Control Freak!

As requested by my good friend Sam I have decided to explore that most manly of subects - the 'remote control'.

Pingu has suggested to me that the male obsession with the remote control stems from them not being able to fiddle with the television reception anymore. Gone are the days that your boyfriend or husband could look all manly whilst climbing up the roof to produce a better reception with which to watch "The A Team", so now he has to get his kicks elsewhere...

Personally, I think the best thing about remote controls is that you can jam them leaving a bewildered 'clicker' wandering why even the brand new batteries fail to get the television remote to work. In fact, I was looking into how i could cleverly construct a homemade jammer but when i came across this little beautie for the very reasonable price of only £4.99 I couldn’t be bothered! Also I realised that you had to have a degree in electronics just to read the website about making your own...

Now for the technical bit, there are lots of different types of remote control but here are the most common:

• Radio remote controls - used to dominate races against friends using remote control vehicles like cars and boats. As an example; the transmitter (boat remote control) creates a binary pattern (ones and zeroes) about what it wants to happen and sends it to the receiver (device inside the boat).
• Infrared remote controls - these use a 'photo detector' and can be found in most televisions, video players ("VCR's"?????) and other sound systems. They transmit a light that is just out of humans red-seeing zone, again passing a binary pattern to the receiver so that it can translate this into a command; i.e. to change channel.
• Laser control - my favourite! This one is used to guide missiles into deserving warring factions. Blow the bastards up i say! This uses algorithms (math’s and computer stuff) to control the path of a vehicle. The receiver computes where it should be and where it actually is and then makes a plan according to the difference.

In summing up, i have made this animated gif:

Although a great time saver the remote has greatly attributed to laziness. Also it wont work if something is in the way... If your boyfriend is getting a bit of a belly on him, just carefully cover the infrared light on the television with some clear selotape and hey presto! - the cheapest jammer of them all!