Not sure if this counts, as most of the components used were technically made for at least part of the purpose I used them for. But I do not think anyone used the combination like I did, so here goes. I once created the most convoluted way of having a remote control for my pc. The setup consisted of a microcontroller board used at the company I worked for, attached an infrared port to that so it could read the infrared signals from a PDA. The microcontroller board was attached to my pc using the serial port. I wrote the embedded software to read the IR for the microcontroller board, then send signals to PC via RS232. Then more software to allow the PDA to send specific signals to the microcontroller, and a third bit of software that allowed the PC to respond to the signals of the microcontroller. This way I could have some basic control over Winamp, which I was using at the time. This setup did actually work "fine", but was eventually replaced by a simple USB dongle + actual remote control when I found that those were actually readily available. :D

Ah, thanks! Like the English sometimes call people named Richard, Dick? Sorry for the offtopicness, I could not google for that ;) (or at least couldn't find the answer)