Yeah you’re right an all points, I didn’t think about the rain drain.

Keep safe out there!

I don’t doubt your expertise and knowledge on the subject, but from veritasium videos on this I would have thought that putting it in a medium size clay flower pot (the ones with a hole at the bottom) and placing it on the car engine hood, it would probably not be a nice outcome for the car. Not total it, but it’s not driving away anyway. A can of gasoline is less logistically complicated (just one item, way easier to ignite) but it’s also bigger to carry around.

I’m just a person who watched too much youtube videos though.

Hum, not my experience. I run it on an old pc as a podman container, for me and my wife, exactly for the same use case of OP: auto uploading the pictures/videos on our phones. Upload is almost instantaneous. Browsing files is fine, but I usually use a separate software to index/search the photos on the upload directory. For all kind of files (documents etc) is good.

the internal angst between wanting to be her friend, wanting to be a good person, and desperately wanting her relationship to end

That’s just being human.

I think it was Mark Twain that said “nobody is completely sad when their best friend fails”

Yes

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/tado

You can also control locally (i.e. without internet connection) using homekit integration.

Been working fine for me for a couple of years.