Raspberry-Pi

The Portal Go sits in my kitchen. It’s a 10-inch touchscreen with a decent microphone and camera, and out of the box it’s mostly a video-calling device I barely used. Meta’s stopped making them, but that doesn’t matter much here: the app I sideloaded onto it would run on pretty much any Android tablet. If you’re starting from scratch, a Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+ or a Lenovo Tab M11 would do the same job — 10-11 inch screen, microphone, speaker, Wi-Fi. That’s the whole hardware requirement for the front end. ...

My Pi 4 runs a handful of always-on services: a small web dashboard, some automation glue, a media helper or two. (If you’re buying today, get a Raspberry Pi 5 instead — same idea, much more headroom.) Every few weeks it would go completely dark. No SSH, no services, and nothing short of pulling the plug would bring it back. I did that twice, which is another way of saying I fixed nothing at all. ...