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

Am I looking in to a mirror?

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

Checks out. But also Military Industrial Complex.

“QR & Barcode scanner” is Free an Open Source, and supports what you want (if i understood you correctly) https://github.com/wewewe718/QrAndBarcodeScanner

Looks like it’s not been updated in a while, but it works just fine. Available on F-Droid and on Google Play

On Windows the system wakes up when connected or disconnected from an AC adapter.

Does it? I could sweat my work laptop (windows 10) doesn’t , and I’m pretty sure I’d notice cause I sleep and move it a lot during a working day.

Is it a windows 11 thing? Or something to do with the so-called “hybrid sleep / hybrid boot”? (Pretty sure that’s disabled by corporate, and for friends and family I always disable that when their laptop goes in a boot crash loop). Does BitLocker matter ?

What if you put your laptop to sleep cause youre done using it and intend to pack up. Then you unplug it and put it in your backpack?

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