Is it more for situations that need to be compatible with most *nix systems and you might not necessarily have access to a higher level scripting language?

Yes, and also because integrating Python one-liners into shell pipelines is awkward in general. I’m more likely to write my entire script in Python than to use it just for text processing, and a lot of the time that’s just a pain. Python isn’t really designed for one-liners or for use as a shell. You can twist it into working in those use cases, but then I’d ask the reverse question: why would you do that when you could “just” use awk?

On macOS, Python is not installed by default. So if you are writing scripts that you want to be portable across platforms, or for general Mac administration, using Python is a burden.

This is also true when working with some embedded devices. IIRC I can ssh into my router and use awk (thanks to it being included in Busybox), but I’m definitely not going to install an entire Python environment there. I’m not sure there’d even be enough storage space for that.

Joplin is great. I have its data stored locally with encryption, and I sync across devices with Syncthing. It also has built-in support for some cloud providers like you mentioned, and since it supports local encryption, you don’t need to depend on the cloud provider’s privacy policy.

Setting it up on multiple devices was a bit complex, but the documentation is there. Follow the steps, don’t just waltz through the setup assuming it will work intuitively. I made that mistake and while it was not the end of the world, it would’ve saved me 15 minutes if I’d just RTFM.

Yes, absolutely! I’m in a renter’s mindset so I didn’t even think of that.

In theory, the only difference between an electric heater and your computer, as far as actual heat goes, is the dispersal pattern. They will generate exactly the same heat: 1W of heat per 1W of electricity used. That’s thermodynamics for you!

You said:

The flat was kept not quite as warm as previous years

So I don’t think it makes sense to assign any of the savings to using your PC vs your usual electric heaters. It’s because you kept your place a little cooler, which makes an absolutely huge difference. When heating in winter, every additional degree of air temperature is more costly than the last, since heat loss is relative to the temperature differential between indoors and outdoors (i.e. a warmer room will lose more heat to the outdoors than a cooler room, so you need to generate more heat to maintain it).

This sounds to me a lot like dieting. Most of the time, the success of a diet has less to do with the actual diet and more to do with the fact that dieting has made you more mindful and changed your behavior in other ways.

The two biggest things you can do to save money on heating in winter are:

1. Keep your place cooler. Wear warm socks, long sleeves, etc. instead.
2. Improve insulation. Plastic window insulation kits are cheap and easy to install/remove. For doorways, you can get adhesive insulating foam to fill side gaps and a slide-on door sweep to cover any bottom gaps.