Universe’s Tech Blog

Many of us have an Apple Remote Control for Front Row laying around at home. Many of us never use it. A nifty piece of software called Mira lets you dust it off and make good use of it to control a Keynote presentation, to operate VLC as you watch a movie from the sofa and more.

The first thing to do is find the remote control. Like me you may also need to dust it off and remove the cellophane.

Mira installs as a System Preference pane. It comes with built-in profiles for 55 apps although you can easily construct more or use it to launch applescripts remotely.

The demo is limited to six items in the master menu (right), which is launched by pressing the menu button on the remote control.

Plus and minus buttons on the remote control navigate through the options and switch to the selected app. If it’s not open, Mira opens it for you.

Mira doubles the control it offers by distinguishing between short presses and longer “duo-presses”. In VLC, for example, the former starts and pauses the movie and the latter switches between normal and full screen view.

The function of each button on the remote control is configurable through the preference pane.

Again, in VLC the defaults do a good job:

It also turns your remote control into a device to control a Keynote presentation remotely (well, from within 33 feet):

The recently updated version of mira has fixed a problem with the recognition of external IR ports, which means you can now use it trouble-free on older Macs as well.

Mira is shareware — US$16.95 ($21.78) — and is available from the developer’s, (Twisted Melon), web site.

While Sony said it would have 400,000 PlayStation 3 systems ready for its North American launch, Nintendo consistently refused to put a comparable figure on its own efforts with the Wii launch. Instead it would say only that it would ship 4 million systems worldwide by the end of the year.

Now that the launch has come and gone, Nintendo has finally tallied up the number of Wiis it has sold. Today the company said that more than 600,000 Wiis were sold in the Americas in the console’s first eight days of release.

“We’ve shipped retailers several times the amount of hardware the other company was able to deliver for its launch around the same time–and we still sold out,” Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime said in a statement. Leading up to the PS3 launch, one analyst predicted that Sony would fall well short of its shipment goal, suggesting that fewer than 200,000 PS3s would be available on day one.

First-party software and accessory sales brought in more than $190 million on their own. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess in particular rang up strong sales of more than 454,000, or three games for every four consoles. Nintendo said the system’s downloadable game service, the Virtual Console, was also a hit, though it gave no figures to describe how big a hit it was.

Earlier this month, the PlayStation 3 launch was accompanied by a handful of reported robberies, with an Elk Grove, California, GameStop reportedly having four PS3 systems and several Xbox 360 systems stolen by a pair of armed men.

Now The Sacremento Bee, which originally reported the story, is saying that police believe that two of the store’s employees were in on the robbery. Two 19-year-olds who were employed by the store were arrested last week on charges of suspected embezzlement, burglary, and conspiracy, according to the paper. One of them has also been charged with filing a false police report.

Police have not yet recovered the stolen systems, and it’s unclear whether or not others were involved in the heist. As for what tipped police off to the scheme, one officer was quoted as saying, “Our detectives were able to gather information that wasn’t consistent with a robbery…They felt there was more to the investigation than meets the eye.”