Yeah, that’s an issue. There are still several computing-related groups, but everything else is fading away. The only non-computing one I read is misc.news.internet.discuss. The Vancouver Canucks and Montreal Canadiens newsgroups both seem to have died during the past year. The Canadian football group gets the occasional comment. The old alt hierarchies seem slow or crud-infested. But if you want to follow comp.misc or Seamonkey updates, you’re in luck.

Is there anything better than DOS jokes???

Better? No, it’s still unmoderated. So there’s some good stuff and there are twits. It’s the wild west out there.

You can still get an account at eternal-september.org. There are a few newsgroups that are still active and interesting.

I’ve been running Debian stable on a ThinkPad as my everyday machine for over a decade. It just works. No issues.

Scoffs derisively at the new popular thing and switches to BSD…

I’ve never used Proxmox, so I can’t say. But TLP is a utility that starts at boot. I’ve used it with virtualbox running, so if Proxmox runs atop a host operating system, I don’t imagine that it would interfere with TLP.

As an additional note, I usually set the min/max thresholds at 40/80, so the battery will charge any time it’s plugged in and below 40% and stops charging when it reaches 80%.

Nice to know that the latitudes work with TLP, since it opens up another set of possibilities for the future!

Batch scripts run on my locked-down work laptop. Powershell requires administrator privileges that I don’t have.

I don’t make the rules, I just evade them :D

I use a 2011 ThinkPad X120e as an FTP/Syncthing server. It was underpowered as a laptop from day one, but still works fine as a lightweight server. The best thing about ThinkPads is that TLP allows you to set min/max charging thresholds, so that you can keep an old battery in good shape for … well, I’ll let you know. This one’s 14 years old and still has a four-hour run time.

One thing I’d like to try is “Wake My Potato” for shutdown / automatic restart when a power outage occurs.

Links:

TLP - https://linrunner.de/tlp/index.html

Wake My Potato - https://github.com/pablogila/WakeMyPotato

If I have to use windows, I write batch scripts. They still work and there is a lot of documentation online. There’s even a good set of GUI dialogs with WizApp (or the Zenity port).

I’ve run an XMPP server for a small online user group for about 7 years. It was relatively simple to get a basic server up and running.

One challenge came when my wife and I decided to use it as our everyday mobile messaging service. I had to learn about and configure a number of extensions to get Prosody working well with Conversations (Android) and Monal (iOS).

Another challenge was filtering spam. I posted my administrator XMPP address online and got hammered with spam. It took a while to figure out how to effectively combat it.

With respect to why it’s not more popular, imagine if you were trying to sell people on email (with no business use-case). It’s a generic federated protocol. I don’t know if you can get much more bland.