Matisyahu's Blog

  • Back to work.

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    I woke up this morning and went for a brisk walk, came back home, had some breakfast and then a shower. The weather is great and the temperature is getting warmer but given the El Niño coming in the New Zealand summer it’ll be interesting to see how crazy the weather will become. Last night I had a chat with mum about the backyard and getting a archgola put over the patio area which will provide some shelter particularly when drying clothes outside on an overcast day.

    While chatting I talked about two other things I want to look at doing in the long term which is the replace the fence at the back with something tidier along with the fences on the side of the property. After replacing the fence I want to then replace the shed with one with a proper floor and is hooked up to the power so then I can move the chest freezer from the office outside along with enough space left over to have a clothes horse as well so that I can dry clothes in there with a dehumidifier.

    I logged into my computer today and the tech team who manage the devices have rolled back the Chrome installation to Chrome 152 (looks like it is the long term branch) which should hopefully fix the issue with Salesforce. The strange part is that it only occurs when I’m either on a call or after a callout if I am logged out of Amazon Connect the issue doesn’t occur which makes me wonder whether there are multiple sources of the problem rather than just one thing that needs to be fixed.

    Regarding the midterms in the United States, I am always reminded of the often repeated phrase ‘checks and balances’ by Americans as if the system had some sort of internal self correcting mechanism that doesn’t require human agency. I read an interesting article (link) and once again it is clear, at least to anyone with an IQ above room temperature, the promise of ‘checks and balances’ is dependent on having the right people in the right places and when push comes to shove they do their job even in the face of political pressure.

    Long story short, the system is only as good as those involved in the system which means it comes down to humans doing the right thing when it counts. The whole system is based on people following the rules and the problem is when you delude yourself with the repetition of ‘checks and balances’ you’ve convinced yourself that some how the system has agency of its own and will repeal bad actors like an immune system dealing with an invasive germs, viruses, bacteria, and other threats. When you realise that isn’t the case then you suddenly recognise the fact that the constitution isn’t something special but rather a social contract that only works as long as everyone abides by it.

    It reminds me of Max Stirner and the phrase “it’s all a spook” – these things we put up on pedestals only have meaning because we as a society give them meaning, we imbue them with meaning because the reality is that they don’t have meaning outside of what we humans give it. The moment you start attributing agency to an institution is the moment you absolve those involved within the institution of agency – “well, we don’t need to worry about the Republicans because there are checks and balances which will keep the Republic safe!”. This is where you get Americans convincing themselves they have the worlds most perfect most wonderful government ever with the repeating of ‘checks and balances’ with the expectation that “everything will work out in the end” like some sort of bedtime story book.

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  • Back to work on Wednesday.

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    I’ve just come back from having dinner down at the local restaurant to celebrate mum’s birthday – mum picked me up and we had a wonderful meal along with a desert (my sister, her partner and two kids also joined). While we’re down there I was able to do some grocery shopping after the meal because I needed to pick up some odd bits and pieces. Woolworths had a special on a 3 pack of caned baked beans for $5 so I grabbed a few of those along with some Pepsi Max and other food for the week.

    I watching tonight’s episode of ‘The Bradbury Group’ where Tau Henare addressed the issue of anti-Maori racism that rears its ugly head every election. The reason why anti-Maori racism keeps appearing every election year is because it can be summarised best by President Lyndon B. Johnson:

    “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best coloured man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

    It gives person or a group of people who have no power or influence someone to look down on so that it allows them to feel better about themselves. The capitalist class telling the middle class to scapegoat the working class then the working class being told to blame the beneficiary for their problems then they tell the beneficiary that the problems in their life are due to immigrants. It is a giant pyramid of the capitalist class directing the classes below them are the reason for their hardship is the close below them.

    As for the CRL (as mentioned in the episode of ‘The Bradbury Group’) regarding the cost overruns, this goes back to the larger problem which is the lack of a Ministry of Works in terms of long term planning, training up and retaining those with the expertise and experience to be able to lead nation building projects on a large scale. The other component are the continuous legal challenges by professional oxygen thieves hell bent on challenging the CRL every step of the way – a group of idiots claiming the they own the land 30 metres under their house and threaten to bring the whole CRL project to a grinding halt. Then there were legal challenges about building a station in Drury – again, more money wasted dealing with legal challenges and every day the project is stalled is money being wasted.

