It’s the end of October. I should play a spooky game.

Posted on October 29, 2026 by baudattitude

If we look back to last October, I decided that it was seasonally appropriate to make a serious attempt at coming to terms with the Resident Evil series, as it’s one of those long-running series that I’ve never managed to click with and when I see a series with that many games I get curious to find out what people see in it.

I didn’t particularly get on with the first game in the series, but once I got to the modern remake of 2 it was off to the races and didn’t stop until I’d played through Village and preordered the then-upcoming Requiem.

So, this October I thought I’d do more of the same and get on with some more spooky gaming.  I had a whole list planned out… and then there was a death in the family and I suddenly had a ton of responsibilities, and getting sucked into a bunch of games didn’t seem as important.

I did make an attempt to play the remaster of Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, since I hadn’t played it since the fan translation of the Wii game.  It didn’t go well.  It turns out that I don’t have patience to spare and it’s a game that demands patience.

Nonetheless, with about a week left in the month I decided that I was going to play SOMETHING.  So I walked over to my game shelf, scanned the spines and decided that I was going to play a Kirby game because I’d bought it in Japan and had never played a Kirby game for more than a few minutes and he turns into a car or something and it’s very cute and…

…and then I put it back and picked up Maid of the Dead instead.

I didn’t know much about it that wasn’t obvious from the cover art.  It had maids in it, and the title kind of implied zombies.  I couldn’t even remember buying it, though it seemed like the sort of thing I would buy.

Fortunately, my wife filled in the missing piece there.  Apparently she had seen it on Amazon or somewhere and decided it looked relevant to my interests and had sent me a link to it.  More evidence that marrying her was the best decision ever.

It opens with a dramatic story of two friends caught in the middle of a zombie outbreak with one tragically sacrificing themselves to save the other and the pathos is only slightly diminished by the careful use of camera angles so you can see up one of their skirts.

You know, some opening scenes just set the entire mood for a game.

When it finally got to gameplay, however, I realized that this was the SECOND game I’ve played this year with the exact same concept, which is a huge time saver as I can simply reuse a lot of my previous post about Wedding Witch.

Enter Wedding Witch Maid of the Dead, which is Vampire Survivors but with boobs.

Full disclosure: I haven’t actually played Vampire Survivors.  I’ve played a fair number of games that were reportedly inspired by it, but not the original.  They’ve all struck me as “Robotron:2084 but with a skill tree”.  Which is fine, because Robotron:2084 is one of my favorite games of all time.  I have spent a lot of quarters trying to save the last human family.

So is Wedding Witch Maid of the Dead just “Robotron:2084 but with a skill tree and boobs“?

Yeah, probably.

To be clear, there’s no actual nudity in the game.  It’s degenerate, but not to the point where you couldn’t play a quick game on the living room TV with your parents visiting.  I mean, they’d probably be pretty disappointed in you.  But would they be any more disappointed than they already were?  If you’re the kind of person to buy Wedding Witch Maid of the Dead, probably not.  They’ve already given up.

OK, that was fun, but I should probably stop there as the two games are very different.  Whereas Wedding Witch is a very story-light game that’s basically a roguelike, Maid of the Dead has a lot of story and a set number of pre-designed levels.  I don’t think there’s any of the randomness you expect from a roguelike at all, and rather than a single rather undefined character you have a whole cast with their own quirks and motivations who are all trying to survive in a Zombie-infested Akihabara and coincidentally thwart the evil plans of Legally Distinct Umbrella Corporation.

This extends to having a Legally Distinct Ada Wong as one of the antagonists.

It’s an 8-chapter game, with most chapters having four levels, and the first few give you a slow drip of information about the zombie virus and why your maid army is the only hope for humanity as you slowly build out the army from a single pink-haired klutz and her heroically-self-sacrificing friend to a full cafe of heavily-armed tactical maids.

There’s also an adorable mad scientist with glasses.  PEAK.

In between rather long – and fully-voiced! – visual novel style story segments, you do a lot of shooting zombies that drop experience points that you can spend on upgrades to shoot zombies better, and at the end of every mission you are scored on how well you did and you can buy some permanent upgrades for your maids to take into the next level.

I will say that the scoring seemed very lenient.  I only ever saw two scores: S-rank and C-rank, with the C-rank coming only when I was overrun by zombies and failed a mission:

There’s also a little mini-game around reversing the effects of the zombification virus on the characters, and I will not post screenshots as it’s the bit of the game you would probably feel least comforable playing with anyone else watching.

One thing I would have liked to see in the visual novel segments was some Live2D-style animation.  The character sprites have mouth movements and some different facial expressions, and the character bodies have a couple of states depending on whether they are armed or not, but that’s about it.  I’ve played a few of Qureate’s other games and they used an E-mote system for sprite animation, but those also tended to have only one main character to animate so it may have been prohibitively expensive to apply to a cast as large as this game has.

Anyway, the first five chapters are all about you recruiting your troops before the final build to the climax, and then level 6-1 is where the game says “We’ve given you everything you need, do you know how to use it?”, because the difficulty spike in that level and the next was quite jarring.  It took me a few attempts to get through the levels in chapter 6, and at one point I went looking for some advice because the strategies that had gotten me that far were not working.

I will sum up the advice, as follows: invest heavily in drones.

After that chapter, though, the difficulty drops way down and it’s a breeze to the final confrontation and some well-deserved credits.

My save file said I spent 12 hours in Undead Akiba, and I enjoyed all of it.  There are a lot of side stories to unlock, so you could spend a few more hours reading, and there’s a survival mode that I expect is just to see how long you can last.  It’s 20 bucks on the Switch eShop or on Steam, and I feel it gives you a lot of game in your game for that money.

 

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I assure you, this was of critical importance.

