This is pretty typical for universities. They don’t want the airwaves clogged, doubling up NAT can lead to networking wonkiness, and they don’t want you giving university network access to unauthorized folks with an open AP.

When you say VR streaming, you just mean wireless from your PC to the headset, right? There’s a chance you could do that with an offline wireless router if the VR experiences you’re looking to play are single player.

I can’t help much on the power draw side of this question, but one thing to look out for with a UPS is some sort of communication option. (Usually NUT over ethernet, but there are some USB options too.) Most modern UPS brands will have a plugin you can install on your Raspberry Pi and Mini PC that allows your UPS to signal, “Hey, I’ve got 3% of battery life, you actually need to gracefully shut down now.” It’s mostly useful for NAS applications with spinning drives, but it could help save your Pi’s SD card potentially.

It’s a pretty standard feature these days, but the cheapest of the cheap will omit it.

It’s still surreal to see OpenAI’s need for training data be so vast that they casually developed and open sourced a generational leap in transcription technology just so that they could scrape online videos better.

Long Switch can’t hurt you. Long Switch isn’t real.

https://www.serverbuilds.net/ is a popular website online for folks building NASes at home. They’re fans of Unraid as well. They’ve got a Discord if you’re looking for something more interactive. Worth checking out. 👍

There’s an interesting conversation to be had about making the Fediverse more user friendly at the cost of increased centralization and non-standard extensions. It’s really difficult to focus on the message you’re trying to convey when you have five other alarmist topics crammed into the post.

Mozilla’s conflict of interest taking money from one of the largest internet advertisers and browser manufacturers was widely discussed during their recent anti-trust trial. It’s not super constructive to flatten the whole conversation to Mammoth being “Google Funded”.