LIRC IR Blaster ?

When I first started planning this project I figured that with the change in Sweden from analog to digital TV we would have to fgure out a way to control an external settop box from MythTV. For this purpose, there are IR blasters available that will act as a remote control and send irsequences to an externa box.
I went ahead and bought one of these things here.
However, since the cable company we use have decided to provide all channels in analog format also, we will not use the thing, it seems.
Though, I have been thinking of other things to control using it.. maybe the VCR? My girlfriend will soon be working, we hope, as a teacher and the schools around here have not yet embraced the DVD for presentation of multimedia content.
The bad thing is that not much else is within reach of the box... :-(