Matisyahu's Blog

"When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'"

recent posts

  • And the vibes moved on.

    FInished the week and now I’m in bed for an early night sleep with the focus on waking up at 9:30 am – so I’ve gone from 11:30 am to 10:30 am and 9:30 am on Monday. Although I’ve set the alarm for 9:30 am I am tempted to just go for a straight 9:00am which gives me 1/2 hour to wake up and get out of bed then get changed to go for a brisk walk in the morning. The weather is looking a whole lot nicer so maybe we’re lucky enough to have gotten through the wet part of winter so then all we have to deal with is just the cold which I can easily deal with – a few extra layers of clothing and everything is all good.

    Regarding the walk tomorrow, I’m tempted to go for the walk down along the waterfront like a couple of weeks ago – get some fresh air and I think if I go down there earlier I’ll find that there won’t be as many people out. One thing I did enjoy on my last walk was being able to listen to podcasts because in the past I never really thought about the idea of listening to a podcast when doing a work out but I found it pretty relaxing – mixing up the monotony of listening to music with some podcasts for variety. I’m not going to push myself because I am getting back into regular excise – no use pushing oneself to the extreme and the find it is next to impossible to function for the rest of the day or getting up the next day to do some exercise.

    Does anyone remember after Trump had won a second term and there was this narrative in the media that there had been a ‘vibe shift’ or sometimes referred to a ‘cultural shift’ with centrists politicians insisting that the middle had moved to the right and now they have to move to where the new middle now resides. Then came the avalanche of businesses moving away from DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) by claiming once again there had been a cultural shift in the country away from such policies. Then there was the rise of ‘trad wife’ influencer that were once on the fringes were now having their moment in the spotlight – carefully curated content that was completely devoid of any practicality.

    As we get to the middle of Trump’s second term, his poll numbers are going from bad to worse, influencers who were cheerleading Trump have either turned on him or completely changing the subject in a hope their audience won’t remember their role in getting Trump elected. Then there are the trade wife influencers who are now doing the rounds – “oh who, me, na, I was never a trad wife…I don’t know who gave me that label but that isn’t something I call myself”. The whole ‘cultural vibe shift’ is now having another vibe shift as the Trump vibes have become toxic thus no longer a viable business model so they’re now all rebranding as something else.

    Social conservatives have become more visible especially of the Christian nationalist variety but sooner or later they’re going realise that there hasn’t been a ‘revival of traditional values’. What was sold in the form of ‘trad wide’ was off the back of an nostalgic aesthetic that attempted to cater for the anxieties of its audience by providing that felt reassuring, a return to stability, providing fulfillment etc. The problem with making a decision based on vibes and aesthetic is that eventually the whole thing comes crashing down when reality rears its ugly head and then those involved quickly realise how utterly unfulfilling it is trying to live up to an unrealistic archetype that isn’t grounded in reality.

  • One more day to go.

    I woke up this morning at 11:30 am after a great night sleep, got out of bed, had a cup of coffee and relaxed on the patio out the back in the sun – it was a little on the cool side but the sun made the experience enjoyable. I’ve set the alarm for Sunday to be 10:30 am and then on Monday I’ll set it for 9:30 am – I wanted to gradually get used to going to bed at an earlier time so then I can get back into a good habit.

    I’ve been watching the politics in the United States and it is always painful to hear talking heads in the United States media label something that is a main stream position in every other country as being ‘far left’. This whole term ‘far left’ is becoming yet another talking point along side ‘woke’, ‘DEI’ and ‘CRT’ where those using such terms can’t even clearly define the term means that they’re throwing around and yet their ignorance is paraded as some sort of fount of wisdom. I wouldn’t mind it so much if this ignorance was being spewed by randos on the internet with a platform and far too much time on their hands but I would have thought that media outlets would at least have some standards particularly when their media brand is going to be associated with such half baked commentary.

    With that being said there is a glimmer of hope that that is the fact that my generation and younger make greater use of the internet to seek out news. Previous generations had the excuse that the only news they had access was either from their local newspaper with maybe articles syndicated from one of the bigger newspapers (or wire service) or when it came to television you were pretty much at the mercy of one of the big television stations. Fast forward to today and it is now possible to jump onto YouTube and watch news from all around the world, from Bloomberg to BBC, from DW English to France 24, from ABC in Australia to Al Jazeera English service. Long story short, the gatekeepers of news no longer exist and if you want to seek out news from different points of view then you’re able to find that online from reputable sources.

