Darkoshi

I wondered about that yesterday, as I switched from listening to a local radio station via the Audials streaming app on my phone, to my (over-the-air/OTA) portable radio.

Some parts of that, I could measure myself with my "Kill-a-watt" meter - the energy usage of the radio, and of the external computer speakers that I often connect my phone to. Measuring the energy usage of the phone itself is harder due to its built-in battery. I could check how much it uses while charging, but that wouldn't tell me how much extra it uses when streaming music vs being in stand-by mode.

The broadcast side can also be considered. With over-the-air transmitters, the energy required for the broadcast is the same regardless of how many people tune in to listen. With streaming, I imagine the energy usage increases depending on the number of devices that connect to the stream. If a station transmits both ways at the same time as many do, choosing to connect to the stream won't reduce the power used by the OTA broadcast.

There are many variables and things to be considered. But I did a web search and was pleasantly surprised to get several on-topic pages in the results. Of course, I don't have time to read them all, but it looks interesting.

BBC Radio Services: How much energy is used to deliver and listen to radio?

...we explored four ‘what if…?’ scenarios over 20 years, from 2018 to 2037, which were:

Business as Usual - All platforms retained
Digital Only - Switching off AM and FM from 2030
DAB/IP Only - Switching off AM, FM and DTV radio from 2030
IP Only - Switching off AM, FM, DAB and DTV radio from 2030

All switch-off scenarios showed energy-saving potential compared to ‘Business as Usual’. Out of the scenarios modelled, the ‘DAB/IP Only’ case led to the largest energy reduction of 599 GWh, which was almost twice as much as the second-largest saving from ‘IP Only’ at 301 GWh. For the ‘Digital Only’ scenario, we estimated the smallest reduction of 176 GWh compared to ‘Business as Usual’. However, our results were sensitive to which devices people migrated to after switch-off. For example, a greater uptake in listening via television sets reduced the energy-saving potential in some scenarios.

Our most notable finding, demonstrated in both the baseline and scenario results, was that the biggest factor driving energy use was the standby power of radio sets and smart speakers - more so than the power of devices when they are turned on. Therefore, as a potential intervention, we simulated the removal of this standby energy across all our scenarios from 2021. In practice, this would mean people unplugging devices from their power source when not in use.
By testing this, we found an average energy saving of 38% across our scenarios, which was unprecedentedly large.

In that article, I also found this surprising:
The total energy required to prepare, distribute and consume BBC radio in our 2018 baseline was estimated to be 325 GWh, equivalent to 0.1% of UK electricity use that year.

0.1% is a small number, but still more than I'd have expected to be used just by the BBC radio services.

StackExchange: What is the energy efficiency between FM radio tower broadcasting over an area vs point to point streaming via Internet?

Techsurvey 2023 Shows Gap Between OTA And Streaming Listening Is Shrinking

(If that booklet were to exist, I could probably use it.)

If I click on a link and it's not what I was originally looking for, and not helpful to my current goal, I'm trying to get better at closing the page quickly without reading it, no matter how interesting it may be, or how pertinent it may be to something other than my current goal.

But it doesn't help when I'm purposely looking for random entertainment instead of whatever I ought to be doing.

Logging onto the nytimes.com website, they present me with a Google Recaptcha. I select the appropriate images and click to continue, and the page displays a new set of images. After 3 or 4 pages of image tiles, I realize this is going to be never-ending, as it has been several times in the past. I try a different browser, as I might have already fixed the uMatrix settings for this there. But that browser has the same problem.

I check my uMatrix settings, and enable some more domains. Then I click the appropriate images on the Recaptha page and continue. It still doesn't work, so I enable practically all of the non-redlisted domains that are shown in the uMatrix popup.

