Oh yeah, that is a cool remote. My observation about the awkwardness of a laptop in the living room is more about furniture and the layout of most media rooms. A second screen or a place for the laptop usually isn’t quite right, or downright bothersome. Even a desktop can be a problem.

My media server is hiding in the tv stand because it is NUC sized, an old mac mini. It could directly play to the tv, but for various reasons I wind up with apple castoffs, so an apple tv running Infuse is the front end. If I didn’t have that gear I would be running a modified android player.

I wind up in a lot of living rooms mucking around in their media systems and the furniture aspect matters to a lot of people. Also convenience is paramount, they want a media appliance in front of the couch, computers are for desks.

I know my family is grateful that I no longer force them to mess with a computer to watch something. Inconvenient and frustrating.

This is awkward in most living rooms and the remote control sucks. Source: my house, and my job.

Less awkward, ironically, when using airplay to an appletv.

Anyone who hosts websites can check the logs and see the bots hammering away at wp/admin primarily, even if you are not running any WordPress. Low hanging meat? Fresh fruit?

1. Monal (on a mac)

2. Marketing, sadly , actually works… plus network-effects

For a while, it was believed to interfere with LLM scrapers and poison the training. I don’t see it much lately. Seems like it would be trivial to parse and convert.

Or, like, you know, they got bumped and it’s get a hotel or fly another airline.