Back when coffee shop wifi was a new thing, and AP Isolation hadn't been invented yet, I used to discover a lot of music on Network Neighborhood at my local Car

Back when coffee shop wifi was a new thing, and AP Isolation hadn't been invented yet, I used to discover a lot of music on Network Neighborhood at my local Caribou Coffee. A lot of folks would have their file-sharing settings wide open, so I could just click around the WLAN and look for mp3's. Found all sorts of interesting stuff, and if someone left a writable folder, I'd take-some-leave-some in kind. Those days are long gone, so lately it's estate sales. Show up on the last day of the sale and pick up a whole milk-crate of CDs for $40, probably 150 pieces in there. Basically if I recognize and like a few artists in the collection, I figure this person's tastes overlapped enough with mine that I should give the rest of the collection a spin. Oh, wow. Best part is, it's all physical media which can never DRM itself out of my collection again. (I've ranted previously about random tracks just "turning gray" on my Spotify playlists, presumably because of some licensing dispute or whatever, and how deeply offensive that is to the fans who curated these playlists and assign significance to the songs therein.) It's a bit of work to rip and encode, but it's not like the old days where a 60-minute album might take 90 minutes to rip and encode. CPUs are quick and USB CDROMs are cheap; I can do 5 albums in parallel in 10 minutes. Then stuff the milkcrate in the basement and forget about it.