htpc

USB-UIRT drivers / getting started page.

"Fiire, a company which manufactures and sells modular media boxes and remotes aimed at unifying your media center has a few items it'd like you to see. The whole shebang is based around the FiireEngine, a $799 box that acts as a central hub to your media world... The Engine is meant to be accessed through the company's FiireStations ($499-899), set-top boxes or wallmount units that stream media from the FiireEngine to any location you want..."

Great idea, and given Microsoft's botched their MCE release so badly it's not funny, but seriously, could the box look anymore tackier? Looks like some crappy plastic generic case with a sticker slapped on. The UI looks awful too, but maybe these guys fixed that in their version...

Supports PCI-E and AGP.

Quoted: Buy ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail Online

This little device lets you use your Xbox 360 wireless controller on your PC.

Quoted: Amazon.com: Xbox 360 Wireless Gaming Receiver for Windows: Video Games

Quoted: "Managed Windows API" is a collection of C# components that wrap Windows API functionality.

Need to look at this vs. online storage. It can hold 200 DVDs or CDs. One extremely cool feature is you can load it with your CD collection and batch rip! It will also play DVDs via MCE's interface. Need to figure out how flexible it is ... SDK, alternate OS compatibility, etc. Tempting to wait for a BD version, but $399.99 after rebate isn't THAT ridiculous.

I could recover some of the cost by offering "CD ripping services" for people with big collections :)

Quoted: Amazon.com: Sony VGP-XL1B2 Media Changer (also: VGP-XL1B): Computers & PC Hardware

Some tips for waking a sleeping PC on LAN activity ... a timely post, since I was just wondering how I could cut down on my multi-PC power usage (without losing remote SVN, remote desktop, etc.).

Great TV Tuner card for MCE. Hybrid cards are pretty common, but this one is unique in having a hardware MPEG-2 encoder for its NTSC tuner (in addition to its ATSC tuner for OTA HD).

That means you get two tuners which operate at the same time for the cost of one PCI slot. Cheaper than the hybrid ATI 650 with no hardware encoder for its analog NTSC tuner (and you can only use one tuner at a time).

This little device lets you use your Xbox 360 wireless controller on your PC.

Quoted: Amazon.com: Xbox 360 Wireless Gaming Receiver for Windows: Video Games