Courtney Rosenthal

I was just driving down SE Johnson Creek Blvd.

A brood of geese started crossing the road. Two parents and three gooslings.

I stopped to let them pass. Traffic backed up behind me. Nobody honked. (Neither goose nor car.)

The geese hobbled along and eventually reached the other side.

We all drove on.

Have a good goose day, everybody.

#portland

Masto doesn't like nuance. It prefer rage.

It's the most wonderful time of the year.

#girlScouts #girlScoutCookies

I've been blogging about my adventures using Matter/Thread in my #homeAssistant environment. You may get the impression from my posts that all is peachy/keen.

It isn't.

I am experiencing a problem where periodically, a device falls off the network. I had one yesterday and another one today.

This (apparently) is a known problem. I'm continuing to work on this ... but I don't want to mislead anybody into thinking "all is great" by my recent blog posts.

New Blog Post I've joined the Kagi "small web". Thanks to @gairdeachas@mastodon.social for submitting my site. https://www.crosenthal.com/chrome/2026/02/16/01.html #kagi

Thanks to @XyphoidProcess@mastodon.social, I updated my blog post about adding Matter/Thread to #homeAssistant. I added a section on syncing Thread credentials to the companion app at the end.

https://www.crosenthal.com/chrome/2026/02/15/01.html

More blogging about my continued adventures with #homeAssistant ...

This time, the stuff I ran into when adding Matter/Thread support to my environment. (Nothing enormous, just a handful of "lessons learned" that may help somebody ...)

https://www.crosenthal.com/chrome/2026/02/15/01.html

I added an AI Statement -- including a Really Simple Licensing declaration -- to my personal site.

https://www.crosenthal.com/ai-statement

Hey y'all. I'm blogging again!

The stuff I've been posting here about my projects is feeling a bit too ephemeral. So I'm going to try to capture some of it to my rejuvenated blog.

This post is about my learnin' experience with the Seeed Studio IoT Button

https://www.crosenthal.com/chrome/2026/02/13/01.html

#homeAssistant

I picked up a couple of ATOM Echo devices to use with voice assistant in my #homeAssistant setup.

https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/thirteen-usd-voice-remote/

It has one infuriating bug: if there is an error processing the voice command it never plays the audible response and gets stuck. I need to do a manual stop to get it back into listen mode.

Apparently a lot of people are having this problem. (Some use an automation to reset, as a workaround.)

https://github.com/home-assistant/core/issues/142363

The bug was closed without a fix. 😡

I've been wracking my brain for a mnemonic to remember the order of sharps in a key signature. The usual ones are crappy. So I've come up with my own: First Coffee, Get Donut. An Eating Bonanza. #musicTheory (Yeah, I used one of the common order of flats mnemonics as inspiration.)