I’m truly, totally, completely shocked … that Windows is still being used on the server side.

There are gamers and there are gamers.

Some gamers prefer not to have the level of noise of a jet engine taking off right next to them to get a couple percent more frames per second on a game.

I would say there are at least two quite different markets amongst PC gamers who have different preferred balances between performance and the downsides of it (noise, heat, power costs), a bit like not all people who enjoy driving want muscle cars.

Lying and misportraying themselves in social media is nothing for a country were most people are fine with murdering tens of thousands of children because of their ethnicity.

This is nothing given the depths of their depravity.

Several years ago I looked into importing LED Lamps from China into the EU as a business and exchanged some emails with manufacturers in China and analyzed some samples of their products.

Basically they compete on price and hence advertise for bulk purchasers (so basically the no-name and white label brands) the version of their product with the cheapest power converter they have, which is quite crap and more of a hack than a proper converter. However if you pay them a bit more (back then it was maybe 10c for a good LED light bulb that costed less than $1 from the factory) they’ll use proper power converters.

As a consumer and if you’re buying no-name brand lamps you can try and get the ones with the better power converters by buying “dimmable” LED lamps (even if not using a dimmer) because to get the LED lamps to react properly to the effects of a dimmer in the power that’s fed to them, the lamps need to have the better power converters (that do proper AC-DC with voltage step down conversion, rather than the sort of shortcuts used for the cheap converters). Unsurprisingly, dimmable LED Lamps cost more than the regular ones, though nowadays LED Lamps aren’t really expensive.

Stuff designed for Europe which has a CE mark has since 2017 to have been tested for (if I remember it correctly) at least 20,000h of use and 10,000 on-off cycles with no more than 5% failures, plus there is also a maximum loss of brightness of the LEDs (as the light emitting diodes themselves tend to lose a bit of brightness with use after manufacturing) and rules about color quality.

The stuff I get here in Portugal, even no brand stuff from Chinese stores, has quite a low failure rate and I have been using LED lamps for ages (to the point that all the lamps more than paid for themselves in energy savings versus the other options back when I started)

So you might try choosing lamps with CE marks.

I’ve done this almost from the very beginning (back in the 90s) and always had very small mobile communications costs because I could easilly change providers and plans and even do things like use a local SIM card whilst abroad to avoid roaming costs.

Indeed.

60 years ago we were supposed to having to work very little by now thanks to automation, then automation came and instead of the productivity gains of it ending up spread across society, what happenned instead was that the extra productivity went just pushed up dividend and CxO pay higher and due to the reduced need for workers due to automation the purchasing power of salaries actually went down (for example, in the US the percentage of corporate revenues that went to pay salaries fell from 23% in the 70s down to 7% by 2014).

Expecting that, under the exact system that’s been moving us more and more towards Dystopia with each wave of automation, AI would somehow end up making things better for most people rather than better just for the Owner Class and worse for part or most of the rest, is pretty ill-informed and naive.

If you’re getting back pain from an office chair then your arse is likely too far forward when you’re sitting and you’re putting pressure on your spine due it being at an angle other than 90 degrees from the seat, or your table is too low, lowering your arms, so you’re bending forward.

You’re suppose to feel your arse pushing against the back of the chair not leaving enough of a hole between the chair and your lower back that you can fit an arm in it, and when your arms are resting on the table (which they should be pretty much all the time if your keyboard and mouse are sufficiently forward) you should feel no pressure either downwards or upwards on your shoulders

I’ve been coding for over 3 decades, often for massive long hours (to the point that by the age of 17 I had RSI due to how my wrists were resting at the edge of the table and some years later when already doing it professionally went to the doctor with chest pain - which I feared were due to a hearth condition - which turned out to be work posture related) and at some point in my mid 20s I moved to The Netherlands and to a company which had its own Ergonomics Consultant (this was back in the peak of the 90s Tech boom so there was lots of money sloshing around) who would come around when you joined and adjust everything for you (they even had tables with adjustable height) and explain you all about the correct work posture.

Been following that advice and haven’t had posture related problems since then whilst always using pretty standard office chairs (always with adjustable height, tough).

I have however seen plenty of people doing the lazy (and stupid) posture of being all the way forward on their chair and quite a lot with arms too low or too high (which is more understandable since most cheap office tables don’t have adjustable height).

It’s not what makes them money so they don’t really have the business incentive for maximizing hardware sales that leads to a relentless pushing out of new versions of their hardware that are barely better than the last one and all manner of tricks for early obsolescence of older devices (things like purposeful OS and App under-performance and even incompatibility with older versions of the hardware).

Also in the big picture of gaming the Steam Deck is tiny and in its early stages, so business-wise is not the time to go down a strategy of relentless new hardware versions and enshittification, quite the opposite.

Absolutely, they’re doing the right thing and as the right thing aligns with their business objectives it’s a bit wishful thinking to claim its because they care so much about their customers as people.

