Octopus in the UK has tariffs where it basically takes over your system (ie the batteries in particular) and subsumes them into its wider activities, eg:
We brought down our energy consumption substantially over the years starting not so far from that high figure, including swapping out racks of Sun servers for an RPi or two, and we are now slight net exporters of utility energy and with it roughly zero carbon...
EVs provide a lot of storage, but people tend to drive during the day and charge at night, so it might actually exacerbate the storage issue. Increasing access to charging stations usable during the day such as in employee parking lots helps, but short term storage is definitely going to need to increase.
I was being slightly tongue-in-cheek, but if we stopped fighting one another and built a planet-circling grid (I have ofc made a modest proposal for a US/Europe interconnector including wind generation along its route) then the issue would become transmission from where electricity is being generated to matching (EV) charging demand.
Or you could call them interconnectors strung with solar and wind generation.
In any case, if PV is available from somewhere on the globe much of each 24h, and cars are plugged in to recharge then (typical UK cars are parked ~96% of the time), then it's mainly a transmission problem again, maybe?
Browsers already have an early scanner to look ahead for things that it may need to load soon, such as images, and piles of heuristics. Those heuristics are hard in part because many HTML authors don't bother marking up their image dimensions. The lazy attribute helps avoid loading images that the author can be fairly sure will not be in the initial viewport, so is an optimisation hint to override some of those heuristics. So it saves some bandwidth and helps ensure that things above the fold are not fighting things below in the initial viewport construction. So we're about two levels of optimisation in here, but browsers do a reasonable job when fed good img tags anyway.
Thank you, I did not know about Fairphone - I will give it a closer look. It looks interesting.
Honestly, sel-hosting email, DNS, etc. seems perhaps too “advanced” for me - I am not sure I would be able to do it without causing more problems than I solve.
I am resigned to the fact that I cannot be completely independent, protected from surveillance by any state, etc. At this point, I am just looking for ways to prevent catastrophic scenarios, such as Trump blocking (or threatening to block) Europeans' access to American clouds and the like.
I do (1) and have for many many years (laptops w/ ~13" screen), and the mobility it allows is huge, though I have a 2nd-hand portrait monitor on my desk at home for reading portrait documents (eg formal papers) occasionally.
I have had the benefit of multiple/external monitors at (eg banking) client sites in the past, but I don't really miss them, and often forget to use them even when available to me regularly.
Laptop ergonomics are indeed far from ideal. Possibly the biggest help for me was to get my varifocals set up to be mostly central area optimised for my typical laptop screen working distance, with eg much less 'far' vision at the top.
