Speaking of remote controls, The New York Times has a piece on the Harmony remote, which you can program using your PC (it connects using a USB cable) to do all sorts of things with just the press of a single button.
From the article:
Using a side-mounted thumbwheel, you choose activities, not components, from a list on the remote’s small illuminated screen: “Play a DVD,” “Listen to a CD,” “Record a Show,” “TiVo Television” and so on. That’s a huge idea. It reduces a long list of steps — turn on TV, turn on DVD player, turn on sound system, switch TV input to AUX, start playing — to a single button press.
