I’ve been partial to amcrest they’re affordable and “us” based even though they’re rebranded dahua cameras. Everything I’ve read says they’re compatible with frigate and even home assistant if you plan to use that as well. I’ve been trying to do a similar setup for myself.
rpilocator.com is what I use recently got my hands on an 8gb model for $75 USD
Steam is a glowing example of how to prevent piracy though. Because even if I own the games I can still loan them out. I can play the games across all of my devices. Steam has gone above and beyond to give you a reason to not pirate. I buy my games because the convenience steam provides without hindering my actual ownership of them.
Something I always found interesting was a cyberdeck which is kind of like a mishmash of components. Nowadays you can use sbcs for the hardware but I’ve always been given the families ewaste and doing some research you can reuse a lot of it. I have an old celeron laptop that’s too slow for anything useful. It’s just the bare board now ziptied to the lid of a shoebox and I use it for low power learning server. But found out the display connector it uses for the screen, which is gone, is very common and found a 9 inch screen that would work with it. With a 3d printer you can build cases for everything.