I'll be you have a collection of remotes similar to these....one remote for the TV channels and another for the volume and a third for the cable box and a fourth.
And I'll bet you've eyed, if not tried, a so-called "Universal Remote".
Like the author of an excellent story in the NY Times today, I've declared them a dismal failure.
One Christmas, I invested something like $180 on a top-of-the-line Universal Remote that was Internet-connectible and promised an easy way to completely eliminate the clutter on the coffee table. Alas, like all of the others I've tried, I could not get it to perform at least a function or two...meaning I still needed at least one other remote. And if that's the case, what's the point of the Universal Remote?
I eventually gave that fancy photo-displaying remote to my at-home IT guy in exchange for some PC reapair work.
Like Dr. McCoy in the time-travel Star Trek movie ("Savages!"), sometime in the future humans will laugh at how naive we were in using all these hand-helds to get stuff to work. "Daddy? Why didn't they just blink like we do?"
But till then, we'll just do what we do with all of the technology in our lives that has become too complicated. We use what we can, devise work-arounds by the dozens, an move on, collecting more and more decidedly not universal control gizmos.
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