    Regarding my previous post regarding Chrome, I’ve decided to stick with Safari because it really integrates better into the Apple ecosystem. Although there are those couple of bugs I’ve talked about I don’t think it warrants making life more difficult by straddling two ecosystems. I’ve just run the Jetstream benchmark and it is considerably higher than what Safari 26.6 was hitting along with Chrome as well so I’m going to stick with it – maybe in around a month and a half we’ll see 27.1 released and we’ll see the improvements present in Safari Technology Preview 252 make their way into Safari 27.1.

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s the best advice you’d give to someone younger than you?
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    Depending on where they are in their life the advice would be different. If they’re at high school I would remind them that they may think that high school is the centre of their universe but 5-10 years after you leave high school to go to university or polytechnic no one is going to care what happened during those years. There is a reason why the saying “high school hero, real world zero” holds true because apart from those who seem to be perpetually stuck in their high school phase, everyone else moves on to bigger and better things after high school.

    There is no set path and don’t look for a preset way to give your life meaning – you have to go through that process yourself to find what brings you meaning. When you just ‘phone in’ or to use an existentialist term ‘living in bad faith’, the process of finding meaning in itself brings meaning to your life in much the same way that Albert Camus noted in his essay on ‘The Myth of Sisyphus.’: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy because his conscious acceptance of an endless, meaningless struggle turns his punishment into an act of ultimate rebellion.”

    Lastly, don’t compare yourself to others – comparing yourself to others and where other people are at in their life is the ruiner of joy that may have in your life. Rather than celebrating the small achievements you have made in your life you’re constantly comparing yourself to others so you never get to enjoy the feeling of having achieved something. It is something that activists are reminded – celebrate the small victories allows you to recharge your batteries which will enable you to continue fighting for the bigger long term goals.

    Just to round it up – stop caring whether something is cringe. If you want true freedom then embrace the cringe, become the cringe, because I can assure you that 99% of people are living their lives completely oblivious to what you’re doing in your own life. There is a tendency of assuming that people are making judgments about you but the reality is that most people are too occupied in their own lives dealing with their own drama with little concern with what other people are doing in their own lives.

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  • All devices updated.

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    I spent the morning upgrading all my devices to version 27 – DFU installation on my iPhone, a reset and update on my Apple TV 4K, watch updated and both Macs are updated as well. The one thing you’ll find is that version 27 is a lot more polished than version 26 when it was released – not major changes but instead a whole lot of smaller things such as the glass effect, getting that weird floating appearance when it came side bar where as now it was gone back the way it was in previous versions.

    When it comes to individual applications, everything feels more responsive, the icons are cleaner and less ‘bubbly’, copying files and completing tasks is faster than before, networking in terms of sending and receiving files over the network is faster etc. Long story short version 27 is what version 26 should have been and it always boggles my mind as to what the purpose of ‘Liquid Glass’ actually was because if one was inclined to conspiracy theories then one wonders whether it was a distraction because they failed to get Siri sorted after years of promised.

    I’ve checked out WordPress with Safari 27 on macOS 27 because previously I had tried Safari 27 on macOS 26.7 – it shouldn’t make a difference but I thought it would be best to at least test it on both just in case that wasn’t the situation. The ‘daily writing prompt’ on WordPress isn’t working on Safari 27 running on macOS 27. I’ve disabled ‘cross site ‘prevent cross-site tracking’ and I even tried disabling ‘hide ip address from trackers’ and that didn’t fix it either. Maybe this is something that I either need to get over or I go back to using Chrome because it doesn’t have these ‘issues’.

    Half way through this blog I moved over to Chrome on macOS 27 and there aren’t any issues so far – I’ll get around to installing it on my Mac as well. It is unfortunate that developers only seem to care about whether it works with Chrome and if you’re using something else then it is a situation of ‘it sucks to be you’. I’ll see how things progress going forward but in the mean time I’m still having a look at One NZ and 2 Degrees for a possibility of changing my internet and mobile phone provider.

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  • Looking forward to tomorrow.

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    Tomorrow is the big day for the release of version 27 of Apple’s platform update – I’m looking forward to waking up tomorrow and I’ve got my USB flash drive all ready to create a bootable installer. Tomorrow I’ve also go mum’s birthday so I’ve tidied up my hair by trimming the hair at the back which looks a bit messy so now although I I have kept the longer hair everywhere else the back of my head looks a lot tidier. I’ve done some washing before going to bed – I’ve got that drying in the office but I’m not going to have the dehumidifier going because I find that it makes the air too dry.

    On Tuesday I’m going to get up, check for updates, download the installer and then while I’m off for my morning walk I’m going to write the installer to the USB flash drive. When i come back I’m going to do a clean install – sign out of iCloud, for my iPhone I’ll do a DFU install, the Apple TV 4K will be a reset and update but with the two Macs I’ll clear the whole SSD then do a clean install.

