5 Things You Can Remote Control With Your iPhone

One of the more interesting things you can do with the iPhone is use it as a remote control for other devices. Since the iPhone App Store launched almost two years ago, developers have created hundreds of remote control applications.
Some of them are for entertainment — designed to control A/V equipment in your living room. Others control household appliances, functions on your computer, or even expensive corporate security systems.
For now, most remote control apps operate over the Internet, or via a wi-fi or Bluetooth link between your iPhone and another device. But one company is developing an infrared iPhone accessory, which will open the doors for even more remote control applications.

DVR

Zipcar rental car

Home lights and automation system

TV, other gadgets

iTunes

Amarok 2.3.0 "Clear Light" released

Team Amarok is proud to announce Amarok 2.3.0. It contains many improvements and bugfixes over Amarok 2.2.2 as well as many new features. Areas such as podcast support and saved playlists have seen huge improvements, as has the support for USB mass storage devices (including generic MP3 players).

With large parts of Amarok 2 becoming quite mature, it was also time to start looking forward again. Therefore, this release also contains a number of new features of a slightly more experimental nature. These include a new main toolbar and a rewritten and much simpler file browser. These parts are brand new and based on user feedback, and they will change and improve over the next few releases. The old slim toolbar is still available should you prefer that, but we encourage you to try out the new toolbar and tell us what you think. The file browser's look and feel now aligns more closely with the rest of Amarok with improvements such as breadcrumb navigation, and it is now focused on being a way to find and play music instead of being a multi-purpose file manager.


The context menu of tracks in your playlist now offers a "show in media sources" option, making it easier to find the same track again in the collection browser for editing, moving or deleting the file.