Posted on October 25, 2026 by baudattitude

I’m about six months shy of twenty years of posting stuff here, and about a hundred people – or, more likely, random web crawlers – stumble across one or another of my posts every day.  That’s not exactly huge, but it’s still kind of flattering.  Hopefully, most of them have found whatever it was they were looking for when they came here.

It’s also been a little over nine years since I changed the header at the top of all of these posts, and I figured it was about time.

The old header, here, was a photo of a segment of my games shelf taken back in 2017:

And this is roughly the same part of the alphabet today:

Here’s a bigger version, if you’re curious and want to read spines:

As recently as a year ago, this would have been rather less interesting.  Sometime in the middle of 2018, shortly after the release of Dark Souls Remastered, I decided that I was done with collecting physical games, would sell most of the ones I owned, and was going to be a strictly digital gamer going forward.  And, with the exception of buying cheap Japanese and Asian releases of Nintendo Switch games, I even managed to stick to that plan.

I mean, yes, that’s a pretty big exception.  My only defense is that the yen exchange rate has been quite nice if your paychecks are issued in $USD.

You would think, then, that Sony’s announcement that they were killing physical media in 2028 would have had me smug in the notion that the world had finally gotten around to catching up to me, but it had entirely the opposite effect.  I’ve been getting new releases on disc and even buying some slightly older releases for cheap.

Fortunately, I have no interest in rebuying all of the Saturn and Sega CD games I owned once upon a time.  When I sold off THAT particular collection, well over ten years ago, I was gobsmacked at the absurd amounts of money people were willing to pay.  I did not have any inkling that the real absurdity had yet to begin.

I try to avoid looking at what a copy of, say, Panzer Dragoon Saga or Keio Flying Squadron sells for these days, because the last time I looked I discovered that both are well past “new motorcycle scooter” territory and flirting with “used car”.

That level of madness has not, fortunately, affected PS4 and Xbone games… for the most part.  I’m glad I picked up Gravity Rush 2 when it was like $40.

Looking at the old header, I count 30 games, and about six of them came into my life, sat on a shelf, and left my life unplayed.  That’s a little embarrassing, but at least that’s 80% “I bought this thing and actually played it” which is something.  The new header has 45 and, well, I’ll work on getting to at least that 80% mark at some point. Probably after retirement.  Many of them are duplicates anyway.  I need to stop buying Fatal Frame II.

Also, I have a 3D printer now.  I’m sure 3D printing was a THING back in 2017 but it definitely wasn’t at the “want thing -> look up on Maker World -> push button -> thing appears” level of accessibility that it is now.

Furthermore, a decade ago I would not have measured dollar amounts in terms of how much scooter it could afford me.  That’s a notable change in my outlook on life.

I’m impressed that WordPress continues to be a thing that exists and where I can continue rambling at the internet strangers who come this way.  I know that the actual WordPress SOFTWARE is still a thing, but I half expect them to get rid of their blog hosting gig at any time.  I guess if and when that happens I’ll need to decide if I should move this to a dedicated host or start a Substack or something.

Followup: After mentioning that probably only web crawlers even visit this site anymore, I got curious enough to go to my Google Search Console, which I haven’t logged into in some years, to see exactly who was visiting and why.

It turns out Google hasn’t been indexing me since WordPress moved all hosted blogs over to https.  In 2016.  So, anyone who HAS been coming here has been coming here looking for very old articles indeed.  I’ve corrected that, and maybe there will be a resurgence of people looking for helpful information on, uh, whatever the topic of this blog is on any given day.

 

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In which, delusions meet metrics

Posted on October 20, 2026 by baudattitude

So, like a lot of people these days, I always have a phone on or near me, and eventually there was a smart watch and a sorta-smart scale (it reports my weight to the phone when I get on it every Monday morning, I’m not sure if that’s really “smart”) and I have the health app on my phone linked to the EHR at my doctor’s office so those are all talking back and forth. My bank watches my credit score, Amazon and Walmart know what I’m buying, Steam and PSN know what I’m playing, YouTube and Crunchyroll know what I’m watching… in general I just have a lot of devices that are keeping track of what I’m doing at any given time and it’s all being logged in ways that are sometimes more helpful than others.

So, when my insurance company sent me an email offering to send me a little monitor to stick on my car window that would sync to my phone and check my driving patterns and maybe cut my rates, I figured one more set of metrics was a good thing.  After all, I barely drive since moving to full-time WFH back in 2019 and I haven’t been in an accident in 30 years, I must be a safe driver worthy of some healthy discounts.

Well, the little white box arrived and got synced to everything without too much fuss, and after a few days of letting it monitor my driving I opened the app expecting it to say extremely nice things about me.

This is not the screen I saw at the time.  This is the screen I see TODAY.  The screen I saw at the time had recorded 10 trips and both my “Steady braking” and “Smooth turning” scores were in the 30s, which is very bad indeed.

My initial reaction was to be rather upset.  After all, I’m a good driver, right?  It must just be being picky.

Then I noticed that I could review every trip it was tracking and that it would helpfully put up little icons for every “event” used in scoring and it was, well, humbling.  Lots of “oh, yeah, I did kind of stop hard for that yellow light when I didn’t need to” and “I mean, sure, I take that cloverleaf exit a LITTLE faster than the sign suggests I should, but I like the way it feels…”

In short, it wasn’t wrong.  There were a lot of places where I was driving a little recklessly, where I’d been driving a little recklessly for years, and even if it was only being done when there weren’t other cars around the app doesn’t know that it was safe at that precise moment in time.  (Yes, this is my flimsy justification.)

The monitor just sees those extra G forces that make that curve feel more exciting and makes a little note to the effect that I probably shouldn’t be looking for “exciting” when I’m just going to the mall.

