just a quickie on the wireless range.
i identified a few different technologies (?) which will give a varied range of control, as in:
- plain 27 MHz wireless devices can go up to 1.8 m (6 ft) - this frequency is reserved for "general use" in both the USA and Europe;
- then the 40 MHz ones that can go up to 3 m (10 ft), but it's a reserved frequency in Europe - for civilian radio-controlled (toy?) airplanes - so it's being slowly deprecated;
- and finally there are the 2.4 GHz ones for either 10 m (33 ft), 15 m (50 ft) or 30 m (100 ft) - not sure why the difference;
all of the above do not require line of sight (can work through walls), which is not true for IR (infrared) devices...
there is also a new generation of bluetooth devices that have various ranges, but a typical one is 10 m (33 ft), and sometime you'll find RF devices (for instance, audio headsets) that can really work from across the street sometime...
to conclude, my personal experience with a set of wireless mouse+keyboard connected to the same receiver: the mouse only works from 1 m (3 ft) away while the keyboard works well even from 4 m (13 ft) away... go figure!