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  • A relaxing Monday.

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    Last night I went to bed a little later than normal, around 1:30 am but I stuck to my routine of getting up at 9:00 am. I got out of bed, changed into some comfortable clothes then walked down to the local bakery for eggs bene and a mochaccino – the wether is wondeful at the moment with the sun out, the temperature is comfortable which made the walk down that as a nice way to wake up. After having brunch I caught the bus down to the mall to pick up a present for mum.

    Mum tends to like the same thing every year – Oil of Olay however while I was down the road I bought some chocolates, Bundaberg sugar free 6 pack of ginger beer and a 4 pack of lemon, lime and bitters then to top it off a bottle of Brown Brothers Cienna which is a light red wine you can have chilled. As for how I’m going to wrap it up, I bought a jute bag while I was down there which has a funny pun printed on the side of the bag which I’m sure mum will find funny.

    Apple has released the Safari Technology Preview 252 (link) which has resulted in a massive jump in the web platform test which has increased compliance from 92.1% to 99.1% – it’ll be interesting to see how quickly those improvements will merge into the mainstream release of Safari. I had a check once again to see whether the two issues I face have been fixed – the ‘daily writing prompt’ still doesn’t work with Safari and on the NZ Post YouShop landing page the same issue with the content being half way down the page rather than at the top (like on Chrome) hasn’t been fixed. Both of those issues have been reported to Apple but neither of them have been fixed nor have any programmers gotten back to asking for more greater clarification (eg asking me to copy and paste the code from the website because the only way to get access to the YouShop landing page is to log into it using your NZ Post or RealMe account).

    On a side note I’ve made a change where the comments on the blog have been removed because I can’t be bothered dealing with bots flooding the comment section – I automatically post the blog posts over on BlueSky so if anyone wants to have a chat regarding the topics raise the best platform is on BlueSky. The other thing I was exploring are alternatives to WordPress – I like to keep up to date with the alternatives such as Ghost, Blogger, Medium and Substack. Although I am happy with WordPress at the moment I’m kind of wishing for some better templates when it comes to basic blogs because in the case of the one I’m using now I had to do a lot of tweaking just to get it to the point I was happy with it.

    I’m heading off the supermarket to grab some lamb for dinner and I’ll have it with some salad, maybe some tzatziki to go with the lamb. I might have a look to see what fresh bread they have because the ciabatta baguettes are always nice but then again I find that eating too much great can make me feel bloated.

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s one thing that would instantly improve your city?
    View all responses

    Investment into rail – upgrade the electrical rail network to 25Kv which would allow Auckland and Wellington to put in a bulk order for both cities and get the benefits of having the economies of scale. It would also mean that it would be possible to electrify all the way up to Palmerston North along with the Masterton line as well which would result in a smoother more reliable journey rather than relying on diesel locamotives at the moment. The long term goal of moving to 25Kv would be having full electrification from Wellington up to Auckland (something that was planned back in the 1970s by the Labour government at the time but then cancelled by the Muldoon lead National government). If Christchurch then builds is own urban rail network using the same voltage then Wellington, Auckland and Christchurch could all do bulk orders for the three cities and save even more money.

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  • The week is over.

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    I woke up this morning and went for a leisurely walk before work, came home and then had a shower followed with breakfast. The weather is nice outside and I checked out the news regarding the opening of the CRL project up in Auckland and hopefully it’ll mark the beginning of greater investment into rail. Around a year ago there was talk about a rail project that has been on the plans since the 1950s (link) – how about the Labour Party come out and say “instead of wasting billions on roads of national significance that have an appallingly bad ROI we spend the money on building the aforementioned rail project in Auckland”.

    There have been a few hiccups with the launch of the CRL (link) but it isn’t surprising given that the project was huge, at least in terms of projects undertaken in New Zealand, but I’m sure that as time goes on that issues will be resolved and we’ll learn from the experience which will influencer future mega projects. The other thing to keep in mind is that as part of the CRL project has been the bigger project of reinvesting back into the railway infrastructure after decades of underinvestment which goes further back than the privatisation of rail to way back to the 1970s when Muldoon cancelled the massive rail investments that Labour had planned in response to the oil shocks of the 1970s (Muldoon’s answer to the oil shocks of the 1970s was the ‘think big’ projects that did massive damage to New Zealand’s finances which New Zealand to undertake radical reforms of the 1980s).

