Power costs vary a lot around the world, depending on where OP lives every little saving can help.
I’ve had this debate with myself a few times. In my country air ambulances (helicopters) are often funded by a charity, while normal ambulances are funded by the state. Such essential services shouldn’t be relying on charity to exist.
In work I’ve also been involved in providing services to major national charities, and I’ve often been shocked by the amount of waste and inefficiency going on behind the scenes.
That said I also know plenty of local charity groups that are well runs and make a big difference to the area. I’m not anti charity, but I think it does deserve more accountability.
Yet another reminder that “the cloud” is really just “someone else’s computer”. The end users of cloud based products are controlled by “someone else’s” rules and whims.
With how aggressive Microsoft is becoming with ads, services, and data collection they could at least make Windows itself free.
But no, you still have to pay £100+ per license to have the pleasure of putting up with this crap.
In the UK the BBC are running their own instance social.bbc on trial basis, and I think the trial was recently extended.
Hopefully other public bodies will follow suit.
Kids have been watching plenty of brain melting videos before AI came along too.
If you want kid’s brains to stay nice and firm don’t let them be raised by a tablet.
SEO has been a plague in search engines for almost as long as they have existed. Unfortunately combatting it is an endless cat and mouse game, as there will always be some who will devise new ways to game the system. With how commercialised the web has become there’s enormous incentive to do so.
I’m also not convinced Google has much intention of really fixing it. They already have a monopoly on search, and as an advertising company are unlikely to want to upset the big media companies exploiting their search engine.
So a supposedly cutting edge $3500 device plus an additional $300 dongle gets a wired connection speed from the year 2000. USB 2 is 24 years old
Welcome to the future folks.
One of the main issues is the lack of competition. There are now only 3 main browser engines, Blink, Gecko and WebKit. Blink (which poses Chrome and Edge) is by far the largest, and has a the enormous marketing might of Google (and Microsoft to a lesser extent) behind it. WebKit runs Safari, which only runs on Apple platforms and arguably only has the market share it does is because Apple doesn’t allow other browser engines to run on iPhones and iPads. Gecko, the engine of Firefox, continues to slide into irrelevance (which pains me to say as a long time Firefox user).
We are in real danger of the web being trapped in a browser monoculture again, like the dark dark times of Internet Explorer’s dominance. This led to a period of stagnation in web technology Microsoft at the time put little effort into developing IE. Allowing Blink/Chrome to do the same will likely be just as damaging, albeit in different ways - particularly for privacy on the web.
For the good of the web no one company should ever be in the position to dictate web standards, which is why we need a healthy and competitive marketplace of web browsers and browser engines. The problem is that web standards have now become so complex developing an indecent browser engine is now a monumental task. Opera gave up on Presto, once the poster child for browser innovation. Microsoft, a company with far more resources, gave up on Trident. Mozilla was developing a new generation browser engine called Servo, but gave up on the project also.
So now Windows bloat is extending to the physical keyboard itself.
Looking at the Microsoft blog post they haven't said exactly how they want keyboard layouts to change. So on a full size keyboard this could be either new key entirely, or replace an existing (and arguably more useful) key.
“It was a bug” is the common excuse when an intentional feature backfires.
Loading screen ads seem like an obvious next step of enshittification. They are creeping back into video with ads breaks on streaming, only a matter of time before they are in games too.
Some Zigbee smart plugs and sockets have configurable calibration settings. I have some SmartThings smart plugs that have calibration settings, and I think the new IKEA smart plugs with power monitoring have calibration settings too.
There are some resellers providing generic Wi-Fi smart plugs pre flashed with Tasmota and calibrated correctly. Not sure where you are located but in the UK I can recommend Local Bytes.
I've also seen people recommend Shelly devices for power monitoring for accuracy. The Powercalc integration developer used to recommend Shelly devices for measuring power use of new devices to create Powercalc profiles.
I wouldn't expect too much from accuracy from any of these smart devices though. They are intended for general consumer use to provide general ideas about energy use - they are not scientific instruments and probably shouldn't be treated as such.
If you are looking to monitor homelab devices specifically perhaps you should look at a more professional/enterprise PDU instead.
Remember that to properly calibrate any of these devices you will also need an accurate reference device to calibrate against.