BDY sells their vehicles in Europe.

I do believe the safety regulations in the EU are actually stricter than in the US.

There are no penalties for filling a bogus DMCA takedown and the legal cost for restoring the content falls on the victim of such a takedown: the DMCA legislation was designed exactly for it to be used as Mazda and many other use it against individuals and small companies who can’t spend thousands of dollars fighting bogus takedowns.

There’s a button there to enable/disable air-mouse functionality (basically the tilting of the remote moves the mouse pointer), though it’s awkward to use compared to a normal mouse.

The keyboard on the back is also awkward to use, not just because the keys are small and not quite in standard positions but also because Shift and Alt are both “press to enable, press to disable”, with no notification lights (so, say, your keyboard might be in “Alt mode” and you’re trying to used it and it’s just doing weird stuff).

The thing does work as a combo of media player remote + mouse + keyboard, but it’s not very practical for the last 2. Also that specific model seems to have problems with the remote buttons not working if the remote is tilted (which shouldn’t be at all a problem given that’s a wireless remote).

The idea is good, the implementation could be better. There are other models like that around. Just avoid the “Google” remotes as that’s Android-locked and for voice recognition (plus it comes pre-enshittified with only a handful of buttons which only start apps such as Netflix).

Even with the quirks of the remote, whilst using that setup I often find myself altogether forgetting that what I’m using there is a PC with Linux.

LibreELEC is basically a Linux distro with Kodi and installing it in one of those (or quite a number of supported similar boards, such as Orange Pis) should be the easiest way to “join the darkside”.

I’m using a N100 mini-PC with Kodi as a Media/TV Box and it works pretty much as a dedicated device would with one of these remotes.

I seldom have to actually access it with a keyboard and mouse, though that machine also works as my home server so I do regularly access it remotelly for stuff that has nothing to do with using it as a media box.

My TV has always been run without the “smarts” ever since I bought it.

That said, recently I’ve replaced my TV Box and Media Box with a N100 Mini PC running Linux and Kodi plus a wireless remote and in addition to that the thing even works as my home server with additional functionality than just that of the devices it replaced.

For a cheaper/easier option try LibreELEC on top one of the devices they support (check the downloads page or the Wiki for the list). It’s basically a Linux distro with Kodi, so open and with none of the privacy intrusion risks of Android. The same kind of wireless remote (example - note that you don’t actually need to use the keyboard on the back or the air mouse) also works here since it just relies on standard shortcut keys of media programs like Kodi so works everywhere (even Android).

However what all these privacy-protecting non-enshittified options have in common is that they’re not fully configured solutions that you just buy and use - as you’ve noticed, if you just buy a streaming stick or device it will likely be at the least “spammy” - and you do have to do some of the work to get them working.

Something like LibreELEC on a mini PC should be the simplest to put together as the hardware comes preconfigured in an actual box and all that’s needed is to install the LibreELEC image from a bootable USB stick, but if you have a bit more technical know-how (not really that much needed, mind you) you can get something like one of the supported Orange Pi boards along with a box for it and it will cost you less than half as much as even a basic Mini PC - those boards are basically using the same chips as Android TV media boxes so you get the same performance without the “spammyness”.

In this day and age, accepting cash payments is the least shady and most customer friendly thing of all.

It’s the ones who want to know ALL about you and partner with payment processors who want to know ALL about you that are shady.

Mate, the horse whip and the wheel were Technology back when they got invented.

It’s a massivelly generic word.

Absolutelly some Technology has reduced drudgery. Meanwhile some Technology has managed to increase it (for example: one can make the case that the mobile phone, by making people be always accessible, has often increased pressure on people, though it depends on the job), some Technology has caused immense Environmental destruction, some Technology has even caused epidemics of psychological problems and so on.

Not only is there a lot of stuff in the big umbrella called Technology, but the total effect of one of those things is often dependent on how its its used and Capitalism seems especially prone to inventing and using Technology that’s very good for a handful of people whilst being bad for everybody else.

One can’t presume that just because something can be classified as Technology it will reduce drudgery or in even that it will be overall a good thing, even if some past Technologies did.

Best Windows built-in way to open files with Unix end lines.

Pfew … I moved to Linux just in time!

We’re talking about fingerprinting stuff coming in via HDMI, not stuff being played by the “smart” part of the TV itself from some source.

You would probably not need to actually sample images if it’s the TV’s processor that’s playing something from a source, because there are probably smarter approaches for most sources (for example, for a TV channel you probably just need to know the setting of the tuner, location and the local time and then get the data from available Program Guide info (called EPG, if I remember it correctly).

The problem is that anything might be coming over HDMI and it’s not compressed, so if they want to figure out what that is, it’s a much bigger problem.

Your approach does sound like it would work if the Smart TV was playing some compressed video file, though.

Mind you, I too am just “thinking out loud” rather that actually knowing what they do (or what I’m talking about ;))