Apple, the good design company, bundles its Apple TV with a pitch-black and horizontally symmetrical remote. This means that if you can find the remote in the dark, you're likely to grab it by the wrong end, grasping the touchpad and clicking the wrong button. Thankfully you can fix that by attaching an ugly spot of colour to your remote.

iOS/Mac: Whenever I plug my MacBook into a TV to share, say, a video with my friends, I end up on the floor, squatting in front of the laptop, while everyone else sits back and enjoys themselves. Since I occasionally use my Mac to manage the streaming media in my home and often find myself connecting it to some big screen via its HDMI port or through something like a Chromecast, a remote control would be a lifesaver.

Still using BitTorrent to exclusively download legally acquired content such as operating system images or files you want to share privately with friends? If so, you might want to double-check your security settings to protect yourself from what researchers at Google's Project Zero are calling a "low complexity hack" affecting Transmission and other popular BitTorrent clients. The flaw could leave your computer vulnerable to control by malicious hackers, but you can protect yourself by following a few steps until official fixes are in place.

US morning television host Matt Lauer, recently fired from NBC's Today for sexually harassing women in terrible ways for years, had a door lock button under his desk. Who the hell installed that? we all wondered. But the answer may be: nobody. You can just buy one off Amazon.

At a glance, system monitors might not seem as useful on your iPhone as they are on a desktop computer, but they can pack in a lot of good data. This includes detailed battery life breakdowns, storage space and data speeds. For the average user, our favourite system monitor for the iPhone is Omnistat.

Android: Teamviewer's Android Remote Control app now lets you wake up a sleeping computer, an important feature for connecting to a remote PC.

You've got your Raspberry Pi ready to go, but you want it to run it without having a keyboard or mouse (or perhaps even a screen) attached. In order to interact with it, you'll need to connect to it remotely and one way to accomplish that is with a Virtual Network Computing (VNC) server / client setup.

Airdroid is one of our favourite ways to control your Android phone remotely. Now, in a new update, you can use your computer's keyboard to type on your phone, and even share clipboard access.

Chrome: There are a variety of ways to remotely control your Android phone. Vysor -- from ClockworkMod, the developer behind other popular Android apps like AllCast, Helium and ROM Manager -- may be one of the simplest solutions yet. All you need is a Chrome app.

If you're new to the world of compact media centres such as the Raspberry Pi, it's easy to get caught up in all the bits and bobs you need to get it set up. Of course, having the required cables -- power, HDMI, USB, etc -- is mandatory, but before you splurge on a custom remote and infrared receiver, make sure your TV doesn't provide this functionality already.

Universal remotes are great but often rather pricey. If you want to make your own, Make shows you how to use an Arduino Yun to make a smart remote control you can control from any web browser.

You may not know this, but YouTube on your PC or laptop can actually be controlled from any smartphone, without installing any apps or linking the two over a network. All you need to do is use YouTube TV.

We've talked before about how to control anything on your home theatre PC (HTPC) with your Android phone. But what if you have other devices connected your TV? Or maybe you just want to control your stereo? Don't worry -- you have options too.

Android/iOS/Windows/Mac: Unified Remote is one of our favourite remote control apps. You can use it to control most functions on your computer from your phone, unless your computer is a Mac and your phone is an iPhone. Until today, that is.

Your TV, Blu-ray player and DVR all come with remote controls, but if you use a PC to run your media centre, nothing comes in the box. Fortunately, if you have an Android phone, you can control just about everything on your PC.

There are usually a few remotes sitting near your lounge. There are probably more stacked in a drawer somewhere near wherever you keep your batteries. It's amazing how they proliferate. How many do you use?

Many of us have to give presentations from time to time. And we've all suffered through boring presentations. While there are lots of techniques we can employ to make our slides more interesting work on our public speaking, one simple tool we can employ is a presentation remote control.

Dear Lifehacker, I sometimes need to take control of a client's PC and remotely install software, but don't do it enough to warrant getting a full suite like GoToMyPC. What are some good options that work well on both sides? The people I am trying to help often have problems with the difference in right and left click, so I don't want anything too complicated. Thanks, Total Control

Android: There is no shortage of apps for Android that let you remotely control your PC. However, if you're a coder looking for more functionality, my Control could be the app that gives you want you need.