At least I don’t tend to speed or over-accelerate, I guess.  And I don’t use my phone when I’m driving, though I’m sheepishly admitting here that I will occasionally glance at my wrist for a notification.

In the trips SINCE, now that I am paying a little more attention to things like stopping smoothly and maybe not chasing that centrifuge feeling through the curves, my score has been slowly improving.  I’ve still had a couple of dumb turns, which I’ll admit to, and one case where I legitimately needed to slam on the brakes because someone pulled out of a drive-thru, but the app is starting to give the meatbag behind the wheel a little more affirmation.

Maybe I’ll even earn that premium discount I thought would just happen on its own.

 

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New challenge: Making Oticon hearing aids work with an Apple TV.

Posted on October 19, 2026 by baudattitude

Several months ago, my wife got cool bionic ears a pair of hearing aids made by a company named Oticon.  I don’t have the exact model number at hand, but I understand they’re very good and even work as a stereo pair and are designed so you can use them with your mobile phone or tablet.

I’m not sure, come to think of it, whether they have a microphone built in.  Presumably they must if you’re supposed to be able to use them with a phone?

They’re also listed as compatible with Macs, though we haven’t tried that, but are expressly incompatible with the Apple TV.  I’m not sure why; maybe there’s some Bluetooth standard they don’t support.

Oticon’s solution for this, and indeed for all other conundrums involving hearing aids and your TV set, is a little box called the Oticon TV Adapter, a small box with optical and analog audio inputs that pairs to your hearing aids and routes television audio to them.

It’s unobtrusive, works off a simple 5V USB adapter, and the process of pairing the hearing aids to it was one of the simplest things I’ve ever done when it comes to wireless devices.  You turn them on, lay them on top of the box, it blinks at you and then you set your hearing aids to a new “program 3” that exists alongside the existing two programs that the hearing aids come preset with.  It’s very straightforward in what it does.

Problem is, it needs audio in from somewhere, and that somewhere would normally be the television.

Naturally, I make things more complicated than they need to be, because I’m using HomePods with our Apple TV instead of the TV speakers or a traditional speaker setup.  I also use the eArc channel on the TV to feed audio from the PS5 back into the Apple TV so it can output game audio to the HomePods.  There is nowhere in this chain to tap into with the Oticon box.

Like I said, complicated.

For a while, I was doing this little dance where we’d tell the Apple TV to use the TV speakers instead of the HomePods, and there was a cable hanging off the headphone jack of the TV and this went into the analog inputs of the TV Adapter and if we wanted to hear TV audio we just unplugged the headphone cable and if we wanted to hear audio from the HomePods we went back into Settings on the Apple TV and set the audio output back to HomePods.  It was annoying, needlessly manual, and just a lot of friction when all she wanted to do was sit down and bing some Netflix.

Then we replaced our TV set, and the new one didn’t have a headphone jack so the little dance didn’t work any more.  I tried to make things work with the optical out from the TV, but I couldn’t get the desired solution, which was one in which she and only she could hear audio.

It took me several days to figure out an answer, it was dead simple and I feel stupid for not considering it before.

Several manufacturers make tiny boxes that are designed to turn non-Bluetooth speakers into Bluetooth speakers.  Here’s the one I decided on (this isn’t an affiliate link, and I have no connection to the company, so this isn’t an endorsement beyond the point of “it works for me”): 1Mii B06+ Bluetooth Receiver, Hi-Fi Wireless Audio Adapter, Bluetooth 5.3 Receiver with 3D Surround aptX HD aptX Adaptive for Home Music Streaming Stereo System what a mouthful.

I synced this to the Apple TV as if it were a pair of Bluetooth headphones, ran an RCA cable from it to the analog inputs on the Oticon TV adapter, and… it just works.  Like, there’s a button in it and you hold down that button and a blue light lights up blue to let you know it’s working and audio feeds into the TV adapter and out to the hearing aids and when you’re doing you hold down the same button and the blue light turns off and the HomePods automatically take over again.  The button is kind of small and recessed, so I put a little bumper thing on it to make it easy to press in the dark.  Again, not an affiliate link and not an endorsement.

It’s honestly so simple that I didn’t even think it was worth mentioning, except that I did quite a lot of web searching on this issue and never saw it mentioned.  So, maybe someone will stumble across this post in the future and it will be useful.  That’s my hope, anyway.

Random thought: Do people still say “TV set”?  I guess if you’re old enough to need hearing aids you probably still say “TV set”.  I’m going to leave that in.

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Adventures in International* travel.

Posted on October 18, 2026 by baudattitude

I love visiting Japan.  This is unlikely to be a surprise to anyone who’s read any previous posts on this blog, or really to anyone who even glances at the header image.  I acknowledge that I am very weeb-coded.

I don’t, however, love airports.  I’m not quite as nihilistic as the Douglas Adams bit on airports from his Dirk Gently novels, but they’re not really places I want to spend a lot of time, especially when dealing with security lines or the ruinous prices American airports ask you to pay for food.  I’m also not fond of the constant squeeze in economy class.

So, in the last few years, I’ve put some effort into making the process less awful, starting with doing enough flying and spending enough on my preferred* airline’s mileage card that I’ve gotten a bit of a boost in status and can more easily get better seats.  I also have lounge access which is a great perk and solves the food problem and we will not discuss the yearly fee associated with the credit card that gets me this access.

When I say preferred*, by the way, I recently looked at a statement and realized that the reason I have a flier account with them in the first place is that they’re the airline my company used when they would send me places back in the 90s.  So I’ve been flying them for 30 years based on what some HR person decided back then.

So that’s great, but none of it addresses the security lines which are the first source of stress when embarking on travel.

