My TV spends more time idle than playing content. And every idle minute, Google TV shows me the same curated AI art or Google Photos memories — things I did not choose, do not control, and cannot change.
I wanted my own screensaver. 4K anime art from Wallhaven, video loops from MoeWalls — playing on my TV, not streamed from a cloud service I never asked for.1
Ohara had been running quietly under my desk for weeks. Jellyfin streamed movies. Suwayomi downloaded manga chapters overnight. The server did its job without complaint, invisible and silent.
But I wanted more. I wanted it to talk back.
I had an old PC lying around — one of those machines you keep meaning to throw out but never do. It was slow, loud, and completely useless for modern computing. No one was going to browse the web on it, let alone run any real software.
Then it hit me: I could turn it into a server.
