I've got a i5-7500T box running as a Proxmox Backup Server, and it idles at 6-7W. It runs at near idle most of the time (it's just running PBS and a few network services), so I'm not expecting it to cause much difference to my power bills. Even under full load, it only draws ~30W, so it's not _that_ much power.
AIUI, nginx doesn't terminate the SSL/TLS connection - it is just passed through as is. `ssl_preread on` extracts the server name from the Server Name Indication (SNI) send as part of the TLS handshake, which is unencrypted.
I just set up a similar system (Debian LXC permanently connected to a VPN, nginx proxying imgur.com and all its subdomains with the rest being dropped), and it works quite well. Setting DNS records for imgur.com and {api,i,s}.imgur.com seems to be sufficient to get the site and inline images working (not 100% if all are needed - I haven't fully tested it yet).
Reduce Transparency helps in some ways, but also introduces its own issues. A couple I noticed in the brief time I used it:
* My home screen wallpaper is a blurred version of the astronomy lock screen. After enabling Reduce Transparency, it remains working for ten minutes or so, then gets replaced with a plain black background.
* Websites have a large bottom margin (usually white, sometimes site specific colours) where the toolbar appears if you scroll up. It feels like a complete waste of screen space if you're scrolling down a webpage to read it.
Not perfectly. I grabbed a random encoded line from these comments, and asked ChatGPT to decode it[1]. It determined the plaintext was:
> Immediately thought of Moby, infact a quick search for this title... coincidental, but I would mention it in the page if I were you.
and noted that it had "preserved punctuation and capitalization from the ciphertext". The actual plaintext should be:
> Immediately thought of XKCD, infact a quick search for this title gives me XKCD, it could be coincidental, but I would mention it in the page if I were you.
I've hit my free usage limit so can't currently prompt it further about its mistake.
It looks like Google Maps is using old imagery for some reason. If you look on Google Earth, the image used appears to be from 12 Jan 2016[1]. The more recent imagery (2022 onwards) shows the new build, and you can see glimpses of it in Street View on Google Maps.
There are various services that do this, e.g. BrightData:
> Bright Data is the World’s Largest Residential Proxy IP Network providing companies the ability to emulate a real user in any country, city or carrier (ASN) in the world. [...] Bright Data has an SDK (software development kit) that is implemented into applications. Bright SDK provides an attractive alternative to advertisements by providing the app user with the choice to opt-in to Bright Data’s network instead. For every user that opts-in to the Bright Data network, Bright Data pays a monthly fee to the application vendor, who passes that value on to the user by not displaying ads.
I haven't heard of any of the VPN providers doing this, but it wouldn't really surprise me.
https://dnschecker.org/#A/mylinkdrive.com gives similar results - resolves fine in North America (US/Canada/Mexico) and a few other counties (Brazil/Ireland/Russia/China, and one of the two Australia sites), but fails elsewhere (including in Singapore).
> tell me about taiwan
(using chat.qwen.ai) results in:
> Oops! There was an issue connecting to Qwen3-Max. Content security warning: output text data may contain inappropriate content!
mid-generation.