You know these can only be used while in park, right?

I also had success with sand on top, a couple cm is fine- just enough to completely cover all visible topsoil. You may also want to start bottom watering if you can and leave the top undisturbed since the sand will migrate when you top water. You may need to reapply sand periodically so get a decent sized bag.

You may need to rethink your watering schedule for a bit too, fungus gnats love wet soil. Those yellow cards can help track population, change those out regularly (another pro tip is to cut them down to smaller pieces since you’re not actually trying to control the population with the cards)

Sandy Munro is a legit car reviewer. His firms tears down vehicles and predict reliability based on what they find among other things. He’s a pretty well respected industry guide. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Munro

If you’re looking for a decent setup but maybe not the cheapest- Nvidia shield with an external hard drive would work very well.

You could always build or buy a nas and just run Plex as an app through either your current fire stick or get a cheap Roku stick (although now you’re back in the same ad garden for a player but Roku is minimally invasive imo- especially with a pi-hole for dns)

Seriously, the electric f150 had a 100% markup at some dealerships. The build quality was absolute crap on those too.