Shout out to Minky Momo for teaching me the word “embarkation”, by the way, though until roughly 10 seconds ago I thought it was spelled with a C.  Anime is educational, y’all.

To deal with those, there are a couple of “Trusted Traveler” programs, and since one of the benefits of my ruinously-expensive credit card is reimbursement for the application fee for Trusted Traveler programs I decided that it would be a good idea if my wife and I could both breeze through security using them.

So, we sent in our applications, got our “conditional approval” emails, and were suddenly faced with the problem of the final step, which is scheduling an appointment for an interview to finish the process.  This isn’t easy to do, because there aren’t a ton of offices where we can get this done anywhere near us and the appointments are booked months in advance and difficult to get, especially if you want to schedule two interviews on the same day.

But, there’s a loophole.  You can do what’s called “Enrollment on Arrival”, which is where you get an interview when you’re returning from parts foreign.  No scheduling needed, just show up with your conditional approval and documentation and sit down and wait for a CBP agent to talk with.  If you find yourself in our situation, I recommend this.  If you live in a major city with an international airport and can schedule an interview locally… maybe do that instead.

Hence, our plan:  We would fly up to Vancouver, which is technically international in that Canada appears to still be a sovereign nation and get our interviews done in the tiny piece of the Vancouver airport terminal that is officially US soil.  All in one weekend, so I wouldn’t need to miss work.  What could possibly go wrong?

Well, it started with damn near missing our flight thanks to a massive security line, which would have been a terrifically ironic turn of events, but somehow we made it on to the plane and landed in Canada and made it to our room at the airport hotel.

I mean, the AIRPORT HOTEL.  Getting to watch planes from the hotel room was pretty neat and the soundproofing was impeccable.

My wife had stayed up all night out of an abundance of caution, so she immediately crashed – that’s probably not a good word to use in reference to anything near an airport, come to think of it – leaving me with nothing to do but explore a strange city’s train system.

Serious kudos to Vancouver for having pretty decent transit, at least from my limited experience.  I had a little trouble getting from the Canada Line to the Expo Line, but that was entirely on me and my inability to notice signs.  I went aboveground instead of realizing that I should be connecting underground, and spent a little time trying to find the next station from the wrong layer of the map, as it were.

I at least got a brief walk around Vancouver’s waterfront and some pictures of neat buildings.

No idea what these are.  Would be hilarious if they were for some really utilitarian process and I’m just taking pictures of, like, a water treatment plant or something.

Why do some of the most evil corporations, ones I interact with on a daily-to-weekly-basis, get the coolest looking towers?

I eventually did figure out the Expo line and took it to a video game store that had shown up on the first page of Google results, which isn’t the best research method in the world but paid off on this occasion.

Just look at that window.  This is a store that commissioned an artist back in like 2001, when someone might have thought that Ulala belonged on the same couch as Chun Li, and has just stuck with it through the years. It’s glorious, and the stock on hand was pretty impressive as well.  I’m not sure anyone will pay Modern Retro Prices for a Vic-20 RAM expansion cartridge, just as one example, but if you’re the target customer for that they have a couple in a glass display case, with enough other rarities that I think everyone is guaranteed to see at least one Holy Grail for their own collection.

I was sorely tempted to drop like $120 USD on a collector’s edition of “Food Girls”, because it’s a quirky little management sim that I quite enjoyed, but common sense prevailed and I just bought a few very cheap Xbox 360 games.

I don’t know that I’ll ever be back to this little corner of Canada, but I’ll make it a stop if any future trips do bring me this way.

The next morning we packed up, headed down to security, got to US Customs and were directed to some modestly-comfortable chairs to wait our turn for an interview.  The space isn’t terrifically private, though they do try to at least give the person being interviewed a little space, so I was hearing just enough of the interview of the person before us to make me worry because she was being absolutely grilled about every little thing on her application.  The officer spent the best part of an hour on her before sending her on our way, and I braced for some serious bureaucracy…

…and then our interview was “give us your fingerprints.  Do you still live on X street? Your cards will be in the mail in two or three weeks”

It was, well, rather anticlimactic.  I AM NOT COMPLAINING.

In the end, it felt like a very good use of a weekend.  I’m sure that the 20 or 30 minutes per trip it saves us on future air travel will eventually add up to more than the time we spent on the process.

 

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In which, I find myself in the uncomfortable position of wanting to say nice things about Microsoft.

Posted on October 15, 2026 by baudattitude

I should probably start by saying that I don’t, in general, have a very positive view of Microsoft right now.  I’ve moved almost entirely to using macOS and Linux at home, and the computer that CAN still dual-boot into Windows does so only because I occasionally need to update firmware on hardware that needs a Windows app to do so.

Yes, I’m sure I could probably make these work using WINE.  This is a situation where I will sacrifice ideological purity for the simplicity of turning on the laptop and trying to remember what key to mash for the boot selector.

I should probably make a label to help with that, come to think of it.

There.  That’s one problem solved.

Despite having purged Windows mostly from my life, I do still have an Xbox console.

Well, two of them.  There’s an Xbox 360 and an Xbox One X.  I’ll ignore the one that’s old enough to drink in favor of the one that is… well, actually, it’s nearly a teenager at this point.  That’s a sobering thought.

One of the first nice things I’ll say about Microsoft is simple: many of the nice things I have to say are applicable even if you have a decade-or-more-old Xbox One console.  There are probably some improvements that are Series-only, but since I no longer own a Series console I’m not sure if I know about those ones.

And, actually, the positive thoughts I have are largely centered around support for older consoles and older games.  This has kind of been percolating in the back of my head ever since I booted up Dead Space to get a screenshot for comparison purposes for an article I wrote a few weeks ago – my Xbox One X happily booted the 18-year old game and downloaded my save data from when I played it shortly after release.  If I’d wanted to, I could have picked up directly from where I left off.

