Before you ask, I am no further along in solving the deferred procedure call (DPC) mystery that has been plaguing me for the last few weeks. The DPC problem has simply vanished, and despite my desire to get to the bottom of it, nothing I do will bring it back. So, until something noteworthy in the system performance department happens, DPCs will not be mentioned again.

This week I have a cool gadget for you. If you, like me, prefer to work with music playing, then there’s a good chance you might be using iTunes. For all its faults, and it does indeed have many, iTunes does a pretty good job and makes life so easy for iPod users that it is hard not to wind up drinking Steve’s Kool-Aid. 

Anyway, what happens when you’re using iTunes but you’re not on one of those nifty iMacs that come with a remote control? If your boss or a client calls and you answer with “London’s Burning” ratcheted up to 11 and the iTunes interface is lost somewhere in the Z-order, they’ll probably get the wrong impression.

The answer may be Keyspan’s TuneView. TuneView is a small, slick-looking remote with an iPod-esque user interface and a color display that allows you to control a copy of iTunes running on either Windows or OS X.

The TuneView communicates over a 2.4GHz radio signal at up to 150 feet, provided you are standing on the unobstructed surface of a perfect sphere. In reality the TuneView remote works reliably up to about half that distance.

To get the TuneView remote working you install the TuneView software and plug a USB transceiver into your machine. There will then be a pause while the TuneView control software (which has to be running for the remote to work) builds a database of iTunes’ database and uploads it to the remote over the wireless link.

Once the upload is finished you can use the remote’s tiny display to browse and select from your collection and control playback (no, it doesn’t display album artwork).

The user interface is, as I said, “iPod-esque” only in so far as the display echoes the way an iPod would display your music. The actual physical controls are arranged in a circle under the display with a separate “wizard” button below that. Using these controls you can navigate the menus, control the volume, skip forward or backwards in the track list, fast forward or rewind the current track. The wizard button provides a maintenance menu with additional entries dependent on what is playing.

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