As I mentioned briefly in the New Year bullet post, I've been messing with Home Assistant a bit at the new house. I'm trying very hard not to fall down a rabbit hole of just continuously buying crap.
I do like the idea of lights on timers. And, rather than some noisy timer switch or something, I can run a whole Home Assistant server and have it do the timers!
But honestly, Home Assistant is up there as one of the best open source projects in the world. There so much it can do, you find yourself making big, insane plans for what it could do. And then you gotta wonder is whether this grand plan you have is actually going to improve anything in your life or is it going to be a frustrating, fragile headache that you constantly need to fiddle with.
What's worse is the hardware side is an absolute mess of competing and compromised standards from companies whose primary goal is to get you to fully buy into their ecosystem, collect as much data as they could hypothetically monetize and top it off with a monthly subscription fee.
We managed to clear out the remaining stock of Leviton Zigbee switches for most of the smart switches in the house. Leviton has mostly moved over to connecting to their own centralized service with Wi-Fi. Terrible. Matter is the new emerging standard, but "standard" is a bit of an overstatement. Support is spotty and a significant fraction of devices require Wi-Fi. I bought the ZBT-2 Zigbee and Thread (which is the non-Wi-Fi Matter mesh radio protocol) hub, not realizing that it only supports one protocol at a time. And since we've got Zigbee switches in the wall, it's a Zigbee hub. If I want to do Matter, I'll need another Thread hub. Annoying. My bad, but still annoying.
The whole home automation thing is full of gotchas, and I think my plan is to take things slow, take on a small project here and there and avoid the temptation to just go on AliExpress or Amazon and buy a tonne of gadgets that probably aren't going to work.
I finished Hades to my satisfaction and then tried to find another game. I tried a few things, but none of them were clicking for one reason or another. So I decided I'd jump straight into Hades II after all.
And, you know what? It's great. Not a huge surprise. They took Hades, kept the essence but changed the flavour a bit, and then added a whole nother Hades on top. It's two Hades! Hadeses? Hadii? Hadeae?
Anyway, I liked it. I'm was gonna come out here and say I was done, but, coinciding with the console launch, apparently they've added a whole new game mode. I should probably give that a try, at least.
I have played a bit of Star Trek: Resurgence, and I intend to make a blog post about that at some point, but I find Telltale-style adventure games a bit stressful. So I keep needing to put it down. Apparently it's no longer for sale, which is a great shame, since I feel like this is closest to what a Star Trek game should be. But maybe I'll save that for its own blog post.
So I guess I'll go back to Hades II for a bit, as I was missing it.
2026 is kind of a sad year for Eurovision owing to some poor management decisions. But I won't go into that here. I've decided to continue deepening my love of this weird bit of nonsense. And this year, I ended up watching a whole pile of national final shows, which many of the countries use to pick their entrants.
So most of these haven't been introduced to me this week. I've been enjoying them for a while. And I've also been enjoying songs that didn't win their national finals, and those I've been adding to my ongoing "Almost Eurovision" YouTube Music playlist, which I started a couple years ago.
This list isn't who I think will win. The odds are saying Finland right now. I don't really believe them, but I don't think I have any particular insight into who will actually win Eurovision. Instead, after the cut, these are songs I just like, that speak to me, or I think are special in some way.
