I haven’t, that’s the problem. It seems like it’s possible, but I’ve given up trying for the moment.

I have a Reolink PoE camera. It works fine. As far as I can tell, it only uses the internet to check for updates and set the time, but I have it blocked off anyway. Home Assistant was actually causing it to check for updates, too, so that got disabled.
I don’t record, so I can’t help you there.
I will say that is a pain to get Home Assistant to display real-time video instead of a slide show.

my $1,000 festool vacuum.

Ahem. Dust Extractor

Right? Has this ever worked for anyone? I’ve never bothered because of how easy it is for spammers to bypass.

Bitwarden Authenticator because Bitwarden seems to have a good reputation. I don’t use their password manager, though.
It does seem faintly insecure that it displays all of the codes at once on one page, but I’m having trouble imagining a scenario where it’s actually a problem.

Ah, the ol’ Skyrim Space Program.

I have a Reolink PoE camera. It’s plugged into Home Assistant, and some setting in the integration had it phoning home constantly looking for updates. I turned that off and now it only connects outside of my network to sync the time.
The camera has survived outside for a few years now, so no complaints.

USB-א

Home Assistant for viewing

Heads up: by default, HA does not show real-time, full-framerate video - just a snapshot that updates every 10 seconds or whatever. As with all things open source, there is a way to fix it, but you have to faff around. I haven’t bothered yet, but it’s on my list.

Sonarr + Picard

Do you mean Lidarr? Sonarr is the TV one (confusingly).

WHEN YOU SEE THE WHITE WHALE

I use a Pi running LibreElec and it can be controlled by my LG TV down the HDMI cable. It’s the CEC protocol. Look into that.

CPU-heavy process

Sounds to me like a hardware issue: you’re overheating. Find a way to monitor your temps. I’m not sure how to do this on Linux, so I’m open to suggestions too.

I’ve had good luck having it write simple scripts that I could easily handle myself. For example, I needed a script to chop a directory full of log files up into archives, with some constraints. That sort of thing.
I haven’t tried it on anything more substantial.
This was using Copilot because I haven’t found a good coding model that will run locally on 16GB VRAM.

I use GitHub Desktop on Mac and PC. It works fine with local repos, too.

I’m savvy enough where I can adult Lego a PC together but struggle when it comes to software and troubleshooting and really don’t have the time for that stuff.

Then Linux is not for you; it is nothing but troubleshooting.
If you have to use Windows, get the LTSC IOT edition. It’s official and it has none of the crap people complain about in 11 (copilot, onedrive, recall, etc.). I’ve had no problems gaming on it, either.

Given pihole’s recent record with updates, I’m not sure I want them firing automatically.

Unfortunately I can’t remember whether I downloaded pihole from some package manager within DietPi, or whether I used the instructions on pihole’s site. It’s not hard either way, it’s really just one package.

I run it for my pi-hole. It’s been great. It tells you when there are package updates when you log in, which I find helpful.

Lots of Lemmy forums have a problem with stupid rage bait being left up. Like this could be in /c/programming since X is a program after all.