Gemini* and Gopher

• Technology and Free Software

  • SONOFF Announces Matter Support — If You Self-Host eWeLink's CUBE O

    Home automation and Internet of Things (IoT) specialist SONOFF has announced official support for the Matter vendor-neutral interoperability standard — providing you self-host a copy of eWeLink's CUBE OS, that is.

    "Now all your SONOFF devices work with Matter easily," the company announced this week. "Bringing SONOFF Wi-Fi & Zigbee devices into the Matter ecosystem is now official and simple. Works seamlessly with Matter platforms like Apple Home and Google Home."

    Originally known as Project Connected Home over IP, Matter — developed by a consortium formed of Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung, and what was known at the time as the Zigbee Alliance — aims to address the fragmentation of the smart home connectivity sector. Any Matter device can be connected to any Matter network and controlled with any Matter-compliant software — regardless of the manufacturer of the device, hub, or app. In some cases, adding Matter support is as simple as a firmware upgrade; in others, it requires new hardware.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • 2026-01-14

      I've written an "Ode to elinks" on my #Gemini capsule before, and I recently stumbled upon this great article that goes into more details and reasons why #elinks is one of the best text web browsers out there. Excellent for when you want to access information from a #RaspberryPi Zero or other low-powered device.

    • My Signup on the envs.net Pubnix

      I signed up for a pubnix account on envs.net on Mon, 12 Jan 2026. Thanks to ~creme for squeezing me in between moving the servers to different locations! It's my first membership in a pubnix ever. I already introduced myself in the #meta channel of the Tildeverse IRC servers, and as far as I can tell so far, the tilde members are really nice, friendly and helpful people.

    • Yet more downtime, spontaneous second migration

      Unfortunately geminiprotocol.net has been unexpectedly down for the past several days. Thank you to everyone who wrote to let me know about the situation. The outage was due once again to network problems on the VPS provider's end. I was less than impressed with the competence and practices of the provider in trying to restore connectivity, and in light of this happening so shortly after the tedious and poorly documented datacenter migration process I was required by that provider to carry out at the end of last year, I spontaneously decided to just cut my losses and migrate the server to a new provider in the hopes of better service. If you are reading this, I guess it worked! There might still be a few loose ends for me to tie up over the coming days but hopefully things will be essentially stable from now on. Sorry for the inconvenience!

    • a small catch-up

      So starting off a new year with something new, a /proper/ gemlog. Never really felt it was necessary but honestly, I am hoping to spend more time here!