You’ve got umpteen remote controls in your living room, and you always seem to lose the one you need. Sound familiar?

We have this problem at our house, and while there are many solutions available that can consolidate your remote control codes into a single remote control, Griffin Technology showed a product at CES that may be the best so far. It works with an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch.

The product is called the Beacon Universal Remote Control System. Yes, it’s a mouthful. And no, it doesn’t make a decent acronym — BURCS. It is, however, a well thought-through product.

Other remote control solutions attach directly to your iPhone, which makes the iPhone much heavier. And you have to remember to attach it each time. Or possibly even find it, like one of your remote controls.

The Beacon is an intermediary device that translates the signals between your iOS device and your various other devices. The intermediary device uses the customary IR (Infrared) technology to send the commands to the other devices, but uses Bluetooth to receive the commands from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch.

You install Dijit’s Universal Remote app, a free download from the App Store, and use it to select the manufacturer-specific codes for your devices. Once that task is complete, you can configure control layouts for different functions, such as listening to music, playing a DVD, or watching a television channel.

One potential issue could be the placement of the Beacon. In theory, it would need to have a line-of-sight to all your IR-based devices. A coffee table in the middle of the room would be ideal.

I asked a Griffin rep how critical placement would be if you couldn’t place the Beacon into the middle of the room. I was told that the light signals tend to bounce off walls, so it shouldn’t be a problem. I wasn’t able to test the viability of the bouncing light waves in the CES booth, but suspect that placement may still be important for this type of product.

It may sound like name of a Roman General or twist-toy Transformer, but Optimus Maximus is actually a high-tech computer keyboard. There’s a tiny OLED screen embedded into each of the 113 programmable keys.

A software utility lets you associate each key with a 48×48 pixel image, so you might use a logo for a corporate website, desktop icon for a popular application, or friend’s photo for an instant messaging program.

The keyboard is ideal for switching among unusual character sets, such as Cyrillic, Ancient Greek, Georgian, Arabic, or Quenya. Musicians might use musical notes, mathematicians could embed math functions, and programmers may favor HTML codes.

Before you rush out to buy one, you should know the price. It’s roughly $1,500, depending on the exchange rate between Russia and the U.S. Check out the website of Art.Lebedev Studio, the designer of the keyboard, for other interesting products — most with more down-to-earth prices.

Lost among all the cool new gadgets at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was a nifty Skype-compatible accessory from Polycom.

You might wonder why Polycom would be releasing a consumer product. The company is best known for its business-oriented teleconferencing equipment, especially its tri-cornered phones that let a room full of people participate without the usual audio feedback problems. Polycom has taken that same conference-room expertise and applied it to the Polycom Communicator ($129 list price), which brings conference-phone capabilities to your Skype-equipped notebook or desktop computer.

It plugs into any USB port with a lightweight cable that folds back into the unit when you’re done. The front-mounted buttons adjust the volume up and down, mute the microphone, run the Skype program on your computer, and hang up the phone. It has a stereo headphone jack for private conversations, as well as a slim carry case for easy portability. Given Skype’s rock-bottom prices for domestic and overseas phone calls, this would be an excellent way to add phone service to your WiFi or cellular-modem equipped laptop.

I found the audio quality to be very good on my end, though someone on the other end of a call mentioned the audio sounded a bit tinny. That was probably a result of the Skype Internet connection, not the fault of the Communicator, as the built-in speaker and dual microphones seemed fine when I used them for other computer-based functions.