One of those 3 cent one time programmable microcontrollers would be sufficient. Something with enough power to run a web server is just wasteful.

It’s not really worth the trouble to try to host your own e-mail. There are lots of e-mail hosts that you can use with your own domain. A few of them are free and there are plenty of low cost ones. As long as you use your own domain, you can switch hosts whenever you want and keep your addresses.

Hydrogen balloons are fun. Be sure to get some fuse to tie on them.

The last console I bought was a PS3. I only bought it because it was one of the cheapest bluray players at the time. The games were way too expensive. Now I only play PC games and I wait a few years and buy them when they are on sale and have hopefully had all of the major bugs fixed.

An old surround sound receiver and some decent speakers will sound better than any PC speakers.

The data is burned into a piece of glass with a laser. It doesn’t use a dye to store data like a CD-R. I doubt bit rot would be much of an issue. With that much capacity, you could use lots of forward error correction though.

The WiFi calling can be a bit buggy. Sometimes I answer the phone and there’s no audio. I have to reboot the phone to get it to work again. I should just get a VoIP line to use at home.

Syncthing and Nextcloud are both FOSS. You don’t need to sign up for anything.

In a lot of places it got worse. At least I had reliable service inside my house on 2G and 3G. Now that those are gone, I have to use WiFi calling or try to find a spot outside where I may be able to get a bar of 5G if I’m lucky.

Not all smart glasses have cameras. A camera is not needed for real time subtitles.

A large FPGA could work as a hardware video decoder that is software updatable. Unfortunately they are way to expensive for consumer hardware.

It would be nice if someone would make low cost hardware video decoders on an m.2 module. Then it could be easily upgraded even on a laptop.

Software decoding should work fine on modern PCs if the bitrate isn’t really high. You will want hardware support for anything battery powered though.

That motherboard has a very limited number of PCIe lanes. Using the second m.2 slot will slow down the second GPU. All of the other slots are coming from the chipset and are only PCIe 2.0.

I would get rid of the second GPU, then there would be enough lanes to run 3 SSDs at PCIe 3.0 x4.

These aren’t real bitmap fonts. They are all ttf or otf.

Most kids don’t know anything about computers these days. All they know are phones and tablets. Maybe this will get them to learn some basic computer skills.

The Faraday cage will keep the WiFi signals inside the building. Nobody will be able to track you from outside and your own trusted devices will work fine inside. Just don’t bring any untrusted WiFi devices inside the Faraday cage.

That could be fixed by using WiFI calling, getting a VoIP line or installing a cell booster.

You don’t need to build your own router. All you need to do is flash open source firmware like OpenWRT on a supported router to prevent it from spying on you.

I rarely go over 1TB per month at home. It’s usually closer to 500GB. My seedbox goes through several TB per month with all of those Linux ISOs though.

Proton is just Wine with some modifications. You can use the same sandboxing methods you would use with Wine.