Category: General

Games December 2025

December 31, 2025 3:08 pm

Made it to one board game meet up. Played a round of The Guild of Merchant Explorers. I won.

While waiting for other games to wrap up we played a quick game of L’Oaf. I lost.

And I rounded out the evening with a game of Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor. This game is about laying out an ecosystem (in this version, within a moor) and placing animals in your environment. I filled my moor with dragonflies and newts, but didn’t win.

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By quick count, I played ~63 games this year. (I counted unique games in each monthly post I made, so if we played “Cat Fluxx” 4 times in one session I only counted that as 1).

Books December 2025

2:59 pm

The Witcher: Baptism of Fire by Andrzej Sapkowski

The saga of Geralt and Ciri continues. Geralt recovers in Brokolin and begins anew his search for Ciri. Ciri joins up with the Rats.

A lot of people die throughout.

50 Years of Text Games by Aaron Reed

The most recent book-group pick at work. This is a history of text games–where the concept of “game” evolves with time and mostly becomes what is now called “interactive fiction.” It was interesting, well researched.

The Witcher: The Tower of Swallows by Andrzej Sapkowski

Ciri is nursed back to health by Vysogota. Geralt searches for the druids in hopes they can provide information about Ciri. There’s a reformed vampire. Yennefer is seen again.

A lot of people die throughout.

Starter Villain by John Scalzi

This was the girls’ pick as my Christmas present this year. It’s an odd book. Take the tropes of supervillainy; mix them with whimsy, sarcasm, and quotidian life; add a dash of sentient cats and dolphins–you’ll end up somewhere in the vicinity of this book.

Easy reading; enjoyably humorous.

That’s 35 books completed in 2025, one of which in French, and several of which were really long. I also played two text-heavy video games entirely in French: Syberia and Spiritfarer. My French has a long way to go (especially aurally), but it’s nice to see that I can muddle through content and not get totally lost.

Migrating to Home Assistant Green with ZBT-2

December 30, 2025 3:12 pm

I have been running Home Assistant from a RPi 3B with a Conbee II stick for Zigbee (using ZHA) for years now. Finally decided to upgrade and directly support the Home Assistant project by migrating to a Home Assistant Green device with the Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 Zigbee adapter.

I wasn’t sure how painful the process was going to be, so now that I’ve done it, I wanted to document it. It went quite smoothly with really only one tiny hiccup.

I made a backup of my existing system and shut it down. I moved the Conbee II stick to the HA Green, connected the network cable, and plugged it in. It showed up on the network without issue. When I connected to it, it said it was “starting up” or something similar. Expanding the details didn’t show anything happening. After a few minutes I started to get concerned that perhaps there was an issue, but shortly thereafter it finished and showed me the setup page. I restored from the backup and waited a bit for that to complete (it would be a nice improvement to have a progress bar for the restoration process).

When the restoration completed, I logged in as expected and saw that the Zigbee system (via ZHA) was grumpy about something and that HA detected updates to install. I installed the updates first before tackling the ZHA issue. It was complaining about the current configuration not matching the last backup. I had thought moving over the existing Conbee II dongle and doing the restore would go more smoothly than trying to jump directly to the ZBT-2 while doing the hardware upgrade, but that seems to have been a mistaken assumption. I clicked on the gear icon for ZHA and it asked if I wanted to reinitialize the existing adapter or migrate to a new one. At this point, I suspect I could have migrated to the ZBT-2, but I wanted to get things functioning with known-good hardware to minimize variables so I opted to reinitialize the existing adapter and that seemed to work fine. ZHA stopped complaining and my Zigbee devices started re-establishing communications with Home Assistant.

Next I plugged in the ZBT-2 and followed the instructions it came with to add the device. It performed the firmware update to configure the adapter for Zigbee, but then the onboarding flow stopped. But I simply clicked the “Add” button on the automatically-detected ZBT-2 device again and everything completed without issue. I unplugged the old Conbee II dongle after the migration completed (when HA says you can do that) and verified that my Zigbee devices were still functioning with the new adapter.

But some of my Zigbee devices fell off the network during the migration. All of which were battery-powered devices: two water-leak sensors (a third one stayed connected), a vibration sensor, and a button (a second one stayed connected). Not sure why some stayed of and some fell off. I believe the three water-leak sensors are the same make/model. Same for the two buttons.

Overall, pleasantly low friction in this migration.

Christmas 2025

December 29, 2025 3:19 pm

I intentionally limited how much stuff I was going to try to do in preparation for Christmas this year based on how last year went. Last year I wanted to get a lot of baking done and ended up kind of worn out by the time we got to Christmas. Last year I also lamented it not feeling Christmasy somehow. This year we had a cold snap in mid December with overnight lows around 34 and daily highs around 50. That actually made quite a bit of difference in it feeling seasonal. Unfortunately, a warm, wet weather system moved in and brought the temperature back up leading in to Christmas which undid some of the effect. Anyway, I intentionally limited my baking to peanut-butter blossoms and cinnamon rolls while supervising the girls making sugar cookies (that was more-discretionary baking anyway, I still made fresh bread for Christmas-eve dinner and rolls for Christmas dinner). I think it felt more Christmasy this year, maybe that was in part from not having a leaking roof and a failing clothes dryer to deal with.

Anyway, we were at home for the holiday. Just us and the cats. On Christmas Eve we had our traditional cheese fondue with fresh-baked bread (and assorted other dippings). Heather and I played some songs together on cello and trombone while Corinne and Jess sang along. While Heather and I have the same book of Christmas music, they’re written in different keys. So for each song one of us had to play in an unfamiliar key, but it worked out fine.

Corinne read “Happy Narwhalidays.” Heather read “Mistletoe and the Christmas Kittens.” Heather played some more songs on her cello. I played some more songs on my trombone. And I read “The Polar Express.”

Then we opened the books chosen by the girls for each of us, drank hot chocolate, and read a little before putting the girls to bed.

In the morning we told the girls they had to wait until 7 to get us up–which they did. Then it was the usual whirlwind tour of stockings, presents, breakfast, and playing with stuff.