Well, technically I’m not sure if you can do anything in Dead Space after you see the ending credits.  That’s beside the point.

In addition, I took the screenshot using the “Share” button on the controller, and that’s a button that wasn’t present on the Xbox One controller.  Connecting a Series controller to a Xbox One not only works but gives the old console a new feature – granted, a fairly small feature, but I take a lot of screenshots.

That screenshot then showed up in the Xbox app on my phone and also uploaded automatically to OneDrive.  I’m not a fan of Microsoft’s constant attempts to get its customers to move all of their documents to OneDrive, but for the purpose of being a cloud storage platform for transferring files, it’s worth the two bucks a month I spend for 100GB of storage.

Both Sony and Nintendo have feature parity when it comes to “your screenshots automatically show up on your phone” but the process of actually getting them out of their respective apps and into my photo library is annoying and you have to do it a few images at a time.

Going back to the backwards compatibility… I’ll gladly admit that it has some glaring omissions (Why can I not play Soulcalibur IV, or buy Arkham Origins?), but it’s still pretty huge for keeping access to my older games.  I understand they’re even implementing some form of this in Windows, but can’t speak to that myself.

Finally, the new disc to digital thing is neat.  It wasn’t a big deal for my personal needs, because I only owned five physical Xbox One games and only one was compatible with it, but it’s a really nice thing for anyone with a big library of discs and I give them extra credit for letting people get digital licenses for Series games using an Xbox One, considering how many Series devices don’t include a disc drive.

It would be amazing if it extended to Xbox 360 and original Xbox discs, but I understand there are a couple of technical issues there.  These older discs didn’t have the individual serial numbers that Microsoft uses to assign rights to your account, and I seem to recall that there’s no provision to remove rights for an Xbox 360 game from your account once it’s in there – that’s why I still have all of my old Games With Gold licenses despite not having subscribed to Xbox Live in years.

It’s a shame that these very gamer-friendly features haven’t really translated to success, to the point where “Xbox” is almost an afterthought when it comes to consoles now.  In the last forty years, we’ve seen plenty of examples of what happens when the market leader doesn’t feel like they have any real competition, and it’s never a good thing.  The new management seems to have remembered that they actually make and sell gaming hardware, and that they shouldn’t keep paying companies that don’t actually make games, so maybe they can turn things around and become a slightly-more-competitive option.

Look, I’m keeping my optimism to realistic levels here.

Anyway, that’s been a very weird post to write.  I’m sure I’ll have something to rant about later, but for now it’s just good vibes.

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Continuing the true and only slightly-embellished story of my descent into madness; more adventures in home networking

Posted on October 10, 2026 by baudattitude

Yesterday, I commented that an entirely foreseeable and preventable chain of events had led to me spending entirely too much time and money moving my home network over to Ubiquiti gear.

I should note at this point that I tend to use “Ubiquiti” and “UniFi” interchangeably, and I should probably watch that because there probably is a distinction, but at the same time I tend to use “gigabit” without looking up whether it really should be “gibibit” because the only people that care strongly about whether gigabit or gibibit is accurate are the same sort of people who smugly tell you that Pluto is not technically a planet and this is a somewhat strained way of saying that getting it right was going to be too much work.

I also touched on the idea that even having a “home network” as opposed to a simple monolith leased from the cable company that handles all of your home connectivity needs is, in itself, an entirely unnecessary thing for realistically 99% of people in the modern developed world.

Nonetheless, I have one and I decided it needed to be made up largely of components from a single manufacturer that would naturally work seamlessly and in harmony to make our connected home the best possible connected home it could be.

I have never been more wrong.

To be fair to Ubiquiti, the cracks in the system didn’t become obvious until I decided that a perfectly-functional network could be …better.

Actually, if I could just buy a collar that would give me powerful electric shocks whenever I thought or said some variation of the phrase “well, it’s working now but I think I can improve it” it would save me so much time at the cost of only occasional searing pain.

To be specific.  As I mentioned previously, I’d gone from a very small UniFi setup to a rather complex one due to a combination of factors involving having access to a budget that needed to be spent and wanting to have a fallback for the incredibly rare occasions when my primary Internet connection was no longer available.

I feel I have to make that clear – as much as I will occasionally say unkind things about the state of my cable service, if I look at it rationally I need to acknowledge that Xfinity manages a very high level of uptime.

I just wanted it to be better.  (see above)

Specifically, I wanted to move the UniFi controller (the “secret sauce” that makes their gear worth the premiums) from one device to another.  I had an Express 7, which is an all-in-one router + WiFi solution and which was rather nice but suffered from its physical location in the house.  By changing the controller to a “Cloud Fiber Gateway” I could have the router near the cable modem and use the Express 7 as a wireless access point at a place in the house that gave better coverage.

There were probably other advantages.  But that was how I justified things.

In my defense, I DID research the process, and read a lot of reddit posts and even Ubiquiti’s own migration documents. They all seemed to agree that the process was as simple as backing up your existing configuration, plugging in your new controller, and restoring your backup during the initial setup.

For all I know, that’s how it works if you do it correctly.

That is not how it worked for me.

The first sign that there were going to be issues came when I tried to set up the new controller with it plugged directly into the UCI – that’s the UniFi cable modem.  The UniFi mobile app would happily detect the existence of the new controller, but would then report that it couldn’t get an internet connection.

At that point, I reconnected the Express 7 to the UCI and plugged the cloud gateway in downstream.  It got a network connection then, and even gave me the option to restore from an backup – with a list of all the Express 7 backups, even!

