Off lease corporate thin clients with fresh ssds. You can get something that runs off a laptop power supply, will handle more than you’re going to throw at it, and they’re insanely cheap.

I moved to one from a pi when I got serious about home assistant.

I also run a stack of networking utilities on my OPNSense router.

Jellyfin has been a bit more difficult to transition, I’m still running it on my wife’s gaming computer. I’ve pre transcoded most of our collection, but not all of it. I need to find something very cheap but also capable of handling the odd 4k transcode.

Take a look at their coverage of the Holocaust. Hasn’t gotten better since.

The problem with windows 8 is that with the initial release they wanted everything to be a mobile OS, even your desktop.

“Metro Design” lol

But it seemed decent for tablets and phones.

The door monitor mostly helps when a kid walks off leaving it open thinking they closed it.

The freezer temperature monitoring has saved the contents several times. A breaker had tripped once and I didn’t notice, it let me know that I needed a generator during a power outage, and one of the kids snuck an ice cream and left the lid wide open.

So yeah, it’s been useful. It’s not needed 99% of the time.

Nothing needs to be, but I do like to monitor door status and temperature for my fridge and deep freezers with home assistant.

It’s not the actual tech, generally speaking, that people are upset about. Although your Luddite reference is probably more accurate than you intended.

The Luddites weren’t anti-tech, they were anti- the damage it was doing to the people who did the work.

Most people who hate these new technologies aren’t mad at the tech itself, they’re mad at the quality that’s produced when the only concern is lowering costs and the extractive infrastructure built around it. A monthly fucking subscription for heated seats. This exists now.

The alternative to this is the galaxy brained take: “THESE PEOPLE HATE HAVING A COMFORTABLE ASS WHILE DRIVING”

I like how they’re worried about “violence done to ICE facilities.”

Really returning to the roots of policing.