I’ve got the following two issues with two of my recent toys. Can anyone help, because, well, it’s driving me insane.
1) Xbox 360 vs Media Centre
I have both an Xbox 360, and a PC acting as a ‘Media Centre’, which I use to play DVDs, downloaded movies and music. I use the Xbox exclusively for playing games – its fan is ridiculously loud making it daft for playing movies.
I bought an official Microsoft ‘Media Centre’ remote to control the PC – and, until I got the 360, this worked brilliantly and I had no complaints. Now that the 360 is there – its become a complete pain in the arse.
It seems that the remote control will control both devices at the same time. So, when I switch on my media centre with the remote, the Xbox comes on too. This is tremdendously annoying. Especially when you want to pause a film to go for a pee, only to find when you return that the Xbox is now switched on, and (because the TV ‘prefers’ a HDMI input over the VGA on the media centre) its menu is on screen ready for action.
How do I stop this behaviour? I want the remote control to control the media centre, only.
2) Apple Wireless Keyboard vs Terminal.app
I bought myself a shiny new Apple Wireless keyboard the other day, and on the whole, I’m happy with it. However, there is one potentially fatal flaw for me.
I’m experiencing a problem where certain key combinations appear to be deleting my entire line of input in Terminal.app. So, I’d be merrily typing into my irssi session running on a remote Screen and half-way through a sentence *bosh* my line is zapped.
I can reproduce this by typing the word ‘eight’ quickly on the keyboard – every single time I type it above a certain speed the line erases after typing ‘ei’, and all i get on-screen is ‘ght’. However, this only seems to happen in Terminal sessions. Normal system use is unaffected. For most users, I guess this doesn’t present a significant problem, but being as I virtually live in Terminal.app, it presents a monumental one for me.
Anyone got any ideas? My sanity would dearly appreciate a break!
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But could you not do something like cover the IR eye (I assume it’s IR) on the Xbox 360? As I say, seems a bit too obvious to me…
Gary
–
http://blog.garysmith.org.uk
Hmmm, I guess I could do that – but surely there must be a more sensible solution than this? These remotes can’t be actually designed to work in this way, can they?
Well, they are Microsoft devices, so I guess anything’s possible!
I doubt that this’d be possible. With IR, each device listens for a certain code to do a certain thing. Whilst with some devices it’s possible to reprogram what code does what, in many (think telly, video, hi-fi – most consumer stuff) this isn’t possible.
I think it’s purely a coincidence that they both hear the same IR command for the same thing. In fact, I’d be more tempted to say that it’s not the same command, but a subset of the two that’s the same, for instance:
Device1-poweron: 12345678901234567890
Device2-poweron: 67890123456789012345
Or somesuch.
Gary (done a lot of work with IR in another life)
http://blog.garysmith.org.uk