It still doesn't work, and I'm annoyed enough to want to hit things. I only want to unsubscribe from the mailing lists I had subscribed to a while back, as I don't have time to read the emails and I'm tired of seeing them pile up in my inbox. Now I can't even login in order to unsubscribe!! Gah!! (Maybe I could just click the unsubscribe link in the emails, but dagnabbit I wanted to do it from the website.)

I look up how to make Google Recaptcha work with uMatrix. I find out about ruleset recipes, but I don't see how to enable them. The puzzle icon in the uMatrix popup is disabled.

So I walk away from the computer for a while. After an hour, I come back and find out there's a checkbox in the uMatrix settings (at the bottom of the Assets tab) that you have to select, for the rulesets to be enabled. But after selecting that, the puzzle icon still remains disabled for me...

Later, it's enabled but I don't remember what I did, if anything, for that to happen.

So now I am able to import the ruleset which is supposed to make Google Recaptchas work. (I swear, those are the same rules that I already enabled manually via the uMatrix popup, but who knows...) It still doesn't work!!!!

I try clicking the Audio icon on the Recaptcha page, as some other webpage indicates it will tell you if it thinks you failed, versus the images which just keep redisplaying with no error message. That gives me the popup message,
"Your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now. For more details visit our help page."

Does that mean there's still a problem with my browser/uMatrix settings, or are they completely blocking my IP number now?

I try logging in with Chrome, which doesn't have uMatrix installed. It worked after only a single page of Recaptcha images. I unsubscribe from all the mailing lists, hallelujah!

So anyway, my IP number must not be blocked. But wait, what happens if I click the Recaptcha audio icon in Chrome? So I log out and click the Audio icon when logging in again. It shows a popup with a "Play" button. But nothing happens when I click on Play. I make sure my speaker volume is turned up, and click Play umpteen times, but nothing plays. So much for that.

I'm still not able to login from the other browsers. I still think Google has blocked me as it's still giving that same error message for the audio; maybe the block is based on IP number plus browser id. I wonder how long it takes for the block to expire.

If it were only nytimes.com that had this problem, I could ignore it. But I have the same problem on other websites which use Google Recaptcha too, sometimes.

A while back while squirting toothpaste onto my toothbrush, a tiny bit of it splashed into my eye (don't ask me how). It burned for a moment, then was ok.

A few weeks ago, while filing away some papers, the corner of one sheet of paper hit my eyeball (don't ask me how). It hurt like hell. Worrying that I've got a severe injury always makes it worse, too. I kept thinking that my eyeball must have gotten a paper-cut. After some minutes, I was able to look in a mirror (with difficulty) to verify there was (probably) no shard of paper still stuck in there. The eye kept tearing up, so I had to press a washcloth against it for a couple of hours to soak up the tears, as well as to block the ambient light which was painfully bright.

The incident with my eye happened 40 minutes before a scheduled Spectrum appointment, for my intermittent connectivity problem (which since that last appointment has not recurred, hurrah!) That was the 4th appointment for the same problem; the 3rd time was not the charm. I didn't want to cancel the appointment. So when the tech came, and for most of the time he was here, I kept holding the washcloth against my eye. The tech was unperturbed.

After a few hours the pain was mostly gone and my vision seemed normal. For the next few days, the eye ached only slightly and sporadically. Then it felt completely normal again.

Last week, toothpaste accidentally spritzed into my eye again. This time, it hurt quite bad, and continued to hurt badly for 10 to 15 minutes even after rinsing out my eye as well as I could. It was the same eye which had the paper-cut. Maybe the cut wasn't completely healed after all, and the toothpaste irritated it again. This in spite of it being the wintergreen-flavored toothpaste which is fairly mild. The peppermint and spearmint flavors are too strong for me; they make my mouth burn.

One of the pages I found while searching on "toothpaste in eye" mentioned that most toothpastes shouldn't be dangerous to the eye... except perhaps if it's one of the whitening kinds with silica, as those are more abrasive. I thought to myself, well I know mine doesn't have silica. I purposely don't buy that kind, because their whitening power comes from sanding off the outer layer of tooth enamel. I'm trying to increase my amount of tooth enamel, not decrease it.

