Nexy digest, edition 1¶

*taps mic* this thing still on? My blog has been collecting dust for, as per usual, quite some time. As I say all the time, I usually have small things I want to write about, but rarely enough to justify writing a whole blog post. Well, today I'm going to try something new: a "monthly" breakdown of everything that happened since my last digest, including things I've done, things I'm working on, future plans, and any other honourable mentions I feel are important.

Ideally these digests will be short but rich, rather than the typical larger in-depth breakdowns I usually do. Feedback is wanted: ping me on Matrix, the fediverse, or Bluesky!

I don't want to commit to an actual schedule for these, since I can't guarantee anything interesting happens monthly. However, I'm anticipating write-ups every 1-3 months, both time and events permitting. For those not aware, my blog site publishes RSS (and JSON) feeds - see the footer.

So, I guess I've got to start somewhere. Lets start with possibly the most noticeable change to anyone who subscribes to my blog, shall we?

Tech¶

Host migration in progress¶

I'll probably write a longer post about this one later in the year. Historically I have run three servers: nexcloud3, corellia, and homelab2. nexcloud3 is my oldest Hetzner VPS, which has diligently served as my primary ingress and in some cases egress for over two years now. It also hosted my status page and provided some backup offsite comms services in case I was experiencing a prolonged outage. homelab2 is my main server, with enough compute to make my old laptop quake. corellia was a recent-ish (<1yr) addition to my fleet, which served as a redundant node that hosted mission critical resources, such as a dedicated moderation server for my Matrix communities, which would be unaffected by any changes made to nexcloud3.

However, this came at a cost. When I first rented these servers from Hetzner, they were about £3 a pop. Since then, they have creeped up to just over £5 a pop, leading my cloud bill to regularly exceed my previous soft budget of £10/mo. I tanked this for a while because the labour cost of migrating to another provided exceeded that of the financial cost of just continuing with hetzner, but then disaster struck. My tenancy agreement expired in June 2025, meaning I had to move. Unfortunately, the lease at my new place didn't start for a few weeks after my existing one ended, so while I could lay over for that time, I wouldn't be in a place where I could run my homeserver. I had to find somewhere to move some services, and the natural choice was my cloud servers!

Unfortunately, the capacity afforded by my existing fleet was insufficient for the core services I absolutely had to run, so I had to go server hunting. I ended up finding a sweet deal from OVH, who I have previously rented from, which gave me similar specs to both of my combined Hetzner servers, at a marginally cheaper price (I recall the sum coming to approximately £8/month). Still brushing uncomfortably close to my small budget, but for the situation it made sense. I signed on a 6 month lease, and promptly shoved a bunch of core services on it mere hours before having to pull the plug on my homelab.

Well, now I've got homelab2 running once again, and moved everything off of sullust (the new VPS). But it doesn't exactly make sense for me to go back to Hetzner when I'm getting a better deal from OVH, hence The Migration:tm:. I say this change is noticeable, because it is slow. My DNS management is awful, with nested and unrelated CNAMEs and A/AAAA records pointing to places they really shouldn't, and stupid TTLs (they made sense at the time since my IPs are static). Not to mention, I need to migrate TLS certs across live servers while still retaining the overlap period to avoid interrupting connectivity.

It's a whole mess, but hopefully it'll be done soon!

Obligatory Matrix section¶

I've been a busy bee in the Matrix world! I've been brainstorming ways to improve Meowlnir's user experience, such as offering to protect rooms in a space, adding optional notifications for when the policy server blocks an event, and most importantly, adding a command that meows at you.

In the Continuwuity world, I've actually been taking a bit of a break recently to alleviate a lot of mounting pressure. Nonetheless, I've made some important improvements, like fixing extremity tracking for improved stability in federated rooms, patching over a regression introduced in v26.8.0, and implemented a missing functionality to remove orphaned device encryption info after a bug in a popular client SDK caused servers to store hundreds of thousands of unusable keys. I also took the decisive action to completely remove challengeless registration, which is something I've been itching to do since those automated registration spam waves earlier in the year.

