Nex's Blog

No, Cloudflare's Matrix server isn't an earnest project

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

No, Cloudflare's Matrix server isn't an earnest project

Yesterday, 2026-01-27, Cloudflare published a blog post announcing that they had built a Matrix homeserver that could run entirely on Cloudflare workers. This sounds amazing! Finally, serverless edge-computing for my chat protocol. In theory this brings great benefits, given Cloudflare's dominant global presence. It could even improve access, since lots of networks don't just blanket ban Cloudflare ranges. But, something far more sinister lies in wait.

Continuwuity Postmortem

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Continuwuity Postmortem

On 2025-12-21, an zero-day vulnerability was exploited against the [continuwuity] Matrix rooms. This included all of our community rooms, including the space, main room, offtopic room, development room, BSD suport room, announcements room, git notifications room, and worst of all, our minecraft room. All of our communal rooms were left in tatters with only some damn lucky servers escaping unscathed. We were completely blindsided by this attack, and with zero anticipation, also had zero information on it. Even worse, this attack seemingly affected all servers that weren't Synapse or Dendrite. Quite the dire problem!

I'm going to walk through, step by step, what happened, how it all went down, and what we're doing to ensure disasters like this can't happen again.

Where do we go from here?

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Where do we go from here?

I've gone back and forth on making this blog post for probably a few months now. This isn't the sort of thing I take pride in making really, usually I prefer to make things that are upbeat and have a positive impact. But more and more lately, I've really just been asking myself that one simple question. Where do we go from here?

How I hacked my washing machine

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0100

How I hacked my washing machine

If you've known me for some amount of time you knew this was something that was bound to happen eventually. Yesterday (and technically today), me and a friend went on an endeavor to hack our washing machine, partially for the fun of it, and partially because there's actually a practical use for it.

Where I've been

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0100

Where I've been

As is to be expected, I did the thing every aspiring blog writer does and started a blog page, only to write three posts and then never touch it again. Truth is, I've been itching to write more, but I both haven't had the time, and everything that I wanted to write about ended up not being worthy of its own entry. Plus, almost all of it has been Matrix-related, and I want my blog to be about more than Matrix. But whatever, here's an overview of everything I've been doing since the start of the year. Some of it's interesting!

New Infrastructure

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

New Infrastructure

Hello reader, welcome to 2025!

I've heard the saying "new year, new me" before, but quite frankly, I feel like "new year, new devops solution to a simple bash script" is more fitting. This is just a short blog post to explain how this blog is actually hosted! Very meta.

My experience on Matrix

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

My experience on Matrix

I have been using [Matrix] for a long time now (over a few years), and have gone from simply using it as a way to chat to friends while in school, to being in hundreds of rooms, talking to anyone and everyone, and even writing bots for it.

In this post today, I'm going to summarise my experience on Matrix, what it is, the pros and cons of it, and what I think the future holds for it, and a few of the issues that I have with it.

Vir{m,g}in Media - a tale

Sun, 13 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Vir{m,g}in Media - a tale

Virgin Media (or Virmin Media), one of the world's worst internet service providers I have used so far. Read on to find out my experience with them, and the lengths I have had to go to in order to get a basic level of support as a long time paying customer.

Hello world

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Hello world

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A(nother) new site

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0100

A(nother) new site

Well, the time has come. I have for months, possibly even over a year, been putting off the creation of creating a blog. In this time, I have tried many different attempts, but in the end none of them ever stuck. I've tried using some cool projects like Writefreely, some projects friends have made, and even writing my own blog engine.

But finally, I have settled on using mkdocs, a static site generator that uses markdown files to generate a static site. In this first real blog post, I will be talking about why I chose mkdocs, and talking about my experience with setting it up.