But yesterday I happened to look at the ingredient list on the toothpaste tube. Surprisingly, the main inactive ingredient after water was "hydrated silica". I could have sworn it used to be calcium carbonate. Did they change the ingredients?

Then I remembered that I have a small box full of empty toothpaste tubes. They can't be put with the regular recyclables, but there's a place - TerraCycle that takes them for recycling, if I ever accumulate enough of them to make it worthwhile to send them.

So I checked the box, and found an older tube, which indeed has a slightly different ingredient list. Both the old and new tubes mention "whitening" on the front, but somehow I'd never paid attention to that.

(OLD) Inactive ingredients: glycerin, water, calcium carbonate, hydrated silica, xylitol, carrageenan, natural flavor (wintergreen oil and other natural flavor), sodium lauryl sulfate, sodium bicarbonate, zinc citrate.

(NEW) Inactive ingredients: water, hydrated silica, sorbitol, xylitol, glycerin, natural flavor (wintergreen oil and other natural flavor), sodium lauryl sulfate, zinc citrate, xanthan gum, titanium dioxide, carrageenan.

The Tom's of Maine (my toothpaste brand) website says:

In our Antiplaque Tartar Control & Whitening flavors, the hydrated silica we use is milled to produce a slightly larger particle size (an average particle size of 10 microns, versus 8 microns, on average, in our children's and Wintermint flavors). This makes it a better cleaner, so that it can help to remove stains that have formed on teeth.

So at least the silica in my toothpaste is small-sized. If it were only that, I might continue using it. But with this new propensity for splashing into my eye, I'll be looking for an alternative. (Is it unreasonable to think that brushing one's teeth or doing paperwork shouldn't require wearing safety goggles?) Now when I brush my teeth, I've started holding the tube at arm's length and pointing it away from me.

All About Whitening Toothpastes - has a chart comparing the abrasiveness of different brands of toothpaste.
Setting the record straight about toothpaste abrasivity - says there's no difference in tooth-wear, as long as the toothpaste is under 250 RDA. I don't quite believe that.

This is the 2nd night in a row my internet has gone down. Yesterday it was from about 12:30am to 1:07am. Today it was from 12:20am to 1:30am.

You might think that would be a good nudge to get me to go to bed a bit earlier than otherwise. But no, it leaves me too distraught to want to go to bed. I end up staying up even later than I might otherwise. I was in the middle of looking stuff up! How can I just drop everything and go to bed? Why isn't it working? Trying to see if rebooting the modem will fix it, etc. I hadn't even gotten to the point where I could relax by reading some LJ pages, before it went down.

Without the internet, I can't even play Words With Friends, like I sometimes do while brushing my teeth.
Without the internet, I can't even look up what the weather will be tomorrow, to decide what clothes I'll wear. Though I could have brought it up on my phone.

Pondering whether I should buy an external phone modem to use when the cable modem goes down... do ISPs even still have back-up dial-up modem numbers?
Pondering whether I should open accounts with both TWC and AT&T, just so that if one of them goes down, hopefully the other one would still be up. Bah, no. Are there any other affordable options?

I suppose I could get a cell phone plan with more data, and use that for backup.

Now that the internet is working again, reading reports from other people that it must have been a fairly widespread outage, and that their internet went out yesterday too, is soothing. It's not just me. It will get fixed. Hopefully it won't happen again tomorrow.

I put that outage website link in my phone so that I can at least check it if the house internet goes down again.

It's so easy nowadays with the internet to look up information and to share information with others.

When I was a kid, if I wanted an answer to a question, I'd have to ask people, or look it up in the encyclopedia or dictionary that we had at home, or go to a library and search through books. But even if you did all that, the answer might not be found.

That isn't to say that I spent much time as a child searching the library for answers to hard questions.

