The Raspberry Pi Cluster in My Living Room

There are six Raspberry Pi 4s on a shelf in my living room. They run 24/7, they're all wired directly into the router, and they exist for one fairly specific reason: some cinema websites block GitHub's IP ranges. GitHub Actions runners share IP space with a lot of automated traffic, and a handful of venues had decided they didn't want to serve requests from that space. The failures were inconsistent — empty responses, timeouts, bot-detection pages — which made them annoying to diagnose. Once I'd worked out what was actually happening, the fix was straightforward: residential IP addresses. Requests that look like they're coming from someone's home connection, because they are. Hence the Pis. Why Pis, Not Just a Cheap PC? It's a fair question. I set myself a target: £50 or less per Pi, all-in. That means the Pi 4 itself, an SD card, a power cable, and an ethernet cable. No wiggle room for a fancy case or anything optional. But six Pis at £50 each is £300 — you could buy a reasonable seco