This failed.   My thought was that it might just need a firmware update, so I continued the process to set it up as new, got a firmware update, factory reset the configuration and tried the setup process again.  Problem was, now it wasn’t showing me the Express 7 backups.  It had made a backup of itself during the update process and that was the only backup it was going to try to restore.

I managed to download a file containing the last Express 7 backup and tried to restore from that, but the cloud gateway was very firm in saying that the backup wasn’t compatible.  There may be multiple KINDS of backups you can make?  Like, configuration only vs. configuration + applications?  I dunno.  I was not going to be able to restore this backup.

I decided to set it up as new.  I didn’t think I had that many customizations applied to the Express 7, after all.  Bring it online, set up the WiFi SSID and password, probably not much else to do.

If you’d like to bury your face in your hands at this point in sympathy, it would be appreciated.  I’ll assume you’ve done so.

So I plugged the cloud gateway back into the UCI and… no internet connection.

I fumed.  I looked things up on the web.  One site suggested I clone the MAC address from the Express 7, and this didn’t work.  Another site suggested I unplug the UCI for 10 minutes and plug it back in before trying to connect a new gateway.

Surprisingly, this last worked.  With the new cloud gateway in place, all of my devices came happily back online.  I just couldn’t manage them from the UniFi app, or even see any of them in the devices list.  As far as UniFi was considered, they were still all attached to the by-now-disconnected Express 7.

I also couldn’t adopt the switch that was connected to the cloud gateway, but fortunately a factory reset took care of that, and after that I could adopt all downstream devices.

I couldn’t, however, adopt the UCI.

I crossed my fingers and did a factory reset, praying that I wouldn’t need to call Xfinity and get the thing reactivated.

It didn’t need reactivation – but now the adoption process was failing with the error

“Console connection failed, we could not connect to your Unifi OS Console, Please try again”

I should have taken some screenshots during this whole ordeal.  If you’ve wound up on this page because you’re going through some similar nonsense and are trying to troubleshoot it, I apologize for the lack of same.  I was very focused on fixing the dang thing and not very focused on documenting it.

Anyway, the solution was to unplug the UCI, wait 10 minutes, and plug it back in.  This should not have been necessary.  I cannot explain why it WAS necessary.  But it worked.

Now I had a working network, admittedly one running on default settings which was going to cause me trouble that I hadn’t anticipated, and it was time to get the Express 7 set up as a WAP.  You know, the whole reason for the new cloud gateway.

I plugged it in, factory reset it, connected it to the switch and waited for it to reboot – and it immediately popped up in the UniFi app and asked me to configure it!

I’ll spare you the next few minutes.  The secret is to close the popup asking you to configure your Express 7 and instead go in to your UniFi devices and adopt it.  It’s trying to set it up as a new controller, NOT a WAP, and this will fail.

After that, all I needed to do was set up the WiFi SSID again.  Oh, and enable 6 Ghz radios.  And my DHCP address space was wrong.  And all of the MAC addresses that I had painstakingly looked up and given human-readable names were just MAC addresses again.  And my firewall rules preventing Android TVs from serving me advertisements had been wiped.  And my region blocking for Russia and similar countries was gone.  And all of the IP addresses I had the DHCP server hand out based on MAC addresses were lost.  And… look by this point I think you get the idea.

Honestly, I have no idea how much configuration I HAD done on the old controller.  But it turns out that it was a LOT, little of it was documented, and I didn’t realize it wasn’t part of the default options until suddenly it wasn’t working.

I can at least report that the network is up and running now.  And it IS, objectively, better than it used to be.

Also – and this is incredibly important – my new UniFi Cloud Fiber Gateway connects to the switch using an SFP, or Small Form-factor Pluggable connector, and it is possibly the most satisfying connector I have ever had the pleasure of clicking into a jack.  Worth the entire headache, really.

Gotta look into that shock collar idea now.

 

Posted in homelab | Leave a comment

Being the true and only slightly-embellished story of my descent into madness, see also: adventures in home networking.

Posted on October 9, 2026 by baudattitude

I feel it’s less of a thing these days, but it used to be a common male fantasy to have a big rack of stereo components that all more-or-less matched and had all kinds of exciting knobs and blinking lights on them and that obviously sounded so much better than the pedestrian two-tape-decks-and-a-record-player stereos that you bought as an all-in-one solution.

In truth, these probably did sound better – but the question of whether the better sound was worth the added complexity and expense was not something asked by a polite observer.

It is in something of that spirit that I have allowed our home network to spiral moderately out of control.

It started out so simply, too.  I wanted to get an additional wireless access point because our home WiFi was, well, a bit spotty and having a second WAP would give us better coverage.  That WAP used a Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) connection so I decided to get a switch with a PoE port on it to save needing to have a power outlet near the WAP itself, and this is where I decided to buy a PoE switch of the same brand as the WAP because that would obviously be more compatible.

That’s the Apple Trap writ anew; the bit where you take a tentative step into an ecosystem and suddenly you notice that the ground under you is crumbling and you’re sliding into a hitherto-unexplored abyss.

Honestly, it’s not even Apple.  Anyone of a Certain Age will think back to when they had to match their giraffe shorts to their giraffe shirts and realize that was when we first got our conditioning.

I think I picked up a couple more Ubiquiti WAPs, but I still wasn’t really getting in too deep.  Most of my home networking needs were being covered perfectly well by an array of Zyxel and TP-Link switches, with the cable modem being upgraded at an almost perfect 5-year interval.

Granted, this was being a little more nerdy than the norm – most people don’t buy their cable modems at all – but it still wasn’t too bad.

Then, I got a new job.  An entirely remote job.  A job that came with a budget to be used for setting up my new work-from-home setup, and I couldn’t pocket any that wasn’t spent so I was incentivized to find a reason to spend all of it.