    This is why the complaints from people displaying ‘big boomer energy’ when it comes to TikTok makes me laugh – “the problem with kids these days is that they’re on their phones with their TikToks not getting the truth” . We’ve had Benjamin Netanyahu complain incessantly that the carefully curated narrative is slowly losing its impact on this and the next generation (both Jews and Gentiles alike) as support for Israel falls through the floor even as his right wing allies try to use botnets to shape the narrative both with Israel and outside of the country (link) (link). Then there is the persistent narrative by talking heads in the media, be it on the centre or on the right, calling anything and everything they dislike as being communist, socialist or far left while ignoring that their red scare tactics only work on the generation who still needs their children or grandchildren to come over and show how a PDF document can be resized or rotated or trying to get their printer to work.

    Getting back to closer to home. It is always interesting to see what the fall out is from what Winston Peters said in parliament to the Green MP Lawrence Xu-Nan. The reason why it is interesting to see is because of the recent poll that was done where 54% of New Zealanders want Chris Luxon to sack Winston Peters (link). The first problem is that such a percentage, although a majority, it isn’t really a large majority and the second problem is that the recent polling as of a day or two ago (two weeks after what took place in parliament) demonstrated that although New Zealanders weren’t happy with Winston Peters the voters didn’t consider it a ‘deal breaker’ (link) which is why Chris Luxon is happy to keep him on as foreign minister. This is the reason why it is important to check what the polling is after the event – people can demonstrate that they’re unhappy with something but that doesn’t necessarily translate to “so therefore I can going to vote for a party on the left”. What we’re seeing is the right hold onto their majority but it is now a matter of shuffling the seats around between the three parties over who ends up getting the bigger say if that majority in the polls holds to election day.

  • A busy day today.

    I woke up this morning after having a wonderful good night sleep and the weather was looking good – I hope that we don’t have too many of these sudden cold snaps but I’m sure once we get through the winter and summer rolls around I’ll be complaining about the heat of summer. I’m gradually working through the food I’ve got in my fridge particularly when it comes to the sauces that I have which I haven’t used in a long time. In terms of the stuff I’ve got in my cupboard, the canned food I’m not too worried about – got plenty of time to use that in and the food I’ve built up in my freezer is perfectly fine for quite some time. I like to make sure that I’m rotating through my food to avoid having something I’ve lost track of, the quality of it drops to the point that it is inedible thus requiring me to throw it out.

    I checked to see if there were any updates for Chrome because sometimes Google pushes out two updates in a week. The version number was bumped from 151.0.7922.76 to 151.0.7922.109 with 41 security fixes being made available (link) with quite a few either rated critical or high. I got that installed, cleared the cookies and cache, everything working as it should with no regressions. I checked out to find whether the parcel from the United States is on its way – the details of the package has been sent to New Zealand which should allow it to continue through customs without any delays.

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s a thing you wish schools actually taught?
    View all responses

    Not so much being taught at school given that these subjects are taught at school but rather making them compulsory – history, economics and life skills classes. History is important because it allows you to understand why things are they way they are and what lessons learned because of past mistakes to explain why as a society we do things a certain way. Economics is important because it enables you to understand how the economy operates but also undermines the commonly held belief that a government’s budget is like the family budget. The last one being life skills classes – all to often I see people who don’t understand how the government works, how credit cards work, how to pay bills etc. because at the end of the day you only know what you know – if your parents don’t have those skills then how are they going to teach them to you?

    Fediverse reactions

  • A good day today.

    I woke up and went through my usual routine after getting up then started working. For lunch today I decided to give the Naked Locals Butter Chickpea Curry at try and it wasn’t too bad although I did add some chilli flakes to add a bit of heat to it. The chickpeas added 12g of fibre to the meal and along with the protein made me feel full until after work I heated up some fish in the oven and had that for dinner. I’ve got the two packets that I used to make the chilli this week and I’ll probably do it again on Monday but I’ll need to remember to take the mince out of the freezer on Sunday so then by the time Monday comes around it’ll be all defrosted. One thing I have learned from last time is to not leave the mince too long in the freezer because I did that a while ago and the mince just came out all dry and horrible – lesson learned as they say.

    I finally did it and installed Safari Technology Preview 249 and everything is working well but I’m still finding that the issue I’m having with YouShop hasn’t been fixed. I have reported the issue to Apple but they haven’t gotten around to fixing it nor have they tried to get in contact with me to work through the issue. What I did try after installing it was enabling developer mode and then changing the user agent because I found many years ago that websites would work perfectly fine if you changed the user agent to Chrome. A good example of that was way back when Microsoft launched their Edge browser (the non-Chromium one) there would be certain websites that would break but the moment you changed the user agent to Chrome then they would magically start working – in other words the browser had the ability render the webpage properly but the website was badly designed so it served up crappy web pages when it couldn’t understand what browser was being used.

    I finally ordered the two pairs of pants and two tops that I talked about last week and they’ll probably arrive on Monday. The shipment from YouShop in the United States left the warehouse on 5 August and it normally take 7-9 days to arrive in New Zealand. There are some trousers I’ve got in my wardrobe that I’m 95% sure that I’ll donate – I’ve never worn them and I don’t think I will given that they’re really not my style of trousers (I only got them because they were on special at one of those ‘one day. sales’ websites many years ago). The good thing about YouShop is that you pay any of the required GST so when it is sent there is no delays in delivering it.

