You don’t really need the sever at all if you have another phone in your family that can send a text message. Now that I think of it it might not be a bad idea to set up a sever as backup. But the public sever from the developer should be fairly safe to use as well…
Another option would be to install an im server that is low on resources and not eating your sdcard. I think xmpp would work a lot better on a pi. Prosody, ejabberd or snikket should work nicely.
Ditto.
There is no need fire up a dedicated machine to do this. Use your router/ap running openwrt and connect a hdd via usb. The machine needs at least 128 Mb RAM (256 mb would be better). Install the transmission package, set it up, add a gig of swap space on the hdd and you are good to go. The AP runs 24/7 anyways so there will be very few extra power consumption. Vpns often don’t allow port forwarding (mullvad has stopped support recently if I remember correctly). You can just be a passive node and not often ports, that should work good enough. Consider seeding parts of sci-hub. it’s a project worth supporting imho.
You can just download once of the parts below with less than 12 seeds and set it to host without ratio:
Maybe try the searxng matrix support chat, I think there might be a few developers around that could point you in right direction:
https://matrix.to/#/#searxng:matrix.org
They also have a Mirc support channel is that is more your cup of tea.
I had this problem around ten years ago where I wanted to be able to disable the esp (which prevents powerslides) in my VW Caddy. I found a hardware/software kit on aliexpress that went for around 30$. Maybe have a look there, I don’t know how new your car is and what model it is, but if somebody made an aftermarket kit for your car, there might be a cheap copy of that available from china.
Mine worked fine, I could disable the annoying option where the car always gives 3 consecutive turning signals, no matter how short you move the lever. Also daytime lights could be enabled, and whatnot.
Turning off the esp was not even an option with this board computer unfortunately so I had to interrupt the power line of a sensor with a switch to archive that, which I found out on an obscure German forum thread years later…
I would try to find something a bit newer. Core 2 Duos are really power hungry. Find one with an i5 processor and a T at the end of the number, like i5 3450T or something. This will be a little less performant but run at 30 watt max compared to the core 2 duos 150 watt. Fujitsu esprimo are also a good cheap option and both lenovo and Fujitsu offer rather tiny pcs that work excellent for severs.
Podcasts are a leftover from the non centralized and non-monetized internet of the past. Because is that most Podcasts are still available as rss feeds, so you should only ever get adds if they are spoken by the Podcasts hosts. Ate you taking about those? Only something like sponsorblock would help against those. I use antennapod (fdroid) on android to listen to Podcasts. Sine hosts always start their podcast with an add, but you can autoskip the first minute of a certain podcast with antennapod every time. It has a setting for that. Antenna pod itself is foss software without adds.