3 minutes, 9 seconds
Listen to the rousing gospel track "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free," from To Be Free: The Nina Simone Story (RCA/Legacy), a four-disc immersion in the late soul legend's eclectic career.
A few minutes
Why listen to all those phone messages when you can skim them instead? PhoneTag's voice-recognition technology will send a text-message transcript of your voice mails to your cell phone ($10 per month for up to 40; PhoneTag.com)
5 minutes
Read the daily musings of both novice writers and literary celebrities on the lively RedRoom.com, an online social network for authors and readers (Amy Tan and James Patterson are among the frequent blog contributors).
An hour
Watch a new episode of Iconoclasts, which pairs up innovators from different fields and lets the cameras and conversation roll (starts October 16 on the Sundance Channel).
90 minutes
Meet female combat veterans of the war in Iraq in Lioness, just one of the far-ranging films in the superb series Independent Lens (starts October 22 on PBS).
