Meditation is not "doing nothing". Meditation is doing something useful and practical.

Practice. When you reach mindfulness (i.e not thinking about anything), it won't be boring, such a concept won't exist for you. It's only boring to you because you're thinking.

Start with 5 minutes, try really hard to not think about anything. Search for some online guides. It doesn't matter if you fail, just keep doing it and it will come to you.

Meditation should be as mandatory as going to the gym.

You could try calisthenics.

You definitely can get raw pictures with a phone.

which is gonna be harder?

Scraping, by far. It doesn't matter how much experience you have, you still have to do the legwork. An API is just using a few pre-packaged methods, you don't need experience on it.