Posted on Sunday, December 17, 2006 3:37 PM
I found
this nice tool to remote-control my MP3 collection and even, if I want , my PC Zapper with my cellphone. The good thing of puppetmaster is that it bluetooth-remote-controls WinAmp (and mediaplayer and zoomplayer and outlook and lots of others) and gives you info on what track is playing on your cellphone screen.
I own a nokia 6230i which is java-enabled and has bluetooth. So is my PC.
When installed, Puppetmaster is a nice solution for my audio-needs. I added some extra scripts (more on that next post) to add functionality and off it went. Really easy, actually
The lousy thing of any media center solution, including PCzapper, is that, when you want to listen to your music, you have to watch a large (in my case very large) blue screen which sums up some titles and the music coming from my TV speakers.
So I decided to solve an annoyance that bothered me for quite a while:
I was to make a direct connection to my stereo-set from the scart plug that comes with PCzapper. An audio-breakout, so to say.
Why isn't this built in in the scart plug out-of-the-box? It gives quite some additional value...
I flipped open the PCzapper scart connector (you don't need brute force and you can actually click it back together when you're finished) and welded a short piece of two-paired cable on the audio-pins (pins 2,4 and 6 are needed; pin 2 is left signal, 6 is right signal and 4 is ground for both sides), drilled a small hole in the scart casing through where the new cable goes and clicked everything back together.
I connected 2 female cinch plugs on the other side of the cable (I used a short piece of cable, so I could extend from there to whereever I need the signal) and plugged it in the amplifier of my stereoset. Lovely! Works like a charm! Bonus is that the movies I watch on the zapper also have stereo sound over the hifi set.
If everything went this easy, I'd stop writing about it....
Update: puppetmaster is a goner. You can no longer buy this software. Too bad...