After cutting his teeth on tech writing at Lifehacker and working his way up, he left as Weekend Editor and transferred over to How-To Geek in 2010. He's been in love with technology since his earliest memories of writing simple computer programs with his grandfather, but his tech writing career took shape back in 2007 when he joined the Lifehacker team as their very first intern. Jason has over a decade of experience in publishing and has penned thousands of articles during his time at LifeSavvy, Review Geek, How-To Geek, and Lifehacker. Prior to that, he was the Founding Editor of Review Geek. Prior to his current role, Jason spent several years as Editor-in-Chief of LifeSavvy, How-To Geek's sister site focused on tips, tricks, and advice on everything from kitchen gadgets to home improvement. He oversees the day-to-day operations of the site to ensure readers have the most up-to-date information on everything from operating systems to gadgets. Jason Fitzpatrick is the Editor-in-Chief of How-To Geek. Digging up those more advanced shortcuts required turning to a section in the Kodi wiki about pairing USB keyboards with the Fire TV.

For reasons unknown Amazon lists the simple shortcuts (like arrow key navigation) but fails to list the more advanced (and useful) shortcuts like pressing F12 to return to the Fire TV home screen. The last entry, the official keyboard shortcut list for the Amazon Fire TV, is a good example of an official list that's a bit inadequate. Here is a list of keyboard shortcuts for common media center software/hardware arrangements: Idealy this process should be as simple as turning to Google and looking up something like ' keymap' or ' keyboard shortcuts'.

To that end, the first step in getting Flirc up and running is to determine what keyboard commands do what actions on your media center.

You see there is a fundamental problem when it comes to linking your typical universal or TV remote to a media center system like a Raspberry Pi running Kodi/XBMC, an Amazon Fire TV, a computer running Plex or Windows Media Center, or the like: these devices are either optimized for their own special remote (such as the bluetooth remote that comes with the Amazon Fire TV) or they are optimized for keymaps that map onto a keyboard (like Kodi/XBMC and Windows Media Center).Īlthough the Flirc configuration software does thoughtfully include button keymaps for Kodi/XBMC, Boxee, Windows Media Center, Amazon Fire TV, and even mapping for standard keyboard media keys (and we appreciate that thoughtfulness) it's good to know how to look up and study a keymap without the assistance of the software so that you can effectively map anything to the Flirc (and not just the pre-mapped entries they provide). The Flirc unit is far more clever than a simple storage unit though and works as an absolutely ingenious solution to the problem of linking IR-based remotes to media center software.

At first glance it would be remarkably easy to confuse the Flirc unit with an actual thumb drive as the clear case, visible circuit board, and the IR receiver points (that look much like LED indicator lights) all strongly echo the design of thumb drive storage. Flirc ($20) is a tiny USB dongle about half the size of a traditional thumb drive.

Flirc sticker