A television I recently acquired had a remote control with sets of buttons on both sides: on one side a full set, covering all the functionality available, and on the other side a simplified set for the everyday operations. I mentioned this in passing to a friend, who told me that he had a similar remote which annoyed him, because his was lacking a 'mute' button on the simplified side.
It then occurred to me how useful it would be to be able to completely customise the arrangement of buttons on one's remote control. It also occurred to me, somewhat less rationally, that the perfect way to do this would be in a Rubik's cube style. This would allow you to have 6 different faces, each with a set of 9 buttons, which could be arranged in a mahoosive number of different ways.
Now I'm not an electronics expert, but my masculine tutition tells me that something like this isn't going to work too well using the traditional flat printed circuit board and wires. So I think the best way of doing it (and I'm no doubt wrong) would be for each button to have an extremely weak transmitter connected, whose signal is then picked up by a module in the centre of the cube. This module then transmits the instruction to the television, using a stronger signal. Maybe it could even have a blue tooth or something.
Some might choose to use a single face of their remote in a similar way to the simplified side of my original controller. Others might be more creative, placing buttons on different faces in such a way as to have ready access to a large number of functions - much like the controllers for modern games consoles, which have buttons in all kinds of unexpected places.
Regardless of what configuration is chosen, it's bound to be fun actually getting there, and even more fun trying to get things back to a useable state after one's 4-year-old cousin has been to visit.-- -alx, Sep 22 2003 "Mom! Joey scrambled the remote again!"-- krelnik, Sep 22 2003 You could also have certain channels on the TV accessible only by arranging the remote in a specific pattern.-- AO, Sep 23 2003 random, halfbakery