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.

Yeah, true, but that’s mostly fixed costs, and has a pretty low incremental cost for each video delivered. The fixed costs we have to pay regardless.

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.

I got GOG Galaxy working in Steam, through Proton, as an “Add a non-Steam Game”. I’ll have to try Heroic Launcher.

Doesn’t it freeze there? It’s in northern Illinois.

Could we put Einstein’s bones in a centrifuge, and run at 200km/h?

I loaded a bunch of articles until it prompted me to pay. I got the screenshot below. In my opinion, this is an intentionally misleading fake 50c/month offer.

Not sure how much you’re paying for your VPN, but a virtual private server can be had for about $5 per month. You’ll get a real IPv4 address just for you, so you won’t have to use non-standard port numbers. (You can also use the VPS as a self-hosted VPN or proxy.)

$5 per month doesn’t get you much processing power, but it gets you plenty of bandwidth. You could self-host your server on your home computer, and reverse-proxy through your NAT using the VPS.

a slide out menu needs JavaScript

A slide out menu can be done in pure CSS and HTML. Imho, it would look bad regardless.

When if you said just send the parts of the page that changed, that dynamic content loading would still be JavaScript

OP is trying to access a restaurant website that has no interactivity. It has a bunch of static information, a few download links for menu PDFs, a link to a different domain to place an order online, and an iframe (to a different domain) for making a table reservation.

The web dev using javascript on that page is lazy, yet also creating way more work for themself.

He’s also one of the inventors of Javascript as a browser feature. I feel like that would matter to OP.

Search is easier to implement without Javascript than with.

<form method="GET" action="/search">
<input name="q">
<input type=submit>
</form>

Even if you can buy it, you can’t file a warranty return if you are outside Fairphone’s small support area.

Fairphone has guaranteed 0 years of support in my country.

The point of the blockchain is to achieve distributed consensus of what’s in the database. That way, one entity can’t unilaterally change what the database says.

If you have a public non-profit institution maintaining the database, obligated to serve all legal customers, with serious consequences for tampering with it, you can get pretty much everything blockchain can do, for a billionth of the computing power.

But with that system, you would lose these features:

• partially-anonymous participants
• service of all customers, even illegal ones
• immunity to court orders

I did not know about soft turn signals until I saw this post.

I question why this feature exists. Drivers should be aiming to signal 10 seconds ahead. When making a lane change or turn, you should be keeping your signal on until the maneuver is completed. I can’t think of a circumstance where 3 blinks is enough. 1 blink looks more like a mistaken signal.

Swapping out random parts of the OS will certainly lead to breakage and dependency hell in your package manager (unless you just replace files without using the package manager, which might make all of this even worse).

I’ve done it, and it works. I’ve built packages of libraries and binaries before, at higher version numbers than Debian had, and deployed them to multiple Debian sid systems. They worked. When Debian caught up, I seamlessly upgraded all 3 systems with no problems.

Even in the worst case scenario of dependency hell, you would be able to downgrade to the Debian supported version. But I never had to do anything like that.

I’m not going to respond to all the rest of your post, because I don’t think it will help with anything. It seems that we have very different ideas about device ownership.

Some apps resist being backed up. “android:allowBackup=false” was one way. Apparently that can be overridden, but there are other ways apps can resist backup that can’t be overridden. It’s not clear what those are, but some of my apps definitely aren’t being backed up by Seedvault, even though they aren’t using keystore.

The apps using keystore can only ever be backed up by installing a backdoor in the TEE.

They do provide instructions for compiling from source, they just don’t support you at all afterwards. If you compile GrapheneOS and put it on your phone, they say “you are not running GrapheneOS” at that point. Unlike Debian or Ubuntu, where every package can be replaced by a hand-compiled version, and it’s still Debian or Ubuntu.

need to charge it in a public space? You better hope no one had modified the charger with something like an RPI to silently exploit your phone

Any secure Android device should be starting each USB session in device mode, set to charge only. It is usually not possible to change this mode without unlocking the screen. I don’t know what this has to do with sandboxing or unlocked bootloaders.

Crossing a border into a country and they suspect you’re some sort of threat?

How does this attack work? Are you saying they’d replace the operating system by using the unlocked bootloader? There are plenty of ways to prevent this with full disk encryption. Of course you need to check for modifications when you get it back, but that’s true even if you have a locked bootloader, because of hardware modifications and leaked keys.

Not running software that updates the hardware’s proprietary software drivers? One text message and you’ve got a rootkit.

In any of the open source Android distros, like LineageOS or GrapheneOS, those updates come as part of the operating system. The updater is open source, and doesn’t care whether your bootloader is locked. I assume a Linux Mobile system would be closer to Debian’s Apt system, which is also an open source updater than can install proprietary drivers, and also doesn’t care if your bootloader is locked.

didn’t really need an “um ackshually” about people who don’t want a secure os

This is pointlessly condescending.

Comprehensive backups, which can only be done after rooting. You can do this, but only after disabling verified boot.