My NVR reported a storage failure during the same half hour I had unsupervised houseguests in the building. By that evening it claimed storage was fine and showed no recordings at all.
Nothing malicious happened. It took an evening of forensics to be able to say that, and the answer is the least interesting part of this. What’s worth writing down is how many of the intermediate answers were wrong, and how confidently the tooling handed them over.
The card is a clone. Its PCI vendor ID is 0x8888 – not a registered vendor, just four eights, the fingerprint of hardware built to look like something it isn’t. lspci calls it a “Silicon Magic AVMatrix VC12 4K HDMI Capture.” It’s a cheap 4K HDMI capture card in the lineage of a Magewell Pro Capture, and it had sat dead in one of my machines since I bought it, because the only Linux driver I could find for it didn’t work.
Speech-to-text is one of the few accessibility tools where Linux still lags. The options that exist tend to want a commercial cloud API, a Python toolchain with GPU model files, or an X11 session – and often all three. I wanted something that runs as a single static binary on Wayland, talks to whatever ASR backend I already have, and doesn’t listen until I tell it to.
dicta is that: a Linux/Wayland voice dictation daemon written in pure Go. No always-on microphone, no wakeword, no push-to-talk. Capture starts when you press a key and stops when the session ends.