Hidden Gems

I love the iPhone and the iPad as tech gadgets but I've always hated iTunes with a passion. Yet I have just discovered a trove of hidden gems in iTunes, viz. the iTunes U service.

This service is the academic version of iTunes: it allows the user to download podcast-like lectures of famous university professors. At the moment, it has more than 500,000 lectures available for free download!
In the French-language area of the service, for instance, one has free access to the Collège de France courses on Confucius by noted Sinologist Anne Cheng [whose seminal work Histoire de la pensée chinoise (Paris, 1997) was a major source when I wrote the background chapters of The Celestial Empire].