Are you sick of playing target practice with your remote controls?

I tried several “remote control extenders”. Most of them relayed the infrared signal from one room to another. You still had to point the remote at the sensor and in most cases aim it. When I stumbled across the Next Generation Remote Control Extender I was skeptical. “You put the what where?” Yes… you put a Radio Frequency (RF) transmitter in place of one of the batteries in your Infrared (IR) remote. Don’t ask me how the thing works, but it transmits the signal to the odd looking receiver in the other room. At first I thought the receiver was battery powered. But it comes with an AC Adapter and actually charges the second smaller battery that powers the transmitter. This way you always have a battery ready to go, brilliant.

I am currently using Microsoft’s Media Center Remote Control and Keyboard with it and that they both work WAY better. I was on the verge or replacing the keyboard because you really had to point it to have fluid mouse movements. Now both remotes work on command and flawless in any room in my house!

Pros:

• Super easy to setup.
• Works like any RF remote, no direct line of sight required, thought walls – up to 100′ away
• 433.92 MHz – seems like a good frequency with little or no perceived interference.

Cons:

• I have heard it doesn’t work with all remotes, but it has worked with ever one I have tried.
• Battery doesn’t last long with one battery remotes.

Conclusion:

The technology and engineering behind this device is award winning. It does exactly what it claims to do, convert almost any IR remote to RF. I have been using it for about a month with great success!

Get yours here:

Just as the news that the Microsoft Xbox 360 external HD DVD drive was declared extinct, I found a use for it: load up my new Asus Eee with Windows XP. It is hopefully the last OS that has to be loaded from an optical drive and lets not forget about the F6 floppy driver loading routine (thankfully not needed for the Eee).

I was going to use a Bytecc IDE to USB with an old drive I had laying around. But why not let this already defunct technology marvel go out with a bang. It worked great.

Anyway, I loaded up the Eee with an nlite-ed version of XP for a mere 480mb footprint. I followed this great tutorial over at i64X.com, thanks Jason!

My first impressions of the Asus Eee are very good. I am finding all sorts of uses for it. I already voided the Newegg warranty by installing a gig of Geil RAM, we’ll see about voiding the Asus warranty and installing some hardware hacks (maybe GPS, bluetooth and 3G?). I promise, this isn’t going to turn into a Eee blog, but I will have more on it soon. This thing is amazing!