    On 12 August my work place opens up the abiliy to put through Christmas leave – I’m looking at having the 21-29 December off but I’ll be back for New Years where I’ll get time and a half plus a day in lieu. I’m looking forward to travelling to Australia in November and Google is having an announcement on 12 August so I’ll get to see what the release (what ever products will be available in Australia but not in New Zealand) and by the time I go over we’ll already have version 27 of Apple’s paltform release so we’ll see how things are working given that by the time I go overseas it’ll probablt be 27.1 released by then. I’ll take my laptop over so then I can use the free internet at the motel or hotel I am staying at.

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
    View all responses

    When you’re having a debate, argument or discussion and you realise you’re wrong then don’t stubbornly ignore reality and continue debating – accept accept that you’re wrong and move along. Some people think that acknowledging you’re wrong some how gives power to the other person but I’d argue that not acknowledging you’re wrong when you clearly are gives them more power because you’re essentially saying that your ego is more important than getting to the truth. The other benefit of accepting when you’re wrong is that it disarms the other person – the other person is expecting you to fight to the bitter end only to be confronted by someone saying, “you know what mate, you’re right…” and suddenly the other person is left speechless because they probably had planned a whole monologue and now, well, it’s not longer useful.

    Fediverse reactions

  • Another chilly day.

    Yes, another chilly day in Wellington so I was happy to be working from home today with the heater going. I stopped tryign to do the impossible and took the clothes off the line and hung them inside so that they had chance of actually drying given that for the rest of the week the weather is going to be cold and miserable. I also went for a small walk after work for no other reason than to get some fresh air but it is really cold with the Metservice putting the temperature at 2°C (I use the Metservice because the weather from the Apple widget is normally off by 2-5°C in many cases) but it feels closer to 0°C.

    I was having a look around at the internet form information regarding the under the hood changes that will be coming in Android 17 because I hadn’t read much other than following what had been reported about the higher layers of Android 17. I tripped over an article I found when having a look on Google (link) and it appears that there is an industry wide push about getting the basics nailed down – Apple making their announcement regarding version 27 being able delivering Apple Intelligence along with optimisations, bug fixes and under the hood improvements in general. Microsoft is taking the same path with the work being done on their announced Windows 11 K2 – an on going project to address the laundry list of issues that Windows users have been talking about for quite some time.

    I think that what we’re seeing is the gradual winding down of the AI hype train – LLMs aren’t going to bring about AGI, that LLMs are a useful technology but the businesses that have been build on providing LLMs as a cloud service certainly aren’t worth $1 trillion or more. Microsoft is working on their own models, Microsoft no longer uses Claude Code internally in favour of their own tools and I wouldn’t be surprised that the capacity sold OpenAI and Anthropic will eventually instead be used to power Microsoft’s own AI models – same can be said for Google as well. Long story short, the technology will remain but many are realising that the promises were always overblown and many users would prefer that Microsoft, Apple and Google get back to getting their software to work reliably rather than trying to ram Ai into every nook and cranny.

    uBlock Origin Lite 2026.804.1652 has been released – it is available for Microsoft Edge and Safari however it is waiting for approval at the Chrome extension store. Nothing major in the way of features other than the usual filters being updated. Something that will be interesting is the development of filtering support for request and response headers – there is mention of it being a summer of code project for Chrome so it’ll be interesting to see how quickly it is adopted by content blockers along with support for such a DNR feature on Firefox and Safari.

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s something you used to worry about but don’t anymore?
    View all responses

    I used to worry about fitting in and looking the part but eventually half way through high school I just stopped caring because I quickly realised that it is all meaningless – that what I thought was ‘cool’ was just to happened to be cool based on was present in popular media or what I thought was important wasn’t actually that important once your expand your horizon beyond what is happening at school. I guess as you get older you learn how to triage what is and isn’t important.

    Fediverse reactions

  • Cold and crazy weather.

    I woke up today and the weather was crazy – raining then to hail only to suddenly have some sunshine then back to more rail and hail. At the moment where I am the temperature is 5°C but it feels like 0°C with the possibility of getting even colder with some part of the Wellington region reporting to have received snow today. Today I stayed at home and made a chilli where I cooked some mince then added these two packets:

    The great thing with these two packets is that it has all the seasoning, vegetables and beans – it works well to have those who packets and combine it together with 500g of mince then a tin of cherry tomatoes along with salt, pepper and chilli flakes on the meat as it is cooked (I used some paper towels to dab up the excess fat and water that comes out of the mince as it is being cooked). The other benefit is that it has a good amount of fibre (I’ve hit 40g for today) – with all the obsession by many abour protein I think it is important that people remember to increase their daily fibre intake where possible. This is what it ended up looking like after cooking it:

    I had that with some corn chips and sour cream on top – it was a tasty dinner with a whole lot of flavour. The cast iron pot that I cook it in is great – it conducts the heat perfectly and even with the lid on the heat is retained for a good amount of time afterwards. Getting good pots, pants and other utensils for the kitchen is the best investment you can make because it makes cooking so much easier.

