No and kinda yes. Duckduckgo has its own webcrawler, but also adds in results from other sources including Bing, Yahoo and others.

Not a problem when self-hosting on own hardware. Especially in winter. Overly complicated spaceheater goes brrrr

I’ll start: The Guardian (UK) is self-owned (owned by an organization whose purpose is the long term economic viability and editorial independence of the Guardian).

Hard to say without knowing which method you used to install HomeAssistant.

But I never found mdns .local addresses to be very reliable. They work 80-90% of the time, but the remaining 10-20% are a hassle.

Instead I’d recommend you install PiHole (in a docker container is easiest). PiHole is a DNS server intended for network-level ad-blocking. But it also have a handy feature of defining local DNS entries, so you can have HomeAssistant.myhome or HomeAssistant.whatever (.local should not be used with PiHole local DNS because .local is meant for mdns)

Not Op, but I was in a very similar situation (decent pay, old house, old car, not many fancy purchases). While many people here will borrow a lot and pay the minimum on their mortgage, I paid down my mortgage completely. (and otherwise spent money on travel).

Ironically, this is bad financial advice. The last 15-20 years interest have been very low, and house prices have soared. It would make much more financial sense to borrow more and buy a nicer house. But I value the freedom I get from not having a mortgage. And I never borrowed to buy a car, as cars depreciate like rocks

Checks out. But also Military Industrial Complex.

Syncthing is probably the best option. It’ll keep a copy on both devices, and can sync any changes made on any device. It’s a direct connection, no intermediary server required.

Another way, which is a bit round-about, but surprisingly easy: Install Zim Desktop Wiki (a notebook app), enable its built-in web server, and add your PDF to the Zim notebook. From the iPad use the web browser to open your Zim notebook (Assuming both are on the same wi-fi). This is read-only from the iPad, can’t make changes.

The biggest problem with Discord is that its an information black hole. Its not properly searchable and not indexed by search engines.

Discord is fine for casual chat, but horrible when used for forum-type discussions and even worse when used for documentation.

You see the same problems being discussed and solved again and again, but you cant just “link” someone the solution like you could with a forum thread cause its spread out over 3-10 chat messages that are interleaved in-between other topics being discussed in the same room

Anything of long-term value for the project (forum-type discussions, documentation etc) should not recide in Discord