The pain of a non-functional remote.

Do any of you remember an ancient technology from the 1980s, a world before DVD recorders, TV cards in computers, hard drive recorders, TIVO, Sky+ and all that wonderful stuff? It involved recording television onto magnetic tapes and was called a Video Cassette Recorder or VCR?

Well, I have a horrible admission. I am still living in that 80s world. Not because I'm sitting around playing nerdy computer games and listening to Iron Maiden... although I am doing that too, but because I'm still stuck in the world of the VCR. If I lived in a perfect lazy world we'd have a wonderful Sky+ machine with the one button record, series link and all that other great stuff that makes recording your favourite programs utterly trivial. Unfortunately this isn't the case. Currently we're in rented accommodation and getting the landlord to agree to put a Sky dish on the flat is a pain. Cable services have been really crap and annoying with awful customer services until recently. I had 3 years at a place with cable and nothing but problems with billing etc. Also, we are moving shortly and I can't be bothered setting it all up twice, plus there's the minimum contracts and all that crap. We could just get a DVD recorder or hard disk recorder but it seems like a waste of money if we're going replace it so soon with the holy grail of laziness the HD Sky+ box.

So now I have the excuses out of the way. I'll let you know the current situation. In our flat we have 2 video recorders. Mine, a very cheap one that's over 10 years old and has some kind of power issue that means it can't rewind or record without getting a bit stressed out, groaning for a while and then powering itself off, and my girlfriends which is newer but similarly cheap. Her VCR works fine except for the remote control which has decided to stop working. It's not the batteries, we tried that. Taking a remote away from a Video Recorder is like taking me away from the internet it becomes incredibly stupid and only able to perform the most basic of tasks. So we can play, record, stop, fast foward, rewind, eject and change the channel up and down, and nothing else. We can't program the thing to record, if we are going out and want to record something later in the evening we just have to find a long tape, hit record and hope the tape is long enough to keep recording long enough to record the show we want. Luckily the VCR is stuck on Long Play (we can't change it so Short Play) so we've got up to 8 hours of recording. Forget recording anything if you are away for more than a day. You're just missing that show.

Doing anything to fix either machine would be more expensive and more effort than just buying a new one, and I can't even be bothered to do that. How did people survive before videos and TVs had remotes? At least we can change channels on our freeview box so we never need to change the channel on the VCR. I don't really mind most of the hassle of the non working remote though. Having to fast forward the video to get to the start of the show, recording 4 hours of crap before the show you want are both fine. The thing that really annoys me is that you have to get up to fast forward through the adverts! 4 times in a typical hour long show I have to get up, crouch by the machine and hold down the ffw button for 45 seconds or so. ARGH!

Don't worry, I found a solution. Now, we record stuff upstairs, on my girlfriends video that you can record on, and then transfer the tape downstairs to watch the program the video with the working remote where we can easily fast forward through the adverts. Even in the harshest, most deprived of environments laziness can find a way.

Oh yeah... I do have a computer with a TV card and theoretically you can record stuff onto that but it's really complicated to set it up, I don't have the right cables to allow me to watch TV on that and simultaneously in the bedroom without changing cables over and and the timer stuff on that seems to be really crap, especially if you have any kind of powersaving stuff set up on your computer.