...but things do work. Eventually.

For my mediabox I've needed an IR receiver for remote control purposes. Having fried the old HP4103 module, I went to shop for parts: some project boards, diodes, resistors and caps, an IR detector and a voltage regulator.

After messing up the place somewhat I ended up with this:

Not too bad, fits in the old HP case. But: it doesn't work. There's 3.x volt where there should be 5 or 10, and no signal reception. A lot of tracing down things later I realised that I had installed the IR detector mirrored...sigh.

The final result of some moving around of as few components as possible:

And now it works. I've also found something called the IR Filechooser, a nicely hackable piece of perl that allows easy navigation and playing of content via remote. Slightly ugly code, but a nice and simple tool.