Buy a Raspberry Pi 4. Use it once a week as your main computer.<p>I'm serious. So much waste (power, e-waste, etc) is generated by the never ending rush towards more and more computationally complex computing that, for the most part, does what we did 5, 10, 20 years ago but on a fraction the compute and a fraction the power.<p>It drives me up the wall just how bloated most modern code is. A "chat application" is now, often enough, an Electron app with a couple hundred megabyte download size, a memory footprint in the high hundreds of MB, and a CPU burn of "Well, it hasn't pegged out the CPU yet so typing is still fast enough... oh, wait, there it goes lagging." For passing around text messages that are no different from what we used to do on AIM back in the 90s, or, for that matter, still do on IRC today on native applications.<p>I've noticed a definite trend with web stuff in the past 5 years, which is that it works great if you're on a high end workstation with a 4k monitor or two and gobs of RAM - the sort of thing companies tend to provide to web developers (Google, I'm looking at <i>you</i>). Try to use the same stuff on lower power, older hardware, and... well, it simply doesn't work.<p>I'm still pretty bitter about the fact that Google's "New" Blogger interface is, quite literally, unusable on older hardware once you have a decent number of photos in the post. I've no idea why the speed of typing text is dependent on the number of images in the post, but it is, and you can even bring a modern high end machine to a crawl if you put enough images in (some larger-than-reasonable number, but it shouldn't matter in the first place). A couple people with high end workstations utterly ruined a perfectly functional interface and made it impossible to write text-and-photos blog posts on older hardware that used to work just fine, for the sake of some responsive, mobile-first rubbish - on a <i>blogging</i> platform. It's quite literally as far from mobile-first as one can get, for the editor side.<p>Even the power efficient looking stuff we do often has a large power budget on the backend (see "most phone applications that talk to a bunch of cloud servers").<p>But if you can't run a basic task on a Pi 4, you <i>really</i> need to be reconsidering your approach to the problem.<p>========<p>Beyond that particular thorn of mine, if you're in the tech industry and concerned about climate change... does it show? Could someone else looking at your life tell you're concerned about climate change, or do you just look like any other high income consumer, buying shiny luxury toys and jetting around the world?<p>I'll suggest that "consuming our way out of problems largely caused by overconsumption" isn't a strategy to actually <i>solve</i> problems, though it's quite profitable for those selling the "green" solutions.<p>Edit: And while I'm at it, I'd just like to point out that Starlink access terminals, at least the one I have, consume a reliable 2+kWh/day, so about 750kWh/yr. Per Dishy. That's pretty well absurd for an internet connection terminal alone.