Last Friday morning while taking care of a few errands, I stopped at Target to check out the electronics clearance rack, where over the years I’ve found many great deals on video games and computer storage media. While poking around amongst the marked down ipad cases and wii shovelware, I found one of these:

This is the Pandora radio by Livio, an internet-enabled device that connects to your home network and streams the Pandora internet music service, as well as thousands of internet feeds of radio stations from around the world.

It was marked at about 95.5% off of regular retail price; roughly the value of the loose change rattling around in the average upper-middle class sofa. So of course I bought it.

I use Pandora quite a bit, both through my Android phone and via my Roku streaming media player. It’s a neat service, which generally delivers on its promise of generating a taste-pleasing listening experience based on your expressed preferences. It generally gets it right, too, even if its algorithms tend to think I really ought to listen to more Eminem. The most fun I have with Pandora, though, is trying to predict how the logic works – set up preferences for say Madonna, The Go-Gos, and the Hooters, and then see how long it takes for it to play a song by Cyndi Lauper. Trust me, it’s more fun than it probably sounds.

The real selling point of this little box, however, is the access to radio stations from around the world. I was listening to the news in Welsh within a few minutes, and have plans to start exploring the dial in eastern europe to see if metal is still as big there as everyone says. Also, I found I can listen to my beloved WXPN easily, as well as WFMU, so I can finally find out what this “The Best Show” business people keep mentioning is all about.

Mostly, though, this weekend we found ourselves listening to 98FM from Dublin, Ireland. It’s really just a top 40-pop station, but it’s playlist is just different enough from what you hear in the states that it’s noticeable, and the change is pleasant.

With this piece of equipment in hand (or, rather, plugged in in my kitchen), I’m now equipped to enable my latest obsession and hear all the various localized versions of Gaga’s “Yoü and I” in their various local habitats.