The air mouse remote I use is actually wireless with a little USB receiver, which is generally better than IR, IMHO, though you can’t actually turn the Mini-PC ON with it, wh8ch is fine since purposefully chose a Mini-PC with an N100 processor exactly because its TDP is pretty low and I can just leave it always ON (which is also necessary because it’s running other services).

The thing does have an IR LED and 5 programmable IR buttons (it was designed for use with Android TV boxes, so this is how one could turn it ON with the remote even though most of its functionality is via wireless with an USB receiver), which I use for controlling my TV.

And, absolutely, that stuff works perfectly with Kodi and once Kodi is up (which in my case I don’t yet do automatically but only because I’ve been too lazy to get around to figuring out how to do) I can do everything in it with just the remote buttons, no need for mouse or keyboard.

Most “center” “left” parties in Europe nowadays are just Neoliberals (pro-business, pro-privatisation, pumping up asset bubbles and generally bough and paid for by moneyed interest) and hence not really Left and often not even Center.

However all countries in Europe still have real Left parties (even the UK with it’s highly rigged First Past The Post voting system has the Green Party), though judging by the one in my own country (of which I am a member) there’s often this messy mix of people whose leftwing thinking is basically slogans from the Soviet Union (these being mainly people in their 60s and older) and people who grew up in the post ideology neoliberal age for whom leftwing is basically greed but for-the-group instead of the individual (hence you end up with Identity Politics which is a twisted subverted charicature of the Fight For Equality that far too often is dominated by people who are members of a group they were born into demanding shit for their group - instead of a broad push for Equality done on the basis if need an independent of the “group” people were born into, we have competing pulls for getting shit per group, with people said to be deserving or undeserving based on the genetics they were born with, thus far too often rewarding some people who are priviledged but have the “right genetics” whilst not helping those who have real need and yet were born with the “wrong genetics”).

I don’t really know if the present day Left can find a modern ideology and vision that’s not just a “branch of neoliberalism that doesn’t talk of Economics”, though the victory of the NFP in France, lead by Melenchon and his party rather than the old “moderate” mainstream party - called Socialist but not in any way form or shape so, but rather just neolibs plus performatice leftwing talk - gives me hope.

If people are hurting, some of them will listen to the arguments of the Far Right - “the blame is those other guys who don’t look the same as you” is quit an appealing argument for many.

There are two solutions for that:

• You try to get most people to really think deeply their politics, in a well informed way which puts aside tribalisms, thus reducing the take of far-right arguments.
• You remove the causes of the hurt, which at the moment it’s mostly end-stage Neoliberalism (basically the wealth people produce is incredibly ill distributed).

I reckon the first one is pretty much impossible (I mean, it would be great, but it doesn’t work for actual human beings, with all their tribalism and ignorant self-evaluations as not at all ignorant), whilst the second absolutelly is possible (and probably required, if only to stop the Environmental destruction of our planet and guaranteed the survival of our civilization).

Having lived in a country with Proportional Vote, that’s exactly it in my experience: all those other, mathematically-rigged, parliamentarian allocation systems are not broken Democracy, they’re subversions of Democracy that twist what is supposedly the will of the voters to achieve some other objective (generally we’re told it’s “Stability”, which curiously always end us as a power duopoly of parties whose politicians have to worry about getting votes far less than they would otherwise, and which are easilly corrupted by those with lots of money).

Democracy isn’t broken, it has however been subverted to control it in most of the West, very deeply so in some cases like the US.

Yeah, by European standards, I don’t think New Labour are even just Center-Right: they have far too much love for “businesses”, privatisation and deregulation to be an inch left of the traditional Right - in many ways they’re pretty much were the Tories were back in Thatcher’s day.

“Aujourd’hui, ma baguette est levée pour la France.”

(more or less)

This is The Guardian, a Liberal (not Left, Liberal) newspaper in Britain, a country whose only left of center (by European standards) party is the Green Party which has all of 4 seats out of 300 in Parliament now (and it used to be just 1, even though they had 1 million votes out of 40 million).

(Labour was once leftwing, before Blair’s Third Way, and when recently it’s members voted for it to go back to being Leftwing there was a massive smear campaign which included this very newspaper to bring down the leftie leader and put the neoliberals back in control of it).

From the point of view of the journalists, editors and board of The Guardian, even Social Democracy if “far left”.

Britain is maybe the most “like America” (but not on the good things) country in Europe, with a very similar voting system (First Past The Post) and with and Overtoon Window far more shifted to the Right than almost any other country in Europe (basically the Tories are a posher version of Orban) and their Press is one of the least trusted in Europe, and that includes The Guardian.

Think of The Guardian as a British New York Times.

