Where I live in California, electricity can be over US$0.60/kWh during peak summer time. Thankfully I have solar panels that offset most of the cost. I'm from Australia which also has high electricity prices.
Depending on the electricity price where you live, a VPS with 8GB RAM might be cheaper than running the laptop. Just something to keep in mind. GreenCloudVPS have some for $45 annually: https://greencloudvps.com/billing/store/budget-kvm-sale (I'm not affiliated with them)
Should I run the server over a VPN
Do you mean for you to access it remotely, or do you mean to expose it publicly via the VPN (so that you can have publicly-exposed services while hiding your home IP)?
For remote access, I'd recommend Tailscale. It mostly "just works".
The hostname will be encrypted eventually (ESNI) but you're right that the IP address is visible.
Destination IP is starting to mean less and less these days, given there's a large amount of sites that use shared IPs rather than dedicated ones (for example, if they use Cloudflare, Vercel, Netlify, AWS CloudFront, etc.)
you can also do the exact same thing with any other HikVision camera too
Most people that install security cameras don't directly connect them to the internet like this. A company that's installing them at scale should be aware of this.
using default credentials
Modern Hikvision and Dahua cameras don't have a default password. They require you to set a strong password during initial setup.
In general, a lot of electronics have moved away from generic default passwords, as many jurisdictions ban them now. Any modern device should either require you to set the password during initial setup, or have a randomly-generated password printed on a sticker under the device.
The device you found was either a very old one, or one where the owner intentionally set a basic password.
Yeah this doesn't make sense. Docked bars have worked fine since Windows 95. You could have the task bar on any side, and apps would handle it. You could have multiple docked bars too, as some third-party apps used to be dockable. For example, Winamp had a view that was a short bar stretching the entire width of the screen, stuck to the top of the screen. The windowing system handled it with no issues.
Yes! I'm not sure about it changing when you connect monitors (since I'm usually using desktop PCs), but you can have a different setup per monitor.
I have three monitors at work. My main monitor is configured to show all open apps in the taskbar, while the secondary monitors only show the apps opened on those monitors. You can totally change any of the configuration though... the layout, the position, the settings, or even just not have a taskbar on some monitors.
It's what I've experienced at FAANG companies. MitM isn't used and would break certificate pinning on sites (including internal tools) that use both certificate pinning and HSTS. The Chromium source code has a list of domains that are hard-coded to only accept particular root certificates.
Larger companies that monitor for corporate passwords being entered on third-party sites usually use a browser extension that's force-installed using Chrome Enterprise. That's especially the case if they mandate the usage of Chrome.
I was using LibreOffice Calc on my work PC with a Threadripper CPU, and somehow it still chugs at times. Scrolling was very laggy with larger spreadsheets for example. I ended up using Google Sheets instead, which is way more responsive for me. If it was for personal use, I'd probably try IronCalc.
It's not uncommon on sites where a high proportion of the userbase uses an adblocker, as making ads look like and render using the same code as organic content (same CSS classes, etc) makes them harder to block.
Energy per distance is a more useful unit than distance per energy though.