Everything starts as a luxury until the working class bands together and demands it. 40 hour workweeks, overtime, sick days. These are workplace examples, but the concept holds true everywhere. In a capitalist society things like privacy aren’t considered until someone starts exploiting them for profit, at which point people start to get serious about protecting it. And this rule applies 5x in any tech realm, as governments are notoriously slow to build legal protections in new and fast moving sectors.

All that was to address your title, which is only tangentially connected to the rest of your post. Regarding the body, companies have absolutely started to equate VPN with bad actors. Still worth having. I just whitelist the services I have to.

I use the tiller extension in Google sheets. With the community savings budget template to allow for 0 based or “envelope” budgeting. One of the few things in my life so far ahead of every other option I couldn’t bring myself to ditch it and selfhost.

IP and port are what I put in my browser

I converted an old laptop into a home theater PC. My friend bought spare components for cheap and built a desktop for the same purpose. Not for everyone, but a great solution for some use cases. And can potentially fill other roles, like being your jellyfin host.

While shopping I suggest you find a spreadsheet with the capabilities of every device you’re considering. A lot don’t support certain formats, which can limit the kind of files and content you can stream. Last I checked shield and the Google TV stick thing were trouncing the competition.

Definitely need remote access, and tunneling in every time I want to sync my notes app is way too much work. I’ve containerized these services as a security layer and you need user creds to access anything without an exploit. I’m comfortable with that level of risk.

Dynamic DNS is a very cool thing I didn’t know exists. I’ll definitely look into it further! But for the time being I still need a fix for my problem.

Who exactly is having trouble believing this?

This has a lot of promise!

That’s where I found my current top contenders. Nothing had exactly what I’m looking for, which is why I turned here. It probably just doesn’t exist, but doesn’t hurt to ask.