Here's a cut and paste from my Livejournal about an inexpensive thing that made me very happy:

We're all sitting around the TV, watching "Die Hard" because Seanan hadn't ever seen it. Plus, it's a Christmas movie. A completely different kind of Christmas movie than Grinch or Wonderful Life, but a Christmas movie nonetheless. Plus, Alan Rickman. You can't go wrong with Alan Rickman. (Side note: We all want a sweatshirt now.)

So we're watching it from a DVD, which is playing on the Playstation 3. The PS3 is great for watching DVDs in terms of sound and picture quality, but the pain of having to use the PS3 game controller to pause or rewind a DVD is nearly unbearable. When you pick up the controller, it's either already powered itself off to save battery charge, or you accidentally bump one of its soft finger triggers and inadvertently skip forward a chapter.

We've got a fantastic universal remote, but the Playstation doesn't have an infrared transceiver, so you can't use the remote with it. Each time someone curses at the PS3 controller, I have to explain that I need to get the proper "doohickey" (technical term) that lets me control the PS3 videos with the remote.

So Vixy takes a present out from under the tree and makes me open it, despite my protests that it's two days early, since we're not doing presents until Tuesday. And what do you know, it was an honest to goodness doohickey!

After industrial-lasering the blister packaging open, I was worried about having to interrupt the playback of Die Hard to make the doohickey work. I figured it would need some kind of setup or configuration. But the amazing thing is, I plugged it in during the movie and it just worked. Plug in the doohickey, and suddenly I can pause and unpause the movie in progress without touching the game controller. That's what amazed me: A tech gadget that actually Just Worked Exactly Like You'd Expect It To. No rebooting the console, no having configure it via setup menus, nothing. Just plug it in, and poof it works. Now that's a good OOBE. (We're going to disregard for a moment that a better OOBE would have been for the PS3 to have had an IR transcever built-in in the first place.)

A few prods at the Universal remote, and now that works, too. The Nyko's only drawback seems to be the lack of a dedicated power button for turning the console on and off, but I don't think that's their fault, the doohickey probably just emulates a game controller, which doesn't have a dedicated button for that purpose either (you have to select a menu option, i.e., multiple keystrokes, to turn off the console from the game controller).