I hope you appreciate the variety of technology and the juxtaposition of new and old, cheap and expensive in my entertainment cabinet!
For gaming I have a SNES from the 80s and an Xbox 360. For watching and recording TV I have a VCR on top of a PC running experimental new social television software (I got rid of the DVD player to save space as the Xbox plays DVDs). And this brand new software is running on a 10-year-old cast-off HP PC…
I really like Boxee. This is the software for watching TV shows, films and clips over the Internet. It integrates with social media sites like Twitter and Facebook so that you can share opinions about things you watch, and direct friends to things they might want to watch too. It’s still in beta and very unfinished, but it has a lot of potential.
I’m running Boxee on Ubuntu. Ideally, I want to live in an open-source world. The problem with open-source software in a capitalist world, is that it receives a tiny percentage of the available resources. If the whole staff of Microsoft or Apple worked full-time on Ubuntu for free, then it would mature a lot quicker… but then they’d have no money to rent a place to live or buy food. Now in a Star-Trek-esque world where money no longer exists and everyone is motivated by bettering himself and the human race, and the universe as a whole, you don’t have this problem. Sadly we’re not there yet…