    I was watching a video regarding a recent opinion piece over on the Washington Post (link) regarding the evangelical Christian movement. I’ve watched a video commentary but I’m going to read the article first hand so that I can read the full opinion piece – I’m not a fan of basing an opinion on a second hand inpretation even though I agree with what the YouTuhe commentator was saying. I think it’ll be quite a drawn out blog post because I’ll want to vent a bit about quite a few theological issues I have with the evangelical and non-denominational movement (funny how the non-denomination movement has become a denomination in the process of claiming not to be a denomination).

    I saw this video recently regarding the dodgy stuff during the dot-com bubble where analysts were they were going on television cheerleading on and promoting shares of particular companies while behind the scenes they were emailing each other about how crappy they were.

    It will be interesting to see what happens when this whole AI bubble bursts and how many analysts who were cheerleading on businesses were saying the exact opposite behind closed doors. It reminds me of an analyst over at Raymond James (link) making insane claims regarding SpaceX and its future share price – I really wish that there were people keeping a record of what these analysts put there and for there to be a name and same session when they ridiculous forecasts crash and burn. I know I’ll be keeping an eye on 2031 to see how this all works out.

    This isn’t the first time analysts have ben spectacularly wrong – anyone remember when Intel launched the Itanium? There was IDC that claimed back in 1997–1998 there would be a $38 billion global market size by 2001 and then by mid-2001 they shifted the goal posts to $15 billion by 2005 but the problem is that by 2006 the actual numbers were $3.4 billion. Not to pick on IDC because many other but they all do a lousy job at forecasting – not just off by a small amount but really badly incorrect. If you’re wondering, by 2006 the global server shipments of x86-64 sat at $52.7 billion. I’m always amazed by the fact that anyone pays these analysts given how often they get it so spectacularly wrong. I was calling Itanium a failure back in the 2000s but too bad I didn’t have the ability to charge a premium for my rectum plucks. Given how badly analysts get it wrong – maybe buying a dart board and throwing darts blindfolded at it would produce more reliable forecasts.

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  • At the half way point.

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    It appears that I’ve finally got the issue solved with Salesforce and Chrome 153 – the solution is to disable JavaScript optimisation. To do that you need to click on the three dots in the top right corner of the window, click on Settings then ‘Privacy and Security’, click on ‘Security’ then click on ‘JavaScript optimisation and security’ then select ‘Don’t allow sites to use JavaScript optimisation’ from the list. After I did that, I cleared the cookies and cache from Chrome and everything to appears to be working now and by that I mean there are fewer freezes but I don’t think it is completely fixed. There appears to be something going wrong in the optimisation process or a bug somewhere with Salesforce so hopefully Google and Salesforce can have a bit of a chat about getting this situation sorted.

    For dinner tonight I’m going to have some Mexican food delivered – the great thing I love about the place I purchase it from is the fact that they have fresh ingredients, their prices are reasonable and everything tastes wonderful. It is one of those things of finding something that is reliably great so you just keep coming back on a regular basis. On Monday I’m going to go for a walk down to the supermarket to pick up a few items and on Tuesday is the big day when version 27 of Apple’s platforms are going to be released – I might end up just downloading it while I’m going for a walk so when I come back it is just a matter of writing it to a USB stick and do a clean install.

  • Almost the end of the week.

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    I woke up this morning but I decided not to go for a walk – I wanted a lazy Saturday morning to spend time watching YouTube, cleaning the window ledges but I’ve gotten one window into it and realised what I’ll leave it till Monday because I really need to get a bucket of water so I can clean the inside and outside. I logged into my work computer to check for any Chrome, Edge or Firefox updates then checked for Windows updates – the administrator gods have blessed me with the September 2026 update and now that is all installed. I’m going to use Chrome today because the choice is between Firefox forgetting that I gave it permission to use the microphone then occasionally the website crashing or Chrome/Edge where it remembers that I gave it permission to use the microphone but the website crashes to.

    If you’ve ever wondered why there is so much AI slop and content farms online, if you needed reassurance that real journalism still exists – Semafor has released a video regarding ‘Ghost’ creators. One thing to keep in mind that the whole ‘content farm’ thing has been going on well before AI arrived on the scene and blessed us with ‘generic white guy with British accent reads script and appear on two dozen YouTube channels.

    Goes into detail regarding the slop channels and content farms – remember the old saying, “hate the game, not the player”. I’m not denying that those involved have an ethical and moral responsibility for what they put out but at the same time it is important to understand that people act based on the incentives that are in place. It is like getting angry at a landlord – a landlord has made an investment decision based on the tax incentives in place and of course that landlord is going to wish to protect their class interest by backing politicians who ensure their interests are protected.

    I am reminded of a video on YouTube from years ago that has been quoted many times over the internet: “Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think ‘oh, the lawnmower hates me’ — lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle.” (link).

