AFAIK the “wear” does not mainly come from the spinning, but from temperature changes that make parts slightly expand and contract in size. An always on HDD has pretty constant temperature.

Be careful with powering HDDs on and off. That is actually the operation that puts the most strain on them AFAIK. Sadly there is no good rule of thumb when it does more harm than good, but I would guess if you turn it on more than once a week, you are probably doing more harm than good compared to just letting in run. Many people even intentionally turn off sleep-mode in “green” drives so that they don’t shut down automatically.

This isn’t about a laptop, but a full desktop case with 5.25" slots. 3.5" fit fine into these with a different kind of adapter.

I find XMPP much more useful for day-to-day communication with people I know. Matrix has more IRC like public channels, but only a few are sufficiently active compared to Discord or even IRC.

But running an XMPP server is also extremely hassle free and uses little server resources, while running a Matrix server is quite involved and will likely need a beefy dedicated server just for it alone.

XMPP chat accounts on the same address as Email would be nice.

Taler ensures asymmetric privacy. The buyer does not expose their identity to the seller (or the government), nor what they bought to their bank/payment-provider. But the seller needs to expose their income for tax purposes. This is a good compromise as it follows existing law and prevents tax-evasion and (to some extend) money laundering.

Yes, like cash.

An IRC server would work, but I think having to deal with 32bit ARM will be too annoying.

Except for some very niche crypto-currency users no one stores “money” like that. You have a bank account where you store money.

The same audience as Paypal, which seems to be reasonably popular. Except this is privacy preserving and an open standard that many providers can use.

It can be many different ones. Usually your home bank would allow you to exchange some Euro into Taler tokens and then use those to pay in compatible stores. But instead of a centralized system there can be many different exchanges that follow the same standard (protocol) and can be used with the same software and wallet apps.

Taler is not a store of value. Exchanging some Taler is like going to the ATM and withdrawing some cash to put in your wallet.

If there’s one thing that we learnt from the cryptocurrecy industry, it’s that users don’t care to understand how the technology works, and will do stupid things.

Yes, like turning a digital payment system into a speculative asset and making it basically impossible to actually buy anything with it.

But it seems you are totally missing the point of Taler, as it doesn’t even aim to be anything like so called crypto-“currencies”. It’s a digital payment system like Paypal, but decentralized.

Apparently this is using face recognition technology from Russia 🤷

It is what you make out of it. Basically it is an ActivityPub federated framework with various modules including one for microblogging.

Probably not, but you can likely improvise by binding the audio mute to a button in your OS.

You cam try https://jami.net/

But I also think Mumble is the better solution, but of course not p2p.

The bigger question is why Matrix didn’t follow the long established standard for this, which is using @.

But I guess it fits into the general pattern of: Monolithic, Awefully Trendy ReImplementation of XMPP (MATRIX).

P.S.: it’s nice to be able to have your ActivityPub, XMPP and Email all on the same address 👍

Seems like an obvious suggestion, but Nextcloud can do that quite well.

That seems like a fun toy. Thanks for sharing.