and displayed
> nice graphics.  It could even take a 300

Mine was bad at graphics - TTL monitor, which
displayed text much better than VGA did.

> baud modem (although it was too expensive
> for me).  My current computer is 1000 times
> faster and has 30,000 times the RAM.  Surely

Mine had .5MB RAM x 30,000 would be 15MB (?)
And 8 MHz.  I used it for 13 years.

> several minutes with an unreadable overlapping
> display (because some idiot thinks an 800x600
> screen has insufficient pixels to display his
> graphical masterpiece).

Opera 9 produces overlapping display if you
tell it to resize image to fit page.
I found this out at the forum.  You can
display the whole page at 80% instead
and make the text larger or switch to
View, Accessibility Layout (shows nice clear
text, and images along the right side of the
page instead of overlapping at the top,
similar to what links2 shows at
http://dpreview.com, where a row of images
are on top of each other if you resize
images to fit page, or normally four
of them are across page top, but with
acc. layout or links2 they are on the
right side.  Or maybe those are different
images?

This page was designed for 1024 resolution.
All my computers made this century can do that.
One low-end 1999 laptop displays 800x600.

Is there a particular page causing you problems?
Opera might have a way to display it usable.

Sindi