Nothing is stopping it, it’s just not particularly convenient because it’s designed around the limitations of the phone system.

SIP could handle it all if you wanted though.

Then then answer to your question is yes, you interpreted it incorrectly. The original (and common) definition of that word is vastly different than what you assumed.

Do you know what a semaphore is?

Quite literally designed for long distance communication.

Used extensively in many different variations before wire/electricity based systems became available, then even used after that for communication in places where you couldn’t have a wire (like between boats)

The number one google result is Owncast.

Looks like it doesn’t save the video by default but there are workarounds to record it.

To add to this a bit, if the site is just a single page that will be fine. If your site has a bunch of pages that all need to share the same theme and headers and footers and such it may be worth learning a simple templating system that runs before the site is sent for hosting.

That way if you need to update something in the design or theme you can do it once, rather than on dozens of pages.

Personally I use eleventy for my little site.

https://www.11ty.dev/

https://frigate.video/

You can absolutely use your external IP rather than a domain, your ISP likely keeps your IP the same for long stretches of time. Mine only ever really changes during long power outages.

You can get around that the IP issue by broadcasting your ip from your local machine to a known service, there are some free ones but they aren’t the most stable things in the world if it’s critical. Google Dynamic DNS

I just have it running in a docker container…

I’d argue home assistant with some smart LEDs and a few sensors would be great.

Having a bulb that let’s you know the outside temperature/weather when you’re getting dressed in the morning is neat. Having a dimming pattern for sleeping time. Tons of other really simple stuff available too.

I hear theres a few neo Mennonite colonies starting up that only use tech before the turn of the millenia. Maybe you could look into them.

And the vast majority of my automations don’t use it because it isn’t required.

I will stand by what I said, the tool is great even if you don’t touch AI at all with it.

The comment was wrong. It’s an automation tool. It can use ai, but its not the primary focus.

It really just helps in cases where you get hacked, but the hacker doesn’t have continued access. Say someone physically penetrates into your building, grabs the key through an unlocked station, and leaves.

That being said, like you mentioned, if someone is going through this effort, 45 days vs 90 days likely won’t matter. They’ll probably have the data they need after a week anyways.

Encryption key theft really requires a secondary attack afterwards to get the encrypted data by getting into the middle and either decrypting or redirecting traffic. It’s very much a state level/high-corporate attack, not some random group trying to make a few bucks.

So there’s an answer, and then there’s a problem.

The easy answer is that Home Assistant has Voice Assistants now, and you can use Ollama, Whisper, and Piper to do that all locally.

The problem is that it really only talks to Home Assistant, there’s no ability to have it search the web, or make a phone call, or really anything else outside of Home Assistant without significant addon stuffs.

It also requires a reasonably significant amount of RAM on your computer to run the VM for Home Assistant while supporting Whisper and Piper and Ollama.

Agent voice response

It’s even mostly open source.

British Columbia, $0.12 canadian dollars for Tier1 rates

The simple answer is most desktop PCs will not come even close to that at idle. Even just having a few case fans may draw more than that, without involving the CPU at all.

Laptop devices can do that in some cases with their extra power management features.

That being said, do the math to see if it matters. The difference between 10w and 40w is 0.7kwh per day, at least where I live that’s about 7 cents or about $25 per year.

In my case it would be more expensive to purchase a dedicated low power device than it will save me in 4-5 years compared to just using something I already have laying around.

I have a couple Tapo cameras set up with HA, I had to use the tapo app initially to set up but once they’re set up you can ditch it and run the system entirely locally. I saw someone had a way to configure them locally too, but it wasn’t simple enough for me to bother and I was fine with the one time step.

If that’s all you want to do, one of the cheaper Ubiquiti managed gateways would probably work and not break the bank.

If you want to tinker even harder, an open source router running https://openwrt.org/ (or even their own device) may be a good option.

Why?

You aren’t going to find a useful AI system for personal use in Finance, you simply don’t have the scale needed to benefit from it. You don’t make enough transactions per month that looking over it yourself is going to be any slower than reading the AI summary.

The question as with most process optimization and data analysis is, what’s the actual result you’re hoping for? If you want it to be able to summarize WALMART, WAL-MART and WMART so you can see those numbers added together, you already know you spent a lot at Walmart. Whare are you going to actually do with that information?