Man, I don’t even run my desktops without a UPS. Maybe I’m jaded from too much tech support, but I feel like not having a UPS is like not using a condom for a random hookup: it’s fine until it dramatically and seriously isn’t.

Almost every desk at my workplace has its own lead-acid battery. That’s well over 1000. We haven’t had any fires or explosions.

Disclaimer: Coming here from all, so I might not be the audience you’re looking for.

I don’t tend to just browse for new releases that might be neat, but I’ve noticed this from the outside as well. Just through the stuff I run into under reccomendations on streaming services and sites. There’s a ton of anime coming out that’s either isekai, harem, power fantasy, or a combination of those themes.

I think there’s potential for some really good shows within those areas, but like most media, I feel that you’re more likely to find quality by stepping back a bit and waiting to see what holds up over time.

Depends on if you’re allowed to bring the Pi in at all. Might be safer to just buy what you need “on site”. There’s a lot more to this than just the technical side.

Whatever you do, just be careful. A lot of places don’t play easy with foreigners breaking the law. It can be easy to hide what you’re specifically doing over a network, but they don’t need to know what you’re spefically doing to say “bypassing the filter at all is illegal”, “using tor gives us probable cause”.

Depending on your situation and how they check things you bring in, it might be better to just load up a/some big hard drive(s) with enough content to carry you through until your next trip outside the filter. Knew someone who was in a similar situation for a long while that would emulate their way through old console game libraries like that.

May be worth looking into how political dissidents can protect themselves. Hidden encrypted containers. Private vps outside the filter that you connect to, doing all your questionable shit on the remote server outside, so the only data transfer is video feed to/from. If hiding what you’re doing is needed, steal notes from the people with lives at stake.

So much of this depends on specifics it may not be safe for you to share. Probably worth asking questions in some of the privacy focused communities.

OpenWRT won’t hide what you’re doing from the network that handles your internet connection. It’s just an option for something you could use as a router/wifi AP.

Toss some CRT shaders over top and this would be very convincing.

Just to stave off anyone else coming in and going “ackshuallee”… it’s true that you could technically do that with libreELEC. It’d be a fool’s errand of using SSH to get to the terminal and install all the programs and dependencies, and you’d still need some way to do arbitrary terminal commands from the kodi menu (I think there are plugins for that and for launching arbitrary programs though).

I played around with that myself for a few hours and gave up.

I’d love something actually good, but the closest you’ll get probably is running Kodi or whatever media frontend you want on top of a stripped down “normal” OS, with a separate frontend for games/programs like HyperSpin. Find a way to launch one from the other and you’d be set.

You’d still have to deal with Kodi not being able to pull full quality video from streaming platforms too, assuming you aren’t just sailing the high seas for your media.

Your account is set as a bot account. You probably want to switch that off in your account settings.