• 2 Posts
  • 112 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Usually it’s this, but sometimes the Recaptcha doesn’t even load (looks like an IP ban). I just submit the form, and then get an error message saying I must complete a Recaptcha, but there’s no evidence in the page of any Recaptcha to fill out.

    I’m on a residential ISP. I’ve checked every IP address reputation system I can find, and see no problems (except from “Clean Talk”, but they’re so small that I doubt Google uses them).

    Also, I hate knowing that I’m doing unpaid labor to help train an AI that will make the world a worse place.



  • I have self hosted my email since 2006. I gave up on self hosting outgoing mail in 2021, but I still keep the server up for incoming mail, and still set up throwaway accounts on there.

    The hard part of hosting email is getting Google and Microsoft to accept outgoing mail. Tons of businesses that do not have visibly outlook .com or gmail .com addresses are still hosted by those servers.

    I had SPF, DKIM, and a static datacenter IP address with no reputation problems. I still couldn’t get through to Microsoft, not even in people’s junk mail directory, until they manually whitelisted my address. Microsoft didn’t allow them to whitelist a whole domain. Google was a little easier, but they added new demands monthly.

    In 2025, I can’t get reliable delivery to gmail .com addresses even sending from a hotmail .com address in the outlook .com web interface.





  • Electrical engineer here. There is almost no difference.

    The cost of streaming video from a server to your computer is pretty small, basically just transferring the bytes from a hard drive to a network card. This happens in a datacenter on a big server designed to be efficient at it, and serve a ton of people at once. Your own electricity consumption on your viewing device is likely much higher than that. You can calculate your electricity consumption using a Kill-A-Watt or similar device, but here are some averages of measurements I’ve made on my devices:

    • PC with 27" LCD monitor: 150W
    • 50" TV: 300W
    • Laptop with internal 14" screen: 40W
    • Phone with 5" screen: 10W roughly, but it’s complicated
    • Phone with screen off, speaker only: 2W (guessing here)
    • Handheld FM radio: less than 1W

    If you look at your computer’s CPU usage while watching video, it’s mostly idle. So most of the power consumption is the screen’s backlight.

    Assuming worst-case coal power, releasing 0.4kg of carbon per kWh, and a large TV, and let’s say 10% overhead for the server’s energy cost, that’s 0.13kg of carbon per hour. So don’t worry about it.