Or, “someone’s thought about this.”
Two things are impressing me at the moment.
1) HDMI. I switch on the Bluray player, it sends a signal to the amp which powers on and selects the correct input and settings for that source. The amp brings the TV out of standby, selecting the correct channel for playback. One button, and everything’s good to go. Gone are the analogue days of playing russian roulette with settings and inputs, a nightmare when others in the house less familiar with your setup just want to put the telly on.
All the remotes interoperate, automagically, without spending hours configuring each one manually, keying in obscure keystrokes and trial-and-error codes from the back of the manual. I want to turn up the volume, I pick the nearest remote and press the volume control and it Just Works, even if I’m watching Sky and happen to be holding the Bluray remote.
At night I don’t want to disturb the neighbours, so I decide to use the TV speakers. Switch off the amp, it reverts to a pass-through device and the TV un-mutes itself. All the volume controls now seamlessly work the telly instead. Genius.
2) VMWare. I got a new laptop at work this week. Historically I’ve have kept a copy of the disk from the old one just in case, either physically swapping the drives or cloning it, so that I can access it if I’ve missed copying something over (eg, I forgot to note down the licence key for an app).
This time, I installed VMWare Converter (free) on the old laptop. It takes a snapshot of the running PC and saves it as a file. Copied the file to the new machine, installed VMWare Player (also free) and pointed it at the image. In a window, just like I’m sat in front of it, my old laptop boots up and lets me log into it even though the physical machine no longer exists. It’s practically witchcraft.
We live in interesting times. What have you got that Just Works?