    Regarding politics in New Zealand and the latest fiasco regarding the Ministry of Social Development (formally known as ‘Work and Income New Zealand’). To be honest I am not surprised about this given that these issues were bought to the attention of the mainstream by Sue Bradford over 30 years ago as she advocated on behalf of beneficiaries. When the news stories came out regarding the Ministry of Social Development (link) (link) (link) (link) I can’t say I was surprised given sort of thing is a regular occurance – it reminds me of the Yes Minister episode regarding ‘the policy of administration and the administration of policy’ where politicians play the game of blaming the ministry for the consequences of the policies the government of the day passes in parliament.

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  • Almost the end of the week.

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    Woke up this morning, pottered around the house and then went for my walk in the morning. The weather was great and the temperature is mild but too bad summer will come along and the temperature will go up – I guess during summer I’m going to have to get better organised and try to leave earlier for my walk to avoid the heat at around midday. I’m looking at looking a few more kgs which will make the heat in Australia a whole lot easier to handle but I’ll still be wearing trousers but I’ve got some liht weight ones that are comfortable to wear during the summer.

    Work was good today, I updated Edge and unfortunately it has the same issue as Chrome with Salesforce and Firefox has its own set of issues (rather than hanging it comes up with an error message) such as if you tell Firefox it is ok to use the built in microphone but for some reason it keeps forgetting when a call comes through (we use a Salesforce and Amazon Connect integration). Hopefully tomorrow there will be an update for Chrome that may fix it but I have a feeling it is something on the side of Salesforce that was triggered by version 153 because the issue never occured when I was running 152.

    I’m excited about the launch of version 27 – yes, I’ll be upgrading on day one to the new version and like always I’ll be doing a clean install so then if there are any issues it isn’t because of some pice of third party software that is causing problems. It reminds me many years ago of an third party extension that would break the upgrade resulting in Apple having to tweak their installer to pick up the third party piece of software and remove it as to avoid causing problems.

    I caught up on the recent announcement regarding the iPhone Duo – to be honest I’m not exactly wow’ed by the idea of a foldable phone except for when Microsoft had the Surface Duo which had two distinct displays rather than a folding one. The reason why I’m not that into them is because I probably won’t find much of a use for the bigger screen so it would end up being closed most of the time thus undermining the point of a foldable phone. With all that being said, I do like the Samsung clamshell flip phone style one which is quite popular based on people using them when I’m down at the mall.

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  • A rainy start to the day.

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    I woke up this morning before my alarm went off and it was kind of spitting down but I thought I may as well get the walk in before it really starts to rain. Funny enough, after coming back the heavens opened and it started pouring down and it has been that way for the last few hours – the temperature has also dropped so I’ve had to put my heater on to get the house back up to a comfortable temperature.

    Ubiquiti is has some big updates in the pipeline over the next few weeks – there is the UniFi OS 5.1.33 currently in the release candidate phase of testing . The really exciting updates are in the early release area with UniFi 6.0.7 which updates the Debian distribution that runs on Ubiquiti hardware to Debian Trixie which upgrades the Linux kernel from the 5.x series to the 6.12 LTS series. UniFi Network Application 10.6.106 has also been released to an early release along with the niFi Access Point & Wireless Bridge 8.8.7 that was released 6 days ago.

    The big announcement for version 27 of Apple’s platforms was announced – it’ll be released on 14 September US time which translates to 15 September NZ Time. All I have to say, I am so bloody happy that it has been released on that day because it is my day off where I can spend all day, doing a clean install on all my devices – maybe I’ll get lucky and see Ubiquiti push out an update as well. From all the reports the release is going to be rock solid from day one rather than one of those situations of “umm, I think I might way for the first x.1 release before I consider upgrading”.

    I logged into my work computer this morning and Salesforce is still freezing with Chrome 153. I did a completed clearing of all cookies and cache, shut down the laptop completely then cleared out all the vents for any dust then turned it back on again. Things were going well until the Salesforce page would freeze again but the funny thing is that the browser itself hadn’t frozen because I could click on other tabs and everything was runnign perfectly fine. I also have to note is that the issue doesn’t appear on any other website so I’m unsure as to the cause of it. I’ve setup Firefox and I’m using that now but I do hope that it is just a matter of waiting for the second update Google pushes out in the same week some time that will address the problem.

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Hello,

I’m Matisyahu

An open diary of my life as I navigate the world – the terrifying lows, the dizzying highs, the creamy middles.

“When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called ‘the People’s Stick’” – Mikhail Bakunin

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