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.

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.

Cloudflare has IP banned me before for no reason (no proxy, no VPN, residential ISP with no bot traffic). They’ve switched their captcha system a few times, and some years it’s easy, some years it’s impossible.

ICE is picking up illegals

At this point, most of them are documented, legal immigrants. Many are even permanent residents. Occasionally, they even kidnap US citizens.

Suppressors are an important safety device for everyone’s hearing. Watching someone fire a 9mm handgun without a suppressor is painful to me, even with double hearing protection (ear plugs and muffs).

I’ve never heard anyone say that Flatpaks could result in losing access to the terminal.

My only problem with Flatpaks are the lack of digital signature, neither from the repository nor the uploader. Other major package managers do use digital signatures, and Flatpaks should too.

OBS worked pretty well for me last time I used it, using the basic package Debian provided.

This doesn’t change the fact that 47 is the current problem, and is the one currently talking about nuclear war. No matter how bad Biden would have been on this issue, he is currently irrelevant.

We’re talking about nuclear war right now.

My problem with that theme is that it doesn’t highlight any buttons. I believe all buttons should have borders, especially the ones the titlebar. This helps distinguish a noninteractive label from an interactive clickable button.

This survey doesn’t distinguish between levels of cloud service provider, so I was a little confused.

Virtual private servers, cloud virtual servers (like AWS), cloud-based software where you provide code or a program and the cloud system runs it on a server of its choosing, and cloud-based systems where someone else provides the software (like Google Docs).

Kanopy looks like they use Widevine DRM. I will continue using other DRM-free sources.

Turn signals are not optional.

I like git add because then you can do git diff --staged

I can’t seem to upload images, but if you image-search for:

“we’ve completed our review and found this account’s activity goes against whatsapp’s terms of service”

You will find screenshots you can download and use as fake proof that you are banned.

When I had to contact Facebook to get an account unlocked, they took about a month to respond to each email, and never did unlock the account no matter how much proof I sent them. I expect WhatsApp is similar, since it’s owned by the same company. So just say that they hardly respond, and they say things they’ve already said, ask you to try things you’ve already tried, or they ask for documents you’ve already sent them.

Why were you banned? Maybe you accidentally signed in on a phishing page, and they sent spam using your account. Maybe you created an account, and your first action was to contact a person you hadn’t contacted before (obviously), and it was marked as spam. Maybe you signed up on an IP address previously used by a spam-sending datacenter (this happened a lot to me at my old house). Maybe your phone number was banned from WhatsApp before you got it, but you already gave it to too many people to be able to change it.

When I worked on OpenStack for a few years, 80% of the bugs I fixed were type errors that could have been prevented by Python being staticly typed.

That is not a reasonable living condition. I can’t pretend that it’s normal to live like that. A person deserves way more than 15m^2 of space.

If you’re trans: Start making plans to flee. You don’t have to carry them out right now. But do get a passport, even if it has to have your deadname. Canada or Mexico probably wouldn’t accept a US refugee just for being trans right now, but that will change in the future.

If you’re an immigrant, or even a permanent resident: It’s unsafe in the US right now. I wouldn’t fault you if you left today. However, everyone’s circumstances are different. Maybe you want to stay and support your spouse and kids who are citizens, and you’re willing to risk your life to do it. It depends on the circumstances.

Anyone else: Stay and fight.