What's everyone up to right now?

[Cyberman]

[Pat Mustard]

I didn't know you were a minister? Appreciate your honesty anyway...

Sinister minister.  

I knew it. I knew you were citheóg. Fecking lefties everywhere, I tells ya

[Seraphina]

Just found out my daughter got into the middle school we applied to for next school year. OMG, so happy.

[c172]

Listening to Cibo Matto. Figuring out my new heater.

[c172]

Double posting.

[The Valkyrie]

Listening to Cibo Matto. Figuring out my new heater.

If it goes "boom!" you did something wrong.

[c172]

Could you scalpel it for me if it does go "Boom!"?

[The Valkyrie]

Could you scalpel it for me if it does go "Boom!"?

You mean pick up the pieces?

[c172]

That would be hawt too. In your surgical scrubs.

---

Umm....but anyhow...catching up with the happenings of the Major League Soccer expansion meeting that happened on the USS Midway this morning.

[vorlon13]

not a big deal in the cosmic scheme, but last summer I reconnected an older AV receiver into the main TV/sat stack and was intending to use it more, but have had a persistent issue with remotes not working properly. The 'universal' DirecTV remote will run volume and turn it off, but it won't turn it on. My original remote for it has always had an issue with the back light sticking on, and if I fail to notice and turn it off, it kills a set of batteries pretty fast. It also has issues both turning it on and off.

So I ordered one from Ebay, it doesn't have a battery life issue, but it won't run the receiver at all.

Well, I've had a pricey Logitech Harmony laying around, so tried to get it 'married' to the receiver and had huge issue with my new laptop not liking the Logitech website to program the remote.

Well, poo! All these resources I am throwing at the problem and I still can't run the AV receiver.

Last night, tried the Logitech website again, only this time stuck the CD ROM in the laptop. LOL, that didn't work either, but after I took the disk out, tried it one more time, and BINGO, everything worked just tickety boo. The remote woke up and absorbed some updates from the Logitech site, and maybe my laptop did too, and then I was in the programming environment and it asked for model # of remote and accepted it. Then I get a message screen, kind of a 'Look at this" alert. So I did, and everything was made clear at last.

The receiver originally has a 2 way RF remote, so the little LCD screen in the remote can display what's going on with the receiver. (this is what runs the batt down when it wont turn off, BTW). Anyhow, I knew that. Years ago I bought the IR adapter so the receiver could at least be controlled via the DirecTV remotes to control volume. The Logitech remote is IR too, and one of the warnings is I need the IR adapter. OK, I know that too. But then it says:

to reset AV receiver remote control mode to IR after plugging in adapter, press and hold one of the front buttons on the receiver till the display acknowledges IR mode.

Aha !!!

Your vorlon did not know that.

So I did the receiver mode thing, it acknowledging the mode change,

-so-

did the Logitech remote work then ?


Hell no !!


But the remote then asked, "Did that work? Y ? N ?

I hit N, and we kept going back and forth and then the 3rd code worked !

I can turns it on, I can turns it off, I can adjust volume, and that's all I wanted. I did play with it some more, and it does EVERYTHING except switch between A and B speaker sets, but the original remote never did that either.

I'm pretty happy about this. It's an old receiver, but it does precisely what I want in my system. I switch HDMI sources via the TV, and all the analog stuff I still have via this receiver. And it also accommodates up to 7 optical or coax digital inputs too, just no digital video formats, so it does what I need done.

The Logitech seems smart enough I'll program more equipment on to it. Maybe even the dreadful Yamaha HDDCD recorder I have never figured out. (I'm pretty good at most of this stuff, but that item is impenetrable in its obscure way of doing anything. Way easier to record audio tracks on ah HDDDVD recorder, edit it, and then pipe it over to a 'dumb' stand alone CD recorder. Yes I still do this)