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[Closed] Technology that 'just works'

Cougar · 2012-04-14T14:57:52Z

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 [i]no longer exists.[/i] It's practically witchcraft. We live in interesting times. What have you got that Just Works?

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DrP

Posts: 12120

Free Member

Tin openers have never caused me any trouble,

Funny -we have a completely useless tin opener (safety thing) that for some unfathomable reason, it's yet to have been binned and replaced for, ooh, 6 years! Perhaps it has a spell over

DrP

Posted : 15/04/2012 12:23 pm

Cougar

Posts: 78659

Full Member

Topic starter

Dropbox - yay!

SUgarSync - boo!

Dropbox - boo!

SugarSync - yay!

Posted : 15/04/2012 12:28 pm

bruneep

Posts: 13820

Full Member

Drop box "lost" a lot of my files. So it's a booooo from me.

Posted : 15/04/2012 12:31 pm

GlitterGary

Posts: 0

Free Member

Toilets.

Posted : 15/04/2012 12:38 pm

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