You'll want to research "room presence" systems.
Here's one I've been looking at implementing for an example: https://espresense.com/
No downvotes or death threats from me! Start however you want or it happens to start! I started by watching TNG on air with my Dad as a kid, which is probably why I like the 90s shows so much. I'm really not sure how younger people find an entry point into the older shows because they just don't have the same feel as the newer shows, IMHO, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't enjoy them.
I watched Picard and enjoyed it. I probably will never rewatch it like TNG, but it was a fun distraction. I'm glad others are enjoying it.
What I wish existed was a self-hosted version of OurGroceries.
If you want self hosted, I'd second all the Grocy comments. I don't use it because it isn't simple enough for my family, but I did like it.
I once heard a consultant refer to it as "The Fog" because it's like a cloud that you're inside of. 🤮
It's a year old video, but it still is pretty relevant I think.
Local Control Video Doorbells - Reolink, UniFi, Amcrest, Hikvision, Dahua. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XCu6L0xn4Y&t=904s
If you'd rather read than watch the video, he has a nice companion blog. https://www.thesmarthomehookup.com/local-control-video-doorbells-reolink-unifi-amcrest-hikvision-dahua/
I've told my wife and family that if something happens to me, they need to start migrating all their stuff off my self-hosted services to cloud services because its a matter of time before something fails and nobody's around who knows or cares to fix it.
Depending on your budget and location, a whole house backup generator can be relatively inexpensive. My family lives in a very rural area in the central US, so we have a backup whole house generator that runs on propane. I chose propane because those motors seem to have less maintenance, plus we have propane for the grill, etc, already on site.
I am lucky enough to have wired my own house for data, so I have ethernet right at my PC Desk! (I also went a little overboard and wired for 220V power there) I've always preferred wired Keyboard/Mouse also, so hopefully those won't be an issue. I have wireless headphones from my existing PC, which I'm hoping to reuse. They already work well with my existing Linux PC.
I love the idea of upscaling graphics on an emulator! Maybe I can go play through FF6/FF3 again!
Sure!
For work I attend a lot of meetings, both in person and online. The service takes a recording of the meeting/phone call/etc, transcribes it, identifies the people who were talking and then feeds it into a "ChatGPT" style AI. It then gives meeting notes automatically and lists action items assigned to each attendee along with other pertinent information, like due dates. You can also continue to "chat" with the AI regarding anything to do with the meeting. I often will asked it to expound on various topics, write emails to participants following up on items, give me pertinent information that was shared like emails, phone numbers, etc. You are also able to go back and listen to the meeting along with the transcription. If it was a video meeting, it records the video so you can see what was being presented at the same time. (I think there's some opportunity for OCRing power point slides too, but these services aren't doing that yet)
One specific example was a conversation I had with a customer regarding another company we worked with mutually. The customer went into great detail about their issue with the other company and asked if I could write an email to that company to try and help solve their problem. I fed the recording of the phone call into the AI and simply told it to "write the email referenced in the conversation" and it wrote out a pretty good email with a lot of detail that was shared by the customer in it. A couple of tweaks and I was able to copy and paste it right into my email software and send it.
There's some other features the software has that I personally don't find as useful, like automatic sharing of meeting minutes/notes. My two biggest issue with these services is that they are charging somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 US per month for an amount of "minutes" of meetings. Also, they are taking all of your meeting data and doing who knows what with it? They do meet all the European Union and California privacy standards according to their site, but we're all here on a decentralized self-hostable community, so I probably don't need to expand on my issues there :)
Even if there was just a good "ChatGPT" style AI I could self-host, I could probably transcribe the recordings somehow myself.
I told my wife when I die, she's just going to have to throw it all away and start over.
We have separate email accounts and she knows how to get into my Keepass, so she should be able to get into whatever she needs to. I now have a daughter who is becoming interested in how these things work, so I'm hoping to slowly start training/handing off to her.
AntennaPod
As a (now former) Pocketcasts user, I thank you for letting me know about AntennaPod!
I got mine working with sync on my nextcloud self hosted instance