Suddenly there was a Ubiquiti cable modem.  And a UniFi Express 7.  And a 16-port switch.  And once I’d set those up it didn’t feel too excessive to buy a couple of 5-port UniFi switches because I was starting to accumulate a very few devices that had 2.5GbE ports and the old TP-Link and Zyxel switches were all gigabit.  But, to be clear, it was still mostly under control.  I’d been reimbursed for most of this stuff.  It wasn’t becoming a problem.

Then we went on vacation for about a week, and on the first evening of the vacation Xfinity decided to run network maintenance and our cable modem didn’t come back up after maintenance was complete.  This happens sometimes and all I need to do is cycle power on it… which I couldn’t do as we were several hundred miles away from home.  So all of our home security was offline and I get really paranoid when the cameras are down.

When we got home, I cycled power on the modem and then started considering options.  Obviously the right thing to do was to find a way to set up a Raspberry Pi or a docker image somewhere that monitored whether there was internet access and rebooted the cable modem somehow if it ever went down.  This was economical, used hardware I mostly already had and would just take a little research…

…and that made me discover that Ubiquiti makes a vastly-overpriced power strip that can be network managed and that can cycle power on your cable modem for you if the power goes down…

…and then I found that they also sell a very inexpensive 5G antenna that can be used to give you failover connectivity in a pinch.

Anyway, to make all this work I needed to move the cable modem and the new overpriced power switch and some other network components to a different room of the house, but then the Express 7 was in a spot where it was providing excellent WiFi 7 signal for our backyard and probably the neighbor’s house but not great signal for the places in our house where devices actually live.

Anyway, that’s about the point where a UniFi Cloud Fiber Gateway and a second 16-port switch appeared and I think I can finally rest because I frankly have an insane amount of network capacity for a single three bedroom house that houses two adult humans and one cat.

Making all of this WORK was another story.  Probably go over some of that in the next couple days.

But basically:  When normal people want the Internet, they go to Comcast and they say, “Give me the Internet,” and Comcast gives them a white box, and they take it home and they set it up next to their TV, and they have the Internet, and all their devices hook into the Internet, and they all work and everything works. And if it’s slow, they just say, “Man, the Internet’s slow today”.

Maybe they go back to Comcast and they say, “Give me a faster Internet.”

But they do not spend two weeks’ worth of salary on Network Garanimals.

Why couldn’t I be one of those people?

Posted in homelab | Leave a comment

Yer a Gamer, Harry.

Posted on October 3, 2026 by baudattitude

Last month I mentioned that, despite not really being a big Harry Potter fan, I’d been inspired by some recent donut purchases to give the 2023 game a try, and that my initial reaction was quite positive.

I can’t claim that this is a particularly unique take.  Apparently this sold north of forty million copies, which is an absurd number for anything not named “Mario Kart”, and a bad game isn’t going to move that many copies regardless of how many kids grew up waving sticks at each other and having spirited debates about which house they obviously would have been sorted into.

I was not one of these kids, since the books didn’t start coming out until I was in my 30s and I didn’t actually crack any of them open until having seen the first few movies.  My generation waved sticks at each other pretending they were lightsabers, not wands.

I did, I admit, dutifully trudge over to our local supermarket for the Midnight launch of the final book in the series so I could read the ending without fear of spoilers.  I think that may be the only midnight launch of a media product I’ve ever actually attended, come to think of it.

Oh, and when I found myself in London at one point I did swing by King’s Cross station to get a photograph of Platform 9 3/4ths.  It’s just a shopping cart stuck halfway into a brick wall that’s not even inside the station, so it’s not much to write home about.  I was more interested in visiting Fenchurch Station and seeing what kinds of hijinks I could get up to in the Left Luggage office.

So I went in with a bit of a jaundiced view, and I confess there were a few moments where I groaned at one particularly silly name or another, but it didn’t take too long for its overall charm to break down the cynicism I brought to the table.  I may not have spent my formative years growing up with Hogwarts, but I absolutely DID spend my formative years as a boy-type person getting into all kinds of trouble with friends and Hogwarts Legacy is the best “getting into trouble with your friends” simulator I can remember playing.

Sure, there’s a Big Plot about a goblin rebellion or something, but it’s kind of one of those stories that I made sure to get back to every once in a while because I needed to progress the main story to unlock new chapters in the stories involving three fellow teenagers.  That’s one problem with a game set in a prequel timeline, after all – if goblins had actually successfully risen up and overthrown wizardkind, the events in the books couldn’t possibly have happened, meaning there’s no risk of a bad ending, so while it was an enjoyable enough path from “welcome to Hogwarts!” to “congratulations! you saved the day!”, I got much more invested in the lives of my friends.

One other thing I loved was how much the castle itself is a character.  It’s massive, and incredibly confusing to get around, and you are constantly stumbling across collectibles or little bits of set dressing designed to push your childhood nostalgia buttons.  Fortunately, even though it is absolutely awful finding your way to places the first time on occasion, there is a generous supply of fast travel points that unlock as you find classrooms and points of interest.

For a few hours, I tried to get around the school WITHOUT using fast travel.  Eventually, I gave up.  If you’re reading this and have played the game and managed to learn the castle well enough that you didn’t do the same, consider me impressed.

The world outside the castle isn’t quite as memorable, with the exception of the Forbidden Forest which I found to be creepy in all the right ways, but I need to give the developers some serious credit for the way the open world changes with the seasons.  Hitting Winter term inside the castle and then leaving and discovering that there is snow everywhere was quite the surprise – I can’t think of any other open world games that do that.

Is it perfect? 

No.  I have a couple of very specific gripes that I think are reasonably objective and a third that is unmistakably a Me thing.  Let’s get those out of the way.

