Another part of the yellow sofa saga has been the other aspects of generally re-arranging the room. Unsurprisingly, there is a fair amount of technology in rashbre central, but the area with the sofas should really be a haven of simplicity. So I wonder sometimes at the large collection of remote controls that progressively accumulate. Television, DVD, Sky, Hi-fi, Remote iPod, Apple Mini, VCR(!). Even the fireplace has a remote control. I can't be bothered to count the number of buttons, but it must be over 500, especially if I count the typing keyboard for the Mac Mini.
And selecting certain lesser used functions like playing a Video Cassette becomes a short excerpt from some kind of mission control movie.
So, like I recycle the shiny boxes from CDs and DVDs, I thought it was about time to rationalize the buttonage and make it simple to switch things on to do what is required.
My current experimental choice is a little Logitech unit. I started with the cheapest programmable unit they make, because I wanted to test the idea. The first time you use it, it knows nothing. You have to log on to a website, tell the website what you want to control (easy selections like "Sony TV") and then tell the website the specific boxes needed for any particular activity (like "Watch TV", "Listen to CD" etc. I didn't expect this to work very well, but to my pleasant surprise, in about 20 minutes I had all the units programmed into the website and then downloaded the control sequences to the controller.
And amazingly, everything works and is simple to use. So to watch Sky, I press "Watch TV" and all the right controls operate to make the Sky start-up and then the buttons on the unit also control the fast forward, pause and other functions that go with Sky+. Same for recording DVDs (an old challenge) or playing iTunes using the television as a Juke-box "Play Music".
Next step is to hide all the units away.
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