This article was riveting and invoked nostalgia I didn't even know I had. I forgot how badly I wanted to buy a TV tuner card so I could run MCE on my crappy tow

This article was riveting and invoked nostalgia I didn't even know I had. I forgot how badly I wanted to buy a TV tuner card so I could run MCE on my crappy tower at the time and being sad that I couldn't afford it (I was in high school). And I definitely remember hard-wiring old CD-ROM drives to good ol' Creative Sound Blasters and ripping at 1x. Some folks made a great business out of this at the time. I agree with the author: the state of consumer a/v tech is kind of sad. It is unfortunate that there really isn't a universally-supported open standard for _easily_ casting audio or video to a renderer (TV, projector) from a phone. Miracast is cool and works great but isn't built into iOS or Android and is a non-starter for non-technical folks. And the only affordable wireless multi-speaker tech is offered by Amazon (Echo) and Apple (AirPlay/HomePod) as loss-leaders to push more home assistants and collect more data. Sonos isn't exactly cheap and it also locks you into their system. Ideally, I'd like to buy wireless speakers from, say, Anker (okay, not great quality, but good enough to stash around the house) and drive them with Alexa or stream Spotify/Apple Music/$MEDIA_PLAYER through Miracast or whatever. But there's no money in that.