It Was Named Wrong.

Yesterday, we got the stereo responding. Today, we asked the rest of the system to be a little less enthusiastic.

The Echo Dots were waking up during instrumental music. Album covers were missing despite being right there on disk. The assistant needed a better understanding of “nearby.” And a light, it turns out, is a surprisingly philosophical object once software gets involved.

Another day building with Codex. Another day discovering that the future needs some labels.

Nobody said your name

Our two repurposed Echo Dots, running Kiosk Satellite and connected to Home Assistant, had started chiming and listening when nobody was talking. Even quiet music without vocals could set them off.

Apparently the instrumental section had questions.

We filed a Kiosk Satellite issue, reviewed the detection code, and followed up with diagnostics after the maintainer responded. The useful clue was which wake-word model was firing: the captured evidence pointed toward Hey Luna.

We disabled that phrase on both Dots, kept Okay Nabu, and left sensitivity alone. Later, I reported no further weird wakes.

That is a working workaround in this setup, not proof that we repaired the underlying model. We added the outcome to the issue so the next person searching for “why does my speaker keep interrupting jazz” has somewhere to start.

We also changed the rings’ accent from bright cyan to a darker blue. Turning down brightness had just made the same abrupt animation dimmer. A proper slow breathing effect would still need an animation change.

A small distinction, but I would prefer my assistant to look thoughtful rather than like it has spotted an emergency exit.

“Nearby” now has a starting point

Business searches got a practical improvement: when I don’t specify a location, the shared assistant now uses the configured home location to prioritize nearby branches. If I name a different town, that takes precedence.

We tested both the default search and an explicit location. The results followed the intended rule.

It’s the kind of feature that sounds obvious until you ask for a hardware store and receive a perfectly good answer for someone else’s afternoon.

What counts as a light?

We worked on a voice-triggered leaving routine, which led to an audit of what the system considers household lighting.

Home Assistant has plenty of things that emit light without being lights I want included in a room-lighting command: speaker indicators, screen backlights, and various small declarations that a device still has electricity.

Those should stay out. Actual fixtures should stay in, including fixtures controlled by smart plugs.

There is another distinction worth preserving: an unavailable light is still a light. Being offline does not automatically revoke its membership in the lighting department.

We reviewed the list and confirmed which controls belonged. Some connectivity troubleshooting remains. I’m keeping the security details out of this write-up, but the broader lesson applies to any automation: define the devices you mean before giving a broad command authority over them.

Art is alive. It was named wrong.

The biggest repair job involved Music Assistant’s missing album covers.

A major cause was wonderfully mundane: 6,559 candidate folders had artwork named `albumart`, a name the installed scanner wasn’t recognizing. The files didn’t need a new artistic direction. They needed a filename the application understood.

We built a repair script that adds compatible cover.jpg or cover.png files while preserving original artwork and audio tags. It skips conflicting artwork instead of guessing and records changes for rollback. Jev helped review ambiguous cases; the repair itself uses explicit checks.

The pilot succeeded, seven tests passed, and we started the bulk run. At the last recorded checkpoint, 958 covers had been repaired and verified, with 20 conflicts skipped. The job was still running. Music Assistant’s rescan and the final display checks in both Music Assistant and Plex were still pending.

Preserving the originals matters because both applications use the collection. Fixing one app by upsetting another would simply move the blank squares.

We also changed Beets’ artwork filename setting from albumart to cover for future imports, then verified its JPEG and PNG naming behavior. No container restart was needed. The relevant setting is documented in Beets’ artwork configuration.

Repair the existing files, then stop making more of the same problem. An ambitious new approach to computing.

A few things stayed on the workbench

We researched more hardware that might be useful for future Home Assistant screens and saved the Mac instructions for unlocking another second-generation Dot. That was research, not a new fleet of deployed devices.

The Buzz update check also found a newer build. Finding an update and installing it remain separate events.

Most of today was this sort of work: follow the evidence, change something specific, and keep the unfinished parts in the notes.

The house is a little less likely to interrupt the music. The assistant has a better sense of where “nearby” begins. The album art is working its way back.

Art isn’t dead. It’s waiting for a rescan.