Funny enough, Usenet is still around too, it’s used as an alternative to BitTorrent for sharing pirated stuff.

I would not bother archiving the mainstream releases that can already be found on many torrent sites (like, you don’t need to archive Star Wars or Lord of the Rings) and focus on the bootleg disks first. You just need any standard DVD drive, then use Handbreak to rip the disks to a video file. For official releases, many of them have forms of copy protection, but 15 minutes on Google should tell you how to get around any you come across.

Also, for reference, “burning” a DVD is writing data to a disk, so the opposite of what you’re trying to do.

I would look for a dongle that specifically markets itself as being Raspberry Pi compatible. Most stuff you find will prioritize Windows, but if it’s marketed to work with the Pi you know it’ll have at least some level of Linux compatibility. Once you find one, try to figure out what chipset it uses, then search if it’s supported by a handful of the distros you wanna try.

That’s what I thought too, but this system doesn’t actually use salt water. It uses a membrane that’s filled with lithium bromide (a “salt” in the chemical sense of the word), which absorbs moisture from the air while the computer is off and then is able to slowly “sweat” the moisture away while the computer is running. They say it can run for about 6.5 hours before needing to be recharged.

This is pretty cool for data centers which use massive amounts of power to keep everything cool, because it’s passive and doesn’t use any extra energy for fans or water pumps or anything. It really isn’t all that great for consumer PCs though, because it’s a lot easier to deal with waste heat.