We did get an electric pellet grill last year and we’ve been using it a lot to keep from heating the house. I wonder how much that adds.

A rule of thumb I heard from datacenters is to count every watt of power consumption as 3 to account for the additional demand on the cooling systems and battery backup, so an electric grill probably saves a ton of energy over the oven given it isn’t heating up the house

I live in Wisconsin where it can get down to -20 before wind-chill in the winter and the heat index pushes 100 in the summer, plus our summers are basically always 100% humidity for months at a time. My house was built before the turn of the century (the 19th century specifically) and both my furnace and AC are on their last legs. With all that said, I get $250 bills in the summer months and it pushes close to that in the winter, but during the spring and fall when it’s a lot more reasonable they can get under $100

Hilariously VLC will happily skip the “unskippable” ads on DVDs

For those dark pattern email boxes I like entering things like admin@[website that’s serving a dark pattern mailbox] or marketing@website because 50% of the time it just gives me whatever without any trouble and the other 50% of the time I clear cookies and consider if I really need whatever they’re gating behind harvesting my email…

You could always go the used/refurbished route to not directly give the chocolate factory money

I acquired an ewaste laptop with a 5+ year old Celeron, 4GM of RAM and a spinning rust drive. I tossed mint on there after fighting with Windows update to try to apply 3 years worth of updates and while the installer took 2 hours to complete, it actually is a bit more usable and once it’s booted it’s amusingly chirpy with random slowdowns whenever it has to hit the disc for data.

I might set it up as my daughter’s first computer. She’s getting to that age already so it’s about time to do it

I feel like a browser API that just gives info to the site when request of either “is under age, is of age to create an account, is adult” might be an easy way to establish something like this too

This way the site can voluntarily check if they’re illegally collecting data on minors, if they’re showing adult content to adults, and automatically display age appropriate content of applicable

Maybe an NSFW flag as well that sites can check to automatically show/hide NSFW content, for example on work machines or shared computers, but that’s probably getting a little too finegrained

The real question is how is the age flag determined? Is it determined by the browser? The OS? Browser seems the safest bet, since Google can base it off of the Google Account, Microsoft can base it off the Microsoft account and Mozilla can shove it in the settings and potentially base it on the Mozilla account

In regards to the DNS advice should I use that for both my PC and android ? And when would I use a vpn?

You should setup your preferred DNS server everything really. On your phone, on your computer and on your router if you can. DNS is the absolute easiest way to track and block/hijack browsing habits, so hardcoding your devices to use a standard one like NextDNS, Quad9 or Cloud flare will put you very far ahead

Regarding VPNs, commercial VPNs are really overhyped, and thats because they’re a cash cow for operators. See Tom Scott’s video on the subject if you prefer this britishplained to you. All a VPN is is a tunnel from your device to the VPN server wherever that is, so you’ll look like your traffic is originating from that VPN server, plus all of your traffic is going to that VPN server so you have to trust that that server isn’t compromised nor slurping up all of the data to sell/provide security agencies. Clear text browsing traffic will also be secured between your device and the VPN server, but that’s super uncommon nowadays. Realistically a commercial VPN is best for if you’re doing illegal activities such as piracy because it will add layers of abstraction should a private company or public agency wish to investigate your activities and try to identify you. I do use Tailscale with an exit node on my home network when connecting to public wifi just in case the network is misconfigured, but it’s really just another layer of Swiss cheese security.

I tried Graphene OS but my banking failed so back to stock Android

Any features in the mobile app that don’t exist on the website? I’ve had good luck checking my bank balance and all sorts of other things through Firefox on Android - pre-edit: I missed that it was app only. That sucks.

For browsing on Android I use Mull and on my android Proton VPN is always on. I visit twitter and twitter ocasionly but always through mull browser.

The VPN really doesn’t do much at all for privacy. It just moves the point of trust from the service provider for the current network to the VPN provider, plus now you have extra hurdles as you’ll show up as a VPN IP rather than a “normal” residential or cellular IP. Realistically set your DNS to be something like Quad9 or Cloudflare and you’ll already be several steps ahead on browsing privacy

For spending habniys I try to use Google pay as little as possible and use my master card.

Realistically any card is going to be selling your spending habits. Cash and crypto are about the only ways to have private purchases, and plenty of places won’t accept either

Personally I had a long hard think about my privacy practices and how they only isolated me and made me unhappy, and realized that if I’m already blocking all ads so I never get to see the results of the incredibly dystopian advertising hellscape, does it really matter that much if Google knows I spent $200 on random model train shit last month when they already know I watch a few hours of train-related content on Youtube? So I take smaller steps to not fully given in, but I don’t take steps that create extra hassle in participating in modern society and living my life to its fullest.

Signing the photo on the camera would achieve this, but ultimately that’s just rehashing the debate back when this Photoshop thing was new. History shows us that some will fight it but ultimately new artistic tools will create new artistic styles and niches

“Ionia County is a farming county, and I know a lot of people in this county view children working, sometimes around dangerous machinery, as part of growing up,” [the judge] said.

I married a farm girl and live in a small town surrounded by farming communities. This is unfortunately very true. Harvest time comes you need all of the help you can get to harvest everything before the weather destroys it. There’s no easy answer to this problem as most people generally don’t want to work on farms given the work conditions, and most small family farms can’t afford to pay for the labor they need (and its gigantic corporate farms where the real abuse happens because there’s no incentive to maintain the land or animals) Pretty much the only people willing to work on farms are the people who grew up on farms and people who can’t work anywhere else (such as migrant laborers from poorer countries)