If you want to see coverage of the French elections that’s not been twisted by a British hard-Neoliberal Private School Attending High Middle Class journalist in a newspaper that prides itself of being “opinion makers”, try Le Monde.

My hope is that Leftwing implements policies that undo large parts of the Money-is-King and Screw-You-Plebes Neoliberalism, thus removing at least part of the popular discontent and distrust (people feel poorer and yet the mainstream keeps telling them the Economy is Growing) that the Far-Right feeds on with their “the blame is those other people that are even worse of than you (not at all the super rich)” scapegoating.

Reduce the pain by making the State more supportive again and getting more “from those who can the most, to give to those who need the most” and you take the wind off the Far-Right’s sails.

The far-right in Europe, with money from both Russia and American billionaires, has been ridding the wave of insatisfaction that’s the side effect of the very problems created by Neoliberalism (which is now in its natural end stage were wealth is far more concentrated than ever since the early XX century and social mobility is pretty much non-existent, hence why most people feel poorer and hopeless) which itself was created with billionaire money pumped into Think Tanks and buying politicians mainly in America in the late 70s, early 80s.

As I see it, the best way for the Left to disarm the the Far-Right is to undo most of Neoliberalism - go back to higher levels of State support and State control of strategical assets, free Education, Progressive taxation with excessive wealth heavilly taxed, and so on - thus removing the very cause of the popular insatisfaction that the Far-Right feeds on using a litany of “blame everybody but the rich” excuses.

At least some of this actually seems to be what the NFP has announced it will do.

Now, Macron (and his party) being hard core neoliberals will fight this tooth and nail, as will the EU because most of the governments there are neoliberals and things like the ECB as as pure neoliberal as it gets, so for starters, they will most definitelly try to help the ultra-rich in France more evade tax even more than now.

The other problem is that part of the NFP is the old centrist “left” party (the Socialist Party, which has nothing at all to do with Socialism) who were part and parcel of the Neoliberalization of French politics (a typical corrupt as hell mainstream “centrist” European party of the last 2 decades) and eventually suffered massivelly at the polls for it. That said, the fear of being made even more irrelevant will probably put a break on their corrupt neoliberal tendencies.

The good news is that, if the French Left manages to overcome the forces in France that will be arrayed against any undoing of Neoliberalism, that country is big enough to pretty much ignore EU pressure.

There we reports of that for some, so it’s worth it to check the model before you buy.

There are however, A TON of models, most which haven’t been flaged as having malware and spyware.

That said, you can always pay more (about 2x to 3x) to get an alternative from a Western brand that’s not one of the big corps (whose products are also “filled” with at least spyware).

The other option is to instal LibreElec on a Single Board Computer (essentially “make your own Media Box”) were you have full control since LibreElec is basically a Linux Distro from media boxes with Kodi, compiled for the main ARM architectures used in those things (A6 and A7 if I remember it correctly), but that requires a bit more expert knowledge and you need to get yourself (or print, if you have a 3D printer) a box for it if you want it to look nice on your living room.

The option I’m currently using and which so far I think is the best is the Mini-PC with Linux, Kodi and the air mouse remote, but then again I’ve been using Linux on and off for 3 decades and for part of my career was designing and implementing server-side software so am very comfortable setting up and using Linux (not that installing Lubuntu and then Kodi on a N100 Mini-PC was at all complicated, as it just works and most modern Linux distros seem way ahead of the stuff I’ve worked with before when it comes to hardware compatibility and ease of use).

I actually had for maybe a decade what’s now a really old ASUS media player (which they don’t even make anymore), which couldn’t play media with newer codecs so I upgraded it to one of the cheapest Android TVs (€18) but that turned out to be sluggish, so I upgraded to a better one (€35, which seemed to work fine), but then I just went “screw this” and replace it with a Mini-PC with an Intel N100 (€150) with Lubuntu and Kodi and also moved other services into it (it’s now also my home NAS), then added always on VPN and a Torrent server.

That Mini-PC is the best setup I’ve had for this stuff and there’s still plenty of room in there to add more services (both storage-wise and in terms of computing power) and I highly recommend it if you’re comfortable enough with the software side of Tech (a SBC with LibreElec is a little more demanding of familiarity with hardware).

You can get an Android TV “TV box” or “media box” or “media player” for that which will cost you about 35 bucks from Aliexpress for a decent one (get something with 4GB).

Or you can get a Mini PC for 150 bucks and install Lubunto on it with Kodi. Get an air mouse remote for it (the kind with more buttons, rather than the Google version) and it pretty much works the same as a media player - you generally don’t have to use the air mouse functionality, as the buttons just map to the appropriate Kodi functionality.

The mini PC has the upside that you can put a lot more stuff in it as it has way more power and storage that you need simple for streaming and media playing - for example you can hang your home media collection from it and have it be your home NAS.

