MouldyCat

I agree with you. I always take sensible steps to minimise my energy consumption, but even at current sky-high electricity prices, some things simply are not worth worrying about. Putting TV in standby is one for instance. When my parents moved house, my dad paid an electrician £200 to have a switched power socket installed by the TV, just so he could easily "turn it off at the wall". Modern TVs use less than 0.5W when in standby, so it would be decades before the savings from this expense made up for the energy costs of manufacturing and installing a new power socket.

I close before systemctl hibernate is my browser. That saves sone wear on the SSD.

I haven't heard of this, curious to know what you're referring to?

For me the advantage of keeping it in sleep is having all the apps open and exactly where I left them. "Session save" type features never keep things quite right - some apps just don't reopen, they're often not on the right workspace etc, not to mention documents and so on have to be saved if you power off.

You can of course use hibernation to get the best of both worlds, at the cost of long start-up times, and so I do often do that, when I'm not expecting to turn back for a while.

I've been using Zoho for about 6 months and have no complaints. I pay about $12 a year for a couple of gigs of storage - not a huge amount, but enough for personal email as long as you delete stuff fairly regularly.

You can create up to 30 email aliases, which I use a lot. For instance, I have an email address for newsletters, a couple for generic web logins, and then some specific ones for important accounts such as banking.

It's easy to make filters to sort email as it arrives. This is how I handle the "priority inbox" situation. Any email from my family or other important senders is all put into a single folder, and I have an email app on my phone which checks this folder and notifies me of new mail. All other mail is either moved by other filters e.g. newsletters or just left in the inbox.

Once you're used to it, you can use the two separate clipboards independently. Say you wrote a sentence like, "one two five four three", you can correct it by selecting "three", cutting with Ctrl-X, then selecting "five" (meaning it is now in the selection buffer), hitting Ctrl-V to paste "three" from the clipboard, and then finally middle-click where you need to paste the "five".

I tracked down the MythBusters in question:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXdaPJAcjC8

Needs a rubber skirt or something

well, they had some toothbrushes as a control which were not even in the bathroom, and they ended up with similar levels of fecal bacteria, meaning that these things are just everywhere. Only solution is to live in a sterile plastic bubble.

compatibility layer upon layer

I can understand the sentiment, but don't ignore the real advantages to the proton/wine way of doing things.

For instance, some old games won't run on modern Windows but will run on Linux under proton/wine.

It's also just a lot easier for game companies to target a single platform i.e. Windows. When Valve first released their Steam machines, a few AA games were released natively. For several of those, the native builds no longer work and you now need to run the Windows version under proton/wine.

I think you got that backwards - the caveman is the one scared of the microwave and its spooky woo-woo magic that damages the water's aura

often social eng attacks rely on a vulnerability as well e.g. getting your mark to open an Excel file that exploits a vulnerability in MS Office.

yes I'm using my regular email and messaging family members using theirs.

It's working fine, except for the occasional issue like I mentioned, i.e. sending multiple emails for one message.

I don't know what it's doing about encryption - it seems to use it when it knows the other party supports it, but that's not my priority at this point, my aim is to encourage people to move off WhatsApp (this is what all my chatting takes place on). I'm kind of using the family chat as guinea pigs really.

Nice, I'll give it a whirl. Their their website says, "ArcaneChat is a Delta Chat client" so maybe it deals with the issues I've had better.

bug reporting

I'm looking for projects I can contribute to in some way, so definitely not averse to bug reporting. From some discussions on the forum, the way I'm using it isn't really supported and they're really aimed at people who want to chat securely without being tied to proprietary networks. But I'm certainly not the only one who would prefer not to use proprietary chat protocols like WhatsApp, but there's just too many other people I'd have to convince to switch to yet another chat app. Delta Chat / ArcaneChat really seem to offer a way forward for people like me, but the chat experience for people using regular email clients has to be very good - people get annoyed quickly if they receive 5 emails in a row each containing a single picture followed by a 6th email that just contains text (which is how my attempt at a message sharing some photos came through for email users)

what is this, is it anything like Delta Chat? (i.e. the UI of a chat app but using email for sending/receiving messages)

I've been trying out Delta Chat for messaging my family. It's a bit kludgy and messy though, at least when interacting with others who are using regular email clients. For instance, it sometimes sends multiple emails rather than bundling it up as one.