Streamzap: Laziness Redefined

When watching streamed Lost episodes off ABC.com, one notable bummer is that I need to get out of bed and click on the ‘Continue’ link after each uninterruptable commercial concludes (yeah, I know, what a whiner…). As of last night, however, that (admittedly minor) irritation is no more. That’s because I decided to install the Streamzap infrared remote control that I recently came across in my storage unit inventory.

Bypassing the v2 drivers included on the bundled CD, I went immediately to the latest v3 software downloadable from the company’s website. By default, mouse emulation wasn’t enabled, but perusing the System Tray-resident applet fixed that omission. And now, all I have to do is raise my arm every 10 minutes or so I even programmed remote control macro keys to ALT-TAB and ALT-ESC through open applications and per-application windows, and the remote control’s power button to put my laptop in standby.

The streaming bandwidth off ABC.com seems to be fixed at ~1.3 Mbps max, at least according to the bandwidth gauge on the bottom right corner of the screen, so my recent DSL bandwidth boost didn’t do me much good with respect to Lost quality (which, as I mentioned before, was quite good anyway). However, as I noted the other day, Netflix definitely benefits from the higher broadband speed (believe it or not, I finally got around to watching East of Eden last night). And by hitting F11 to convert Internet Explorer to full screen mode (a trick which unfortunately doesn’t seem to work with the ABC.com/Firefox combo), along with selecting Full Screen playback within Netflix’s browser-based media player application, I end up with a very TV-like on-screen presentation.