Community Impact

Your local environment at your home is just as important geographic and global environment. How does our relationship with technology become abstracted so that we lose sight of the fine details?

Home

Different people are sensitive to these senses differently. Light may make it difficult for some people to sleep, while the whiting may make it difficult to concentrate.

Noise

Computers may have a built in mono or even dual channel speaker for playing basic sounds for events and notifications these are used for the post

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003682X06000065

Hard drives, power supplies and fans

Whirring, clicking, grinding and buzzing chimes screeching

Dirt and age only make these sounds more prevalent especially on a serve that operates 24/7. It's best to address these as soon as possible

Some are signs of an underlying issue, but sometimes this is just the operational state

Light

Computers emit light, usually from led indicator lights. These are often part of the case for monitoring power, disk activity, network card activity. Components like Power supplies may have their own indicator light. Depending on the hardware, individual components like the motherboard, ram and fans can have decorative and even programmable fans. These cannot always be disabled. Case lights can be unplugged, if possible, or taped over with patches created to block indicator lights.

Vibration

Use feet or mat for the computer. Vibration dampeners for case fans can also go a long way

Heat and cooling

Computers generate heat. Some more than others. Single board computers are designed like cell phones to only require passive cooling without a fan. They make the components operate more slowly as needed in order to throttle heat production in order to cool the device. These computers can use add on cooling.

A server can heat a room, especially when performing high intensity operations like converting a video file. This can cause problems in summer and a boon in winter. It may even be necessary to cool the room during some months. It may be helpful to put the server in A basement. Computers cam operate better at lower temperatures than higher temperatures.

How do these compound? Cooling a server creates more noise and vibration than the server alone. The AC can itself create heat that needs to be directed.

Bandwidth

How much Internet capacity your server uses will affect the other people in your home. If you are consistently using 30% of capacity, the remaining will need to be shared by all of your devices.

Communities

How does your home affect those around you?

Noise pollution can make it hard to focus

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412021005304

Geographic ~~region~~regional

People and identities

~~Refurbishment - are you repurposing local ewaste?~~

Your neighbors

The noise and light pollution created by your server can affect your immediate neighbors if you are in an a apartment style building.

Bandwidth

ISP are often promising you a theoretical connection that is based on everyone using an "average" amount of traffic. When someone greatly exceeds this, it can cause slowdowns for others on the network. This is especially noticeable during prime streaming, gaming and television times. Your ISP might throttle you if you go over or during peak hours

Power draw

Calculate the power draw based on the psu wattage

https://www.energybot.com/tools/energy-usage-calculator.html

You will also be paying for power for the router, modem and other networking devices

Data centers can consume up to 100 times more energy ^[10] than a standard office building.

A router may consume 1KW^[8] and a large data center consumes nearly 100 MW.^[9]

A research study shows that in the US, 50% of PCs are left on overnight, resulting in an estimated annual energy waste of 28.8 billion kWh, and a cost of $2.8 billion per year.

By intentionally creating a localized server for our services, we can focus on ensuring our other computers

How might your power usage effect your neighbors, such as during a heatwave when ACs are running or the winter with heaters? How is the infrastructure at handling this?

Checking where your regional power comes from

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/72h/hourly

Ecosystem

How do the choices we make come together to have larger ramifications?

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-staggering-ecological-impacts-of-computation-and-the-cloud/

This is global and local

Hardware replacement and e-waste

Refurbishment - are you repurposing ewaste?