Five remotes -> one remote!

I recently bought us the L0gitech 'Harmony 0ne' all-in-one remote as a sort of experiment; it's a device where essentially you program in the brand and model of the equipment you have, and it happily switches between them with a little touch-screen and the usual array of buttons that you'd, well, probably find on just about any remote: fast-forward, play, menu, numbers, that kind of thing. It had received high reviews on Amazon, and I knew that April had something like it, so I figured, hey, I'll splurge and give it a shot. We were using five remotes at the time: TV, cable, TiVo, DVD and audio. The new toy (my brain is happily saying, "wiimote!") arrived on Saturday.

The reviews had mentioned that it was a bit complicated to set up; I'd say this is somewhat true, in that the software you use to program the thing via your PC doesn't have a very intuitive interface. More than once we got to a screen where we clicked a button, something disappeared, and we literally could do nothing else except close the window and restart the software. :-P Eventually we decided not to click the button, blundered on, and got through it.

And it worked! :-D We are quite happy, as now we can just click "Play a DVD" and it will turn on the DVD player, turn on the TV, turn on the audio system, switch input channels and audio channels, we see the intro stuff for the DVD on the screen, we press 'play' on the remote, and off we go. And to turn the system off, we click the remote's power button, and off everything goes. Huzzah!

The only thing we need to work on now is persuading the thing via the software to switch widescreen modes for us. We figure it might be possible, because there's a "Yes it works, and we want to be able to do more with it" option that we haven't explored yet, but for now, we're happy. Yay for something we bought that's supposed to make our lives less complicated and actually does! :-)