Tag: Kyle

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.

Games November 2025

November 30, 2025 8:10 pm

Got a couple of new games this month, some simple card-based games that are quick to play.

First up is L’oaf, which is just a fantastic name for the game. The premise is that the players are team of bakers in a French boulangerie. But, none of you _wants_ to be a baker and this is just a temp job. So your goal is to do as little work as possible without getting fired. Each day the boss sets a production quota for the team. Each baker privately selects how many loaves of bread they will bake. Then you reveal your choices and see if the quota is met. Bakers earn or lose reputation based on their efforts and the boss’ mood. Whomever does the least amount of work while still remaining in the boss’ good graces wins. Played 4 times. Won 3.

The second new game is Goblin Laundromat. The players run a laundromat (individually) to clean the filthy clothes of adventurers. Clean the most laundry without taking on too many stains. This game is primarily a push-your-luck game with a memory component. I like L’oaf better. Played twice, lost both.

Played another really great game of Heat at the board game meetup. Really tight through the whole race with several switch ups of leader. It came right down to the wire on the final turn. I lost.

Played a couple rounds of Cat Fluxx. Lost both times.

Books November 2025

6:07 pm

Zero by Charles Seife

This was an interesting study on the history and impact of zero as a mathematical concept. I enjoyed it. It was quite a deep dive covering mathematics history up through quantum physics.

Having studied calculus and the basics of quantum physics I was familiar with much of the end results of the application of zero to these domains, but had not learned the finer points.

Virus Ground Zero by Ed Regis

This was an interesting, though somewhat shallow, look at the workings of the CDC. Sad to know that such an important institution has been gutted and its work undermined by political commissars who make decisions based on feelings rather than science. We know how that ends. We mocked the USSR for doing it for decades. It will take decades to repair the damage done in less than a year. And in the meantime, people will die.

The Witcher: The Time of Contempt by Andrzej Sapkowski

The rest of the Witcher series went on sale a while back and I bought the books I hadn’t read yet and decided to start back in for a break from non fiction.

This book is a bit of an interlude as the table is set for the next set of events in the story. So a little less gripping. I’m expecting things will pick up in the next one.

The Positronic Man by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg

A classic sci-fi work that uses a change of setting to address persistent societal issues from a more objective standpoint. In this case, civil rights for those who differ from traditional expectations and norms. Sadly, still deeply relevant in today’s world.