This is the correct answer if privacy is your priority. They’re not particularly cheap, however.

I’ve done the same! It’s impossible to buy dumb TVs nowadays, but you can always prevent them from connecting to the network.

Chuck 'em in the garbage and get something that doesn’t break when you insist on privacy.

Fair enough.

Thank you for the detailed response! I’m going to give it a try! This will be a step up from OpenWRT on a cheap router, I’ll bet!

Can a device like this act as my router?

Unraid is a great option for anyone, but beginners in particular. It does, however, cost money and isn’t open source.

Sorry, the video takes too long to get to the subject it claims to be about.

https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/

Also, you can host your own server: https://headscale.net/

You’d also need GPIO pins to be able to do the remote “button presses”.

To be fair, this was precisely my role in Populous.

Check out pikvm: https://pikvm.org/

There are cheaper knockoffs that run the same software. For example: https://geekworm.com/

Decent older servers (e.g., Dell Poweredge) can be had off of Craigslist/FB Marketplace pretty cheaply (~$300-$400).

You can also achieve this with any VPN by using two Docker containers:

1. Gluetun: https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun
2. Tailscale: https://tailscale.com/kb/1282/docker/

Set Gluetun up to connect to your VPN (they support a huge number of providers) and then set the Tailscale container to use the Gluetun’s network. Then, use that Tailscale container as your exit node.

You can also combine this with a self-hosted Headscale (https://github.com/juanfont/headscale) instance.

Well, as a first point, OP’s information is wrong. While it’s true that the half-life of U235 is ~700 million years, it isn’t true that half of the initial mass is lost. When U235 fissions, about 200 MeV of the initial mass is converted to energy. The total initial mass is about a thousand times that, though (E=mc^2). So, after 700 million years, assuming you kept it from falling apart, the initial 15 lb lump would only lose ~1/4 of an ounce as energy.