First: While the level requirement for the final story quest is something like 27, there’s an epilogue that requires level 34 – and this is a lot of grinding, because levels come quickly at first but slow down considerably after hitting 20.  Looking at PlayStation trophy statistics, 27.1% of players finish the story but only 15.9% grind their way to the epilogue.  Seeing that kind of drop-off makes me feel just fine about calling the story done where I ended it.

Second: I’ve been doing a fair number of platinum trophies recently, and I’d had a lot of fun with the game, so I looked up the trophy list to see if I could get that shiny orb on my account without too much extra effort.  It turns out that the platinum is a big time sink that involves finding every collectible, doing every quest, checking off every one of the 95 little puzzle shrines dotting the map… one of the trophies even asks you to cast a specific spell on every single enemy type in the game, with no way to track your progress.

So the post-main story grind is pretty intense, especially if you’re a trophy seeker.

Though, after some reflection this is mostly an issue if you’re the sort of person who wants to feel they’ve finished a game at around the same time they’ve finished the main story.  If you’re in love with the world and just want to be able to keep running around it doing STUFF, having another two or three games worth of content available is arguably a positive.  So this is less of an objective complaint than I’d initially thought.  Needing level 34 for the epilogue is dumb, though.  Going to stand by that opinion.

The “me” complaint is that, well, I started out playing the Windows version and almost immediately fell into the trap of tweaking settings trying to get the absolute best image quality without dropping below the minimum acceptable frame rate and I wasted hours with this before I had the presence of mind to check whether the PS5 version was included with my PlayStation Plus subscription.

FOR THE RECORD, IT IS.  And I booted it up, picked one of the presets and happily played the rest of the game without even wondering whether it was really 4K or whether the frames I was seeing were fake ones.

This isn’t really a Hogwarts Legacy thing, though.  It’s just the slowly-dawning realization that I may be, at heart, a filthy console peasant.

In something that I initially thought was a complaint, I was a little taken aback by the presence of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese instructors who didn’t seem to be at each other’s throats, but checking the specific year the game is set showed that, whether by chance or by very specific choice, it’s set in a year where none of the three were actually at war with or occupying the others.  So, on the assumption that it was deliberate, some more kudos to the writers there.

Finally, I was happy to discover that I could apply my “Assassin’s Creed Protocol” to some of the dungeons in the game.  That’s a habit I have in any Assassin’s Creed where I pick one guy in a camp to leave unstabbed while I perforate every other single dude I can get my knives into.  In Hogwarts Legacy, this presents as selecting a single goblin who is NOT a load-bearing goblin (one who needs to die before a door can be opened) and then carefully sneaking past said goblin to turn all of his buddies into smears on the cavern walls so he has a little shock waiting for him when he gets off shift and goes to clock out.

I’m not sure when I started doing this.  Maybe with Assassin’s Creed: Rogue?  Anyway it’s a habit of mine and it was just as fun here.

Bottom line: Awesome game. Poppy Best Girl.  Ominis Best Boy.  Professor Garlick Best Mildly Unhinged Gardener.  Looking forward to Hogwarts Legacy 2: Hogwarts Harder.

Posted in PS5, videogames | Leave a comment

And now, something completely different.

Posted on September 19, 2026 by baudattitude

I was up in Canada a couple of weekends ago, and Tim Horton’s is running a collaboration with the Harry Potter franchise that includes some very tasty donuts and some rather tacky merch.  I ate a lot of the donuts and didn’t buy any of the merch.

If they’d had a T-shirt, I might have gone for one because the collab logo is kinda neat.

I mean, they did have T-shirts with the logo on them but they were employee-only things and I wasn’t going to mug a Canadian for their shirt.  That’s how you wind up tied to a tree with a syrup tap wedged in your sternum.

Nonetheless, it reminded me that I’d gotten Hogwarts Legacy as a free game from the Epic Games Store a little while back, and while I’ve never been the world’s number one Harry Potter fan I enjoyed the movies well enough that I thought I’d take a dive into the wizarding world.

I also looked at this as my opportunity to finally play one of the hundred+ free games I’ve gotten from the Epic Games Store.

This… didn’t work terrifically well.  I don’t have a system running Windows currently, so I play games either through CrossOver (on the Mac) or Proton (on Linux) and CrossOver is typically a bit hit-or-miss whereas Proton is typically rock solid.

I quickly came to find out that there is a massive caveat to that last one, which should include “as long as you’re playing Steam games” because trying to run something off the Epic store was a mess.  I’d either get no controller support, or the game wouldn’t run at all, or the game would run but crash after a few minutes, or cloud saves wouldn’t sync, or…

like I said, a mess.

It was fun during the moments it worked, though!  I rather appreciate their decision to set the thing a solid century before Harry wound up at the school as that lets them stick in a few familiar names in the forms of ancestors of book characters but not go too heavy on the fan service.  Really, the castle itself is the biggest source of that.  AND IT DELIVERS.  The staircases alone!

Oddly enough, the experience on CrossOver was completely plug and play.  Told it I wanted an Epic Games Launcher Bottle, let it set one up, pushed play and off I went.  But I wanted the ability to go between the Linux box hooked up to our TV in the living room and the MacBook Pro on my desk and, well,

Fanatical hooked me up.  And technically this was six bucks for the Digital Deluxe Edition so it comes with …a cool mount? and maybe some other cosmetics? I dunno.

Transferring the same from Epic to Steam was a matter of digging it out of AppData\local in one bottle and dropping it into AppData\local in a different bottle, so that at least was easy enough.

Anyway.  It’s a nice change from horror games.  I’m having a bit of trouble with the combat which is a little too twitchy for my liking, but I am playing on the third difficulty setting so if it gets too overwhelming I can take it down a notch or two.

 

Posted in linux gaming, mac, videogames | Leave a comment