New Toys

I just love listening to music in bed, right before going to sleep. You can close your eyes and focus, experiencing the music like a movie and less like the background noise music is often degraded to during the day. After moving my home office to a different floor, however, my bedroom is no longer close enough to my PC to do this (I used a rather quirky solution, using a game pad to remote-control WinAmp and later shut down my PC :D).

This put me on a quest for a replacement. Because I ripped my entire CD library as FLAC and stored it on my home server (running Gentoo Linux and serving the music files as a network share via Samba), I was looking for a player that supported FLAC and, ideally, would play music from a standard network share. This is what I ultimately decided on:

Logitech Squeezebox, a black rectangular box with speakers on both sides and a green display in the middle

That’s a Logitech Squeezebox Boom.

I admit that I half expected this category of devices to not exist at all, because a “normal” person doesn’t have a home server or a PC that’s always on. And when I found something I expected some half baked showpiece hardware, but was yet again positively surprised. Read on for my personal review of this brilliant device!

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Logo of the Nuclex Framework, the text "Nuclex" with three green dots on a blue ring

Nuclex Framework R1242 Released!

The word 'Nuclex' in a stylish font framed by an elliptical ring with three dots

There’s a new release of the Nuclex Framework available on CodePlex!

The new release adds a new library, Nuclex.Input, which is a very lightweight library that adds seamless support for DirectInput game pads and joysticks, well-behaving keyboard text input, event-based input and the ability to mock any kind of input in your unit tests. Instead of firing up your XBox 360 each time, you can now write simple tests that simulate controllers being attached and detached.

Also new is full support for XNA 4.0 on x86 and XBox 360. Windows Phone 7 is also supported by most of the libraries. The PC builds all target the .NET Client Profile, allowing you to reduce the footprint of your installer. Special .NET 4.0 client profile builds of the third-party libraries (LZMA, NUnit, NMock, log4net and SlimDX).

Of course, all bugs reported since the last release have been fixed!