I started reading The Nears after Sean linked to his comparison of Media Center Extenders. Today, there’s a great comparison of Media Center Extenders to Windows Media Connect devices. Very cool stuff. I’d love to have all my media on a central machine and then be able to listen to or watch it all over the house. The Nears linked to the Roku SoundBridge which plugs into your stereo system. Supports wired or 802.11b/g wireless in as well as analog, optical and coax audio out. Controllable via remote control or web app. Of course, what would be truly killer is web services support. Prices seem pretty reasonable. There are three different models with the same functionality – the only difference is the size and quality of the display. I think I need one or two of these…

Jochen and Stuart both blogged that the walkthrus for the December release of the DSL toolkit are now available for download. Given the relative lack of documentation, this is a good thing.

Apparently Napster to Go is old news, having been launched in beta months ago. They don’t appear to be marketing it – the only mention of it I could find was on the page of compatible devices. I’m guessing the reason is the page only lists five devices compatible with the Napster to Go service and all of them are portable media centers. I wanted to search for other devices compatible with Windows Media Digital Rights Management 10 but the PlaysForSure advance search isn’t working. There’s new firmware for the Zen Micro that supports WMDRM 10, but nothing yet for the Zen Xtra. On the plus side, I discovered the Nomad SDK and FriendlyNomad C# wrapper for the SDK. Not sure what I would write that accessed my Nomad – I which I could customize the playback experience but Red Chair Software’s Notmad Explorer provides a great PC expereince.

Norman blogs about how he chose what blog service to use. His criteria were: 1) ease of use and 2) look of the final product. (Of course, look of the final product was important to Norman – he’s in marketing!) As a developer and architect, I originally cared most about “rolling my own”, though I switched over to dasBlog about a year ago. (I just don’t have the time to roll-my-own as often as I used to.) However, given that I had invested significant effort into the look of my final product, that factor was important to me as well, which is one of the reasons I chose dasBlog over .TEXT.

Of course, what’s funny about investing so much time thinking about the blog template is that I think most people read the site via RSS, not HTML. Chris Anderson of “The Long Tail” wrote about this a while back. Maybe I should invest a little effort into the new dasBlog Community Edition effort – I’d like to see the number of times the RSS feed is downloaded vs. the number of times the home page is downloaded.

Norman further goes on to discuss the fact that his blog is hosted on Blogger, which of course is now owned by Google. I like his point that “Interoperability and mixed environments is the way the world works. If it is good enough for my customers, it is good enough for me.”

First it was Halo 2′s online stats, game viewer and RSS feeds. Now, MechAssault 2 introduces the concept of Conquest. While Halo 2′s online gaming experience is awesome, it doesn’t lead anywhere – each game is completely unrelated to the others. But with Conquest, each battle impacts the ownership of planets in the galaxy. Each player joins one of the five houses and then can participate in the galactic war. Planet ownership is based on the results of battles fought there. You can see the current map of the galaxy as well as war updates at any time. (But no RSS feed for the war updates – what’s up with that?)

The only bad thing is that MechAssault 2 doesn’t appear to have any per game stats like Halo 2 has. Wouldn’t that be a great experience – Halo 2′s game viewer and per game stats combined with MechAssault 2′s conquest metagame.