I use newpipe x sponsorblock, invidious, and pinhole as well, but it’s worth pointing out to those unfamiliar- pihole does nothing for YouTube ads. Pihole is great for sites that add google ads or random junk to their pages, it has no ability to block ads that come from the same domain as a sites content because it is DNS based.
Be thankful you don’t have the drug ads. They’re an infestation down here. The companies advertise the crap out of a drug that costs the patient 3-4k+/mo, it enters the doctors subconscious so they’re more likely to recommend to the patients, pharma company makes bank, the lawsuits roll in right around the time the copyright on the brand name ends (they’re all shit drugs and barely more effective than placebo, yet with knarly side effects), they close it down and let the generic manufacturers fight it out while they pump the next shit pill or shot. Rinse and repeat.
Sports betting needs to go too, but I bet they’ll just move those into shows like big tobacco did.
YouTube series by BurningIceTech, and either spin up VMs yourself to familiarize with group policy, management console, services, event viewer, and basic CLI in Linux, or buy the labs from comptia. 1101 and 1102 are heavily focused on ports and protocol overviews, raid, windows settings, and basic troubleshooting. Take good notes since you’ll build on the A+ stuff in Net+ and Sec+ if you take those too.
If you really need public remote access and you can set up jellyfin, it’s not much more difficult to set up authelia or LDAP with a reverse proxy and valid certs. I use tailscale and just leave simple auth with jellyfin since it’s only myself and family accessing. I used to run Plex for the offloading of authentication to them but I’m with ya, FOSS should be free.
Raspberry pi/small NUC with a screen, in a digital kiosk mode. Just load a static html file with some js to update the clock. No keyboard, no touch input, no way to break it. Connect to it via ssh over tailscale or wireguard VPN to update the HTML with the notes you’d like to display. This way if internet goes down, the clock still works and whatever was displayed wrt messages stays displayed, and you don’t have to worry about the increased overhead of home assistant changes or updates breaking things. It will remain consistent since it’s just HTML and js. If you want less technical family members to be able to update the display…idk, seems like a headache.