I am very confident that voice control is the way to go when it comes to controlling my home theatre setup into the future, because I am currently using it and benefiting from the huge advantages it offers. I believe a reliable voice control system will be the best way to control any electrical appliance, and that voice control is likely to be in our lives indefinitely. There are huge cultural and environmental problems which need to be addressed for it to work reliably, but the technology that interprets what we say works very well.

After setting up voice control on my home theatre PC, I realised that there needed to be an instant way to trigger the voice control so it would start listening to me. I needed a way to avoid using a traditional Universal remote, or my gadget. I needed a button that is ultra convenient. This means installing a button right next to my hand that will trigger the voice control. The only way of achieving this is by installing a button into my lounge. This may seem a bit excessive, but once it is done, the benefits we receive from it will last us well into the future. I believe all home theatre seating or lounge suites will eventually have the option to add a button into the arm.

There are many different types of buttons on the market, but I have only seen one that I know will be able to last the lifetime of the lounge. It’s going to take a beating, so I needed a button that was strong and reliable. Arcade machine buttons have proven themselves over the years as being ultra reliable. Fortunately for me, they are also cheap.

The end result is a button sitting immediately next to my hand which can activate and control my whole entertainment system using my voice. It’s not going to get much better than this. I expect this configuration to last the life of the couch, and it is likely to be considerably cheaper than having these factory installed. The only DIY work needed to be done for most lounges will be to drill a hole to install the button, and to click the pieces together. My scripts are not perfect yet, but I hope you will agree that it is pretty exciting stuff.

This article will show you how to install an arcade controller board, and a button into your lounge to trigger voice control of your entertainment.

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Once I was able to voice control my home theatre PC, I still needed to use my remote control to turn on the TV and receiver. I wanted to rid my lounge room of remotes altogether, so I needed to find a way to get my computer to control the rest of my audio visual gear. I wanted to be able to control everything in the lounge room with just my gadget and my voice.

It was logical to use Infra Red (IR) technology for this, because that is the only way we can control most AV gear currently. Often the buttons on a device (such as a TV set) don’t offer as many options as its remote control unit.

The USB-UIRT is a magic device that can send and receive IR signals. It connects to a USB port on our computer and enables us to send IR commands from our computer to our peripheral AV gear. It sits at the back of the room and has good range and reliability. This device removes the need for remote controls in our TV room altogether as we can tag a voice command to tell the USB-UIRT which IR signal or signals we want it to send.

The result is that we can walk into the room, press the trigger button and say “TV on”. This will turn the TV and stereo on. When we say “I’m finished”, the TV and stereo will turn off. 

It gets really impressive when we start controlling our VCR, BluRay or cable box with voice. I have added some extra scripting which will enable just this. When I put a video into the video player, I can say “Video Player” and the TV will change the channel to AV, to show the VCR. I can then use the usual play/pause/stop/rewind/fast forward voice commands to navigate through the video. When I return to the media centre, the tape will stop, rewind and 3 minutes later, eject the tape and turn off. This is while all the other media centre voice commands are working as per normal.

This article will show you how to setup the USB-UIRT to control your audio visual gear to control everything in your lounge room/home theatre by voice. The scripts need to be installed, and IR signals learnt, which is thankfully quite easy with to do with EventGhost. The speech macros have also been updated to simplify the commands to their shortest abbreviation. I have also included another speech macro which enables the “Play artist/genre/track” commands. It’s a bit harder for the computer to pick up the new commands, though they do work. The old commands still work and are worth learning because the computer is much more likely to recognise them. The commands will be progressively tweaked until each command is as simple as we can make them. It’s not far off as simple as it can get now.

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This PC Remote Controller was sent to me by BudgetGadgets.com for review. No money changed hands allowing me to give an honest review of this product.

Around a year ago, I was on the search for a PC Infra-Red remote to control Windows Media Center. The remote I acquired with my TV tuner card was somewhat inadequate. I was unable to find a remote sold on it’s own for a sensible price, so I purchased another tuner card solely so that I could use the extra buttons of the new remote. If only I had been able to find this remote while I was on my search.

This remote features just about any button you could ever want, and then some. It can be used to control just about any media player software you currently have on your computer. You can even use the remote to move your mouse cursor around the screen, and click on items. This feature works surprisingly well. What this means you can use the remote for extra stuff like a clicker for PowerPoint presentations.

There aren’t any drivers required for this remote, meaning there is no need to configure anything for it to work. While this may seem a little limiting, there are some hotkeys that can be set if you choose. There is not much this remote can’t control on your computer. It is built solid and even has an 18 metre range making it ideal for most environments.

There is only one annoyance I have with this remote and that is the NumLock. Each of the buttons towards the bottom of the remote has a number assigned to it for changing channels etc, but each button also serves another useful task such as navigation. It is a hassle to press the Numlock, and there is no indicator on the remote, or the computer informing you of if the Numlock is on or off. A small gripe for an otherwise worthwhile product.

PC Remote Controller is available from BudgetGadgets.com for $16 including shipping. You will need to fork out for a couple of AAA batteries before you can use it. Overall, I give this remote a big thumbs up with my main factors being the price, features and the overall simplicity of it. BudgetGadgets has quite a few other PC remotes, starting from just a few dollars.

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In my last job, I had a new car with 3.5” jack input into the stereo. This was so I could plug in my PDA/Music player/GPS into the stereo. It worked great until I needed to put the phone on charge.

As I put my foot down, I would hear noise come out of the stereo, increasing as I accelerated harder. It wasn’t a terrible noise, but enough for me to ask others about it. It was very frustrating to me and I had no idea what could be causing it.

A colleague told me about Ground Loop Isolators which would fix the problem. I don’t really know how they work, but it grounded my device when on charge, and killed the noise entirely.

They are a little frustrating to use as you often need to convert from jack to RCA and back again in stereo, but with a few adaptors and somewhere to store all the cables, this is what you need. They are available from just a few dollars and up. The one I got was cheap, and did the job well.

I used to print documents directly from my Ipaq rx3715 to a networked printer. I took the ability to print from this Windows Mobile 2003 device for granted as it came with HP’s Mobile Printing Solution. My need to print since dwindled and I have only started looking at it again over the last couple of days.

I didn’t expect to come across any problems but it turned into a nightmare trying to do it for free, as there is no free software available, and this feature is not built into Windows Mobile 5 phones. There are some commercial/shareware applications which will let you print but I like free stuff.

This article will show you what I have been able to find on this topic. I hope that it will help you find a solution that is practical for your situation. You will also find it helpful if you decide to start your own search for an answer, as I have put together all of my research into this single article.

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