But still. Even if you had a whole library of books, where would you look up the answer to a question like, "Why do my shoes squeak and creak, and how can I make them stop?"

Sometimes you can figure out answers by yourself. In the past, when my shoes squeaked, it was usually due to friction between the tongue and the top of the shoe, or due to small holes in the sole. I found ways to prevent those noises.

This time, the culprit was neither the tongues nor the soles. Internet searching provided some answers I hadn't thought of. The foam layers on one of the insoles* were coming apart. So I glued them back together with silicon sealer. That fixed one of the squeaks. I also sprinkled talcum** powder under the insoles, and after a few repetitions, that got rid of most of the creaks. One of the creaks kept coming back, which I now suspect was due to a thick thread that was under the insole, perhaps letting air in. I trimmed the thread. For the time being, the squeaks and creaks are all gone. Yay.

*I originally thought that insoles are glued in, but in many cases they aren't, and you can simply pull them out.
**Corn starch didn't sound like a good idea, as it might get pasty when wet. Nor did I want my shoes to smell like baby powder. Luckily, I found that non-baby-scented talcum powder can be found in the pharmacy foot-care section. The one I got smells like wintergreen!

Anyway, I was thinking about the above, and also thinking about what will happen to that kind of data over time. People die. Then what happens to the data they've posted to the internet? If they had their own website domain, and if no one takes over paying the domain fees or web hosting provider fees after they die, their website will be gone. If they've posted data on other sites, then it will depend on how long those sites stay around. Websites are not permanent, and most will disappear or radically change over time. Some data may get archived on various sites. But the Internet Archive, for instance, while it has old webpages, isn't very searchable in the normal sense. Google's cache is sometimes useful, but I'm not sure how long Google maintains cached data, once the original websites are gone.

So the answers that I can find today while doing an internet search, may someday no longer be there to be found. Or may no longer be found in the same places. New people will have to post the answers in new places.

Another useful piece of info I found today is that if your Lotus Notes locks up for a long time whenever you paste rich text from a webpage into an email, check the Lotus Notes proxy settings. Make sure it doesn't list an old proxy server which is no longer valid.

The Consumerist : 30 Ways You Can Spot Fake Online Reviews (Apr 14, 2010)

The New York Times : A Rave, a Pan, or Just a Fake? (May 21, 2011)

Business Week : A Lie Detector Test for Online Reviewers (Sep 29, 2011)

Time : Now There’s Even More Reason to Distrust Online Reviews (Jan 27, 2012)

Time : 9 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Trust Online Reviews (Feb 3, 2012)

abc News : Yelp Outs Companies That Pay for Positive Reviews (Nov 19, 2012)

GeoCities went away in late 2009, but someone who should be commended went thru the effort of backing up what they could of the site. They made it available at ReoCities.com. If you have an old GeoCities link that doesn't work anymore, you can change the "g" to "r" in the URL, and see if the page is found.

Update:
www.geocities.ws is another such archive. To use this one, change the ".com" in the original GeoCities URL to ".ws".

Update 2:
oocities is another such archive. To use this one, try changing "geocities" to "oocities" in the original GeoCities URL.

Apparently some torrents also exist, of some parts of GeoCities. See this page for more info.


(Yay, I can now update the broken links on my website!)

I've noticed that when people reply to old threads in various forums, they are often admonished or ridiculed for doing so. For example, today I read a useful reply to a 3-year old thread, but someone subsequently responded to it with "Zombie Thread Alert!"

It's true that the person who originally created the thread or who originally asked the question, probably no longer needs the answer or information provided. However, those answers can be quite useful to other people like me, who are having the same problem/question, and who have found the thread through a search engine.

Is anyone else having problems with YouTube lately, with it doing a lot of pausing while playing back videos, while it buffers data? My download speed is good (~6.5 Mbps), so I'm wondering if it is a problem on the YouTube side.