If you're a tinkerer and you've never checked out the XboxMediaCenter, you really owe it to yourself to do so—there's just so much potential in this project. Did you know that it comes with a Python interpreter, and that there's a scripting community building really cool living room apps for it? Did you know that it bundles the GoAhead webserver along with Spyce Python Server Pages?

I'd never heard of GoAhead's tiny webserver before, but Spyce looks interesting. Overall, XBMC is surprisingly polished for an "amateur" effort, and it's certainly more maker friendly than anything else in our living room besides our laptops.