For your amusement, I'd like to share some stuff that i do at home with a tiny little raspberry pi. I'll start with this.
Briefly, Raspberry pi is a 35$ credit card sized linux computer with hdmi, usb, lan, rca output which you can geek around.
WikipediaOfficial siteThis is what it looks like:
It is an awesome device which can output 1080p videos.
Here is a portion of what i made of it. A multimedia center. These stuff are on my desk next to my notebook (which i'm writing this post from). To understand the size of it, i scaled it with a 75cl whiskey bottle
What is going on here ? Here i'm running a custom operating system on the raspberry pi, which is designed to become a fully blown multimedia center. Here i can wirelessly control & play all of my music, video, pictures on my notebook, external hard disks, cloud, android devices, apple devices. This multimedia center (XBMC) can be remotely controlled using a regular keyboard, mouse, an android phone(or tablet), any AirPlay device or application (iphone, ipad, mac, itunes etc.), tv remote, any web browser, any upnp device at all.
Note that the above picture is only meant to be cute. Normally my raspberry is attached to my 42" Led TV
Here you can see my Tv, Raspberry pi (transparent box on the left) and my mac controling it from a web browser. With mac i can also play media on the tv using itunes. Note that i do-not have an airtv. I'm only using mac and raspberry pi. It takes power from the usb port of my tv so both the tv and raspberry pi boot at the same time.
I have been using this as my primary multimedia device at home. Tho mostly with only my android phone as the remote control, not my macbook.
Well i have terrible photoshop skills. And i made the below image using paint. But alas, here is a snapshot from my mac, tv and my android phone. All are connected by raspberry pi with openelec running on it. Nevermind the playlist.
Other than using it as a funbox, I have my professional plans on raspberry pi (I am a software developer). All it takes to switch the use of it is to switch the sd card.