Another area I've been kinda busy in is Venator. I still don't really dedicate time to this project, however I know people are eager to see a new Matrix homeserver that isn't a Conduit fork, or some vibecoded garbage, and given my track record with Continuwuity, have high hopes too. Most of the time spent up until the past few weeks has been on improving security (such as adding support for password peppering), reducing storage consumption (via aggressive string interning: #136, #142), and improving unit & integration test coverage over the existing implementation to catch regressions better. Complement support was also re-added, however a lot of the Complement test suite is currently incompatible with the Matrix specification, so coverage on Venator is not great. I am, however, starting work on basic federation, and getting a basic account management panel going to further improve Venator's support for OAuth2.

TV¶

What's this? Non-tech content? on my blog? shocker! Actually probably not so much anymore, I've deviated from the tech themes a couple times now.

As for what I've been watching recently, House M.D. has been a repeat binge at dinnertime. I've been watching it on-and-off for months now, and at the time of writing I've finally gotten to maybe half way through season 5. It's not my usual kind of watch, I usually prefer something with a richer story and more coherent plot, and House does feel a bit loosely tied together sometimes, but honestly it's quite funny while also keeping some serious moments in enough to keep my attention.

I was recently informed that Silo released a third season, so that's next on my watch list. I loved series one, series two was definitely amazing too, but it wasn't as memorable as season one to me. I'm probably just forgetting it though, it has been ages since I watched it. Either way, incredibly excited to watch season 3!

No films have entered my roster recently, however I'm getting a twitch to re-watch something when I get time, either Baby Driver, the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, or the Pirates of the Caribbean sequence of films. I've been meaning to watch Project Hail Mary for absolutely ages but just cannot find the time to sit down and watch it.

The most recent film I watched was The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and hand on my heart I haven't cried at anything like that in years. If anyone has any recommendations for similar films that just tear your heart out and stomp on it please let me know!

Music¶

I've had a bit of a genrefuck recently. It's a matter of time until I make a new playlist, but over the past month or so I've been coasting between a huge range of genres and artists. Usually I will be listening to the same albums or at least playlist, but I really haven't had a lock on a single artist, album, playlist, or even genre this month (at least according to my stats.fm and listenbrainz records).

Over the past month, I've been listening to incredibly hyperpop-esque, high energy, noisy tracks, like 4K Carpet by passengerprincess, 123 (the longest dream) by (un)familiar. et al, and Beautiful Princess Disorder by milkypossum. There is also a good dose of alternative/emo in there, with Steady, Steady by The Crane Wives, So Far So Fake by Pierce The Veil, and Hit It Again by Crawlers.

There's some longstanding favourites in this rotation, including the Blurryface & Trench albums from Twenty One Pilots, the Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge album by My Chemical Romance, Collide With The Sky & The Jaws Of Life by Pierce the Veil, and Nunemaker's Swingset by Everybody's Worried About Owen.

What's new in my rotation is a peculiar mix of what I can only describe of music that feels like a good punch in the gut. I'm not really sure how to describe this specific type of music, but examples include Embers by Dead Butterflies, Earthmover by Have A Nice Life, I Want To Be With You by Sadness, and A Quick One Before the Eternal Worm Devours Appalachia by Lizard in the Spring (a cover of A Quick One Before the Eternal Worm Devours Connecticut by Have a Nice Life).

I'm really loving music that invokes strong emotion - please, if you know more good songs like the above ones, link me them! This stuff seems to be really hard to find.

Cool Things Club¶

I don't have much to put here just yet unfortunately. Hopefully after publishing this post, I'll start being able to make a note of cool people, places, software, blogs, etc that I come across, but given this is the first entry, I haven't done that just yet.

I can list some cool things I've found and used recently though: I've recently used Zxilly/go-size-analyzer to investigate some of my Go binaries being excessively large, FiloSottile/mkcert has been a lifesaver for setting up local TLS when testing TLS-enabled services, and gijsdev/ublock-hide-yt-shorts has been very useful for blocking Youtube shorts via uBlock Origin.

This section will mostly consist of things I personally come across, however suggestions for cool things to feature are more than welcome! See the points of contact mentioned at the start of this post.

That's a wrap¶

And that's all for this month's digest. Hopefully I've struck a good balance of content density, relevance, and discovery. I'm aiming to both provide regular updates on stuff I do, but also somewhat curate things people who follow me may be interested in, removing the algorithmic crap we're so inundated with nowadays. If you like this post, let me know! If you don't like this post, let me know! If you have suggestions or other comments, let me know! Very keen on seeing if this goes anywhere.

Anyway, university is starting soon. Time to put my academia hat back on. Oh, also, see you at the Matrix conference!