One of the side effects of feeling better is that there are some things that, though I cared about them before, now, I care about doing something, or what I can, about them. Some of them are environmental, as in climate, pollution, energy usage, among other things, and some of them are more personal.
One of the things I’ve begun to take notice of and try to do my part on is my energy consumption, or at least the heat generation in my home office. The room that I use for my home office, is also the room I use for my art. It has always been the warmest room in my home, but I’ve never thought that much about it. Until this summer. I started noticing that it would get quite warm by mid-morning to the early afternoon. It would be very noticeable. You could walk into the room and feel the heat difference, and you could walk out of the room and feel the temperature drop as you moved into the rest of the home. This became really important to address after I decided to increase the temperature on my a/c one degree warmer.
In this room is my work laptop, with two monitors, and its port replicator. The room also houses my personal desktop computer with a monitor and a Wacom Cintiq. When I started on this project, I would have all these items on during the day. And sometimes well into the evening. The room also sticks out from the building a little so that it is more exposed to the sun than many of the other rooms. I had already been trying to keep the blinds and curtains closed during the day to keep that heat down. And while it made a difference, the issue persisted.
So where did I start? I started by turning off the Cintiq on the personal computer and trying to work with just one monitor again. It made the most sense because I am not usually using the touch screen function of it, and I can turn it on if I need it. That didn’t make a significant difference. Next, I tried turning down the brightness on the work monitors. That helped some. So, I turned down the brightness on the personal monitor. I was working along like this for a week or two when I discovered something that turned out to be particularly interesting.
I noticed that if I had a lot of applications open on my personal computer, and especially something with heavy graphics, the fan on my computer would spin up and run quite hard. I’ve since learned something else interesting about this, I’ll get to that in a moment. Anyway, with that heavy fan usage I realized the computer was working pretty hot. I decided to try to limit the applications that I had open at the same time. I didn’t stick with that for long. Instead, I decided to update my personal laptop and try using it in place of the desktop to find out if that would make a difference. It does.
I discussed this with a colleague who has built a few machines and done some gaming and things like that that are in line with the type of desktop computer I have. He made the point that with a desktop graphics card geared towards gaming, as mine is because that type of graphics card is also good for rendering graphics for art and 3D art, these type of graphics cards have fans built in and the desktop computers have more fans in the cases so there is little concern for heat mitigation. And as I started the testing with the laptop, which also has a gaming style graphics card, though it is a few years older, I have noticed that it doesn’t run near as hot. Until…
I was working with two browsers open on the laptop, Chrome because it works well with my Gmail, and Edge because it works well with my Microsoft account and training. I had the CNN site open in Edge and Gmail in Chrome. I had not been on the CNN site for long when I noticed the fan on the laptop starting to spin up to cool it off. I closed Edge and the fan quieted. I tried the same site again and it started up again. I did some testing back and forth between the sites and browser combinations and what I found is that CNN in Edge causes some strain on the graphics card, it doesn’t do it in Firefox. And I haven’t noticed any other sites that do that, at least not yet.
There has been discussion as to how the different browser makers implement the different code bases that are being used or made standard. This seems to be a good example of how there is a difference and why, even today, people who create websites need to test them in a variety of browsers, particularly all the most popular ones. That allows them to understand if their site is going be consistent in appearance regardless of the browser being used. For the most part. And, it would seem that they also need to test their site for the performance impact the site has in the different browsers. Though, to be fair, one thing they might not be able to test is the impact any advertisements that might run on the site will have.
And that is a whole other topic. For years there have been issues with the behavior of ads on web sites. I’m not going to go into that here. I just know it has been a problem. So maybe that contributes.
Here are a few more tidbits to keep you thinking.
I received some sort of communication from my power company that included ways to save energy. One of the things they suggested was turning down the brightness on the TV to cut power consumption. Sounds like what I did with my monitors.
Several years ago, Google did an experiment with their website. They made their website with a black background for a day in solidarity with some event or cause. What we found out from that is that it takes more energy to display a black website than their white one.
A coder discovered that the way many websites are coded actually increases the power necessary to run or display said websites. He set out to clean up his code and cut the amount of energy that was needed to run the sites and code he developed.
Here’s where I’m at with this interesting heat and power issue now. I’ve been working from the personal laptop for about a week, maybe a little more and I have noticed a big improvement in the temperature in my office. I have a little more information regarding things to keep an eye on when I decide to move back to the desktop. And I still keep the blinds and curtains closed as much as possible. I have learned several interesting things along the way and remembered a few things as well.
I know a lot of this may seem small and irrelevant to many. What impact can it really have. In my case it has an impact on my comfort for working. It will also have an impact on my electricity bill. In light of the recent climate report from the IPCC, I think these things are worth thinking about. I may be one person, making just a few small changes that are a very small drop in the bucket to fix the problem we are facing on the planet, but my very small drop added to many more very small drops can eventually be a flood. To be sure, it will take political and economic will to do the big stuff that will really make a difference, that doesn’t mean I can’t do my part.