Sorry, but Russia has no legimitate grievances on anything that takes place inside of Ukraine.

Ditto on the NATO expansion and all that “argumentation” line you’re parroting: Russia and Ukraine are different soverign nations and none of them has any right to force the other to do anything, which does mean that it’s not up to Russia and never was the way Ukraine runs their government including which alliances they join, same as, for example, it was never up to the United States how Iraq was run (and why the American invasion of Iraq was just as immoral as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the “Saddam was a murderous dictator” is a totally bollocks excuse).

Up and until the point one of those nations actually harms the other, none of the has any right to do anything to the other and as it so happens, it was Russia that harmed Ukraine by invading it, so the only nation there with any legitimate grievances is Ukraine.

In fact since the Russian invasion and occupation of Crimea, Ukraine and Ukraine alone is the one nation of the two with legitimate grivances against the other.

Your whole “argument” is predicated on the notion that Russia as the large neighbouring nation has a say in the affairs of its smaller neighbouring nation Ukraine, which is just a nakedly imperialist view of the relations between states straight out of XIX century political thinking.

Russian and American, though in the latter it was very wealthy individuals funding Leave rather than the State.

The money for Cambridge Analytica came from the US, not Russia.

The riff-raff are the true believers (in Israel, most being brainwashed since childhood with racial supremacist beliefs).

The leadership are just Sociopaths.

Sociopaths do what they do, no matter how abhoring, for their own personal gain and satisfaction, and dying from radiation poisoning ain’t good or satisfying.

I too once disguised to experience life as a Non-Famous Person, and it turned out to be exactly the same as my everyday life.

Well, that phone is a Xiaomi, not a Samsung (who had already made my shit list some years ago thanks to all their bloat), and the new ROM is just a bloat free MIUI, so from the same maker as the phone.

And yeah, as somebody else mentioned, if the banking app stopped working it would be the bank losing me - it wouldn’t be the first time I changed banks because they pissed me off.

Retail banking as a service is a commodity - they’re pretty much all the same - so sticking or not with a bank should be something one does based on cost and convenience and a banking app that doesn’t work on my phone reduces convenience.

As it so happens my banking app works fine.

That said, your alert can be important for other people and points one more reason to avoid Samsung like the plague.

Since that machine is mostly for gaming, I went with Pop OS!

Thanks in party to the spirit in Lemmy (thanks guys and gals) and getting pissed off at the ever more enshittification, I really went full-on on taking back control, and I don’t mean just changing my home PC (mainly used for Gaming) from Windows to Linux, but also replacing the TV Box that’s bundled with my ISP subscription (and will be changing ISP when the current contract is over) with my own Mini-PC with Lubunto and Kodi (which is also my Torrenting host with an always-on VPN and my home’s NAS) replacing the original Samsung Android (which had been bloated due to updates to the point of filling up all memory) of my aging tablet, with LineageOS and even doing the same on my brand new Smartphone.

Granted, I’ve always had the spirit of avoiding “smarts” in stuff that doesn’t need it - like TVs - but now I went and as much as possible took back control on even the stuff that does need “smarts”.

So far I’m quite happy with it all: I’ve maintained (improved, even, such as my Tablet now having more available memory) my level of Tech access whilst cutting of the ways in which companies exploited my time and patience for advertising money - I definitely feel I’m better now than before: a lot of things became more convenient and less restricted than they were before.

Things are becoming really bad out there when it comes to treating customers as cattle to be milked and I reckon that the only future were Tech is actually a pleasure to use for users is for those people who take control back from the corps on all of their devices.

Bullshit!

If it was about “just vote” you wouldn’t care who for.

That post of yours is such a perfect example of that very sleazy political propaganda I was talking about that the very first paragraph is already deceitful misrepresentation.

Then follows the customary use of political slogans from the Book Of Vote Lesser Evil: it’s “unprecedented” vote - again - “fighting for our rights” and, most hilarious of all for the “less fortunate” (trully beyond belief in a country with a grand total of 4 national politicians who are leftwing, and the rest being overwhelmingly hard-right ultra-neolibs or far-right fascists).

The whole thing reads like somebody who has swallowed the Cool Aid and is giving themselves an excuse to pester everybody else, all very similar to religious nutters proselytizing.

From the outside it’s like watching the Russian Elections but for a country with a Power Duopoly instead of a Power Monopoly, complete with people in their minds boosting way out of proportion the small differences between those two cheeks of the same arse that pass for Political Parties, to convince themselves they actually have a choice (lest they realize having the country governed for the many, not for the fatcats, is never going to happen in that electoral system and they have to do something about it) in some kind of country-sized Stockholm Syndrome.

It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad.

His real crime was “Walking down the street whilst looking working class”.