    On the technology front, I gave AdGuard for Safari a try with the 14 day free trial and I did find that the the performance dropped heavily when I enabled the advanced settings – the resolving of the website and downloading of it was horrible. I disabled the advanced settings but enabled all the other filters and tried it again and it loaded perfectly. I tried AdGuard on Chrome and it is also fairly reliable and the website doesn’t hang like it did on previous releases. I’m still going to stick to usign uBlock Origin Lite because it dos a better job ensuring that the websites I use aren’t detecting that I’m using a content blocker.

    Ubiquiti has released UniFi OS 5.1.28 for the Dream Router with the release notes being pretty brief because it is most likely focus on fixing some bugs found on previous releases rather than adding new features. In the early access channel Ubiquiti made available UniFi Network Application 10.6.88 which includes quite a few changes. It is the first release of th 10.6.x series so it maybe quite a while before a stable version is released. Safari Technology Preview 249 was released recently (link) and the recent Web Platform Test it has Safari sitting at 92.6% which is an improvement from 87.9% which was the score for Safari Technology Preview 248.

  • Finally all sorted.

    I finally got it all sorted in the end today – the duvet cover I cleaned last night was all dried by the afternoon so I folded it up and sent it away. The clothes horse that was damaged I decided to throw it out and lucky enough a friend of mine had one of those big hoppers and I also used that to get rid of a broken fan that I no longer used. The clothes rack that had a broken wheel is functionally ok so I removed the other wheels and now if I want to move it I’ll just pick it up and move it but other than that it works perfectly fine for when I want to hang up shirts etc. to dry.

    Mum came over and we had dinner – she bought a casserole along with some potatoes to then we can have baked potatoes along with peas (I put some mint sauce over the peas to give them some extra flavour). After dinner I headed down to the supermarket – I didn’t have a very shop but there were a few items I had to pick up such as a mop bucket, some floor cleaning chemicals, toilet paper, a few bottles of soft drink plus a few other items. There is quite a bit of rain scheduled for the next 7 days so I might just work at home as to avoid the bad weather.

    Regarding the shed, because the fence is leaning on the shed it pushed the shed and made it a bit wonky so I sorted that out so now it is back to where it should be. It is looking a lot better but I still think that long term I need a new fence along with a new shed that had a proper floor and hooked up to the power so then I can move the freezer out there and enough room to have a clothes rack so I can dry clothes without having to worry about putting a dehumidifier on inside the house. That is more of a long term project but if I am going to do it I’ll want to make sure I do it well so then it stays up for a long time.

    I’ve ben following the Chrome Platform Status (link) page and it appears that Google has pushed the migration for IndexedDB to using the Sqlite backend out to version 154 where as before it had been scheduled for version 152. Given that a big migration it is I wasn’t surprised particularly the number of sites that are probably built based around the assumption of IndexedDB acting a certain way. I guess we’ll see what happens with release of Chrome 154 and what benefits it’ll bring. When I was looking up details regarding IndexedDB I was surprised just how many websites make use of it – the unsung hero working behind the scenes making everything work as it should.

    Ubiquiti has released to the early access channel UniFi OS 5.1.28 for Dream Routers, it’ll be interesting to see whether it makes its way to be a release candidate or whether there is still more work to be done. There is also talk about Microsoft working on replacing Windows UI components with WinUI 3 which is based on XAML. I’d like to believe that Microsoft is putting in a genuine effort improve Windows but having been disappointed on a regular basis when it comes to Microsoft’s promises I can’t help but get the feeling that I’ll believe it when I see it.

  • A relaxing weekend.

    I got up this morning at around 10:00 am and decided to head down the road to buy two pillows for the duvet cover pillow cases. After I came back home, I took the washing off the line that I put out last night and then after getting that sorted I made my bed and iit now looks like this:

    The previous duvet covers were 16 years old and faded so I decided that they needed to be replaced. They’re functional but I’d like something nicer so I’ve washed them and have donated them to the local charity store. I’m still making a decision regarding getting a rug to put in my bedroom and the one I’ve had a look at is one that is 3.5 metres by 2.5 metres (or maybe 3 metres by 2 metres) which would pretty much cover 90% of the floor in my bedroom – add a splash of colour when compared to the boring brown carpet that I’ve currently got now or what I could do is get the really big rug and put it in the lounge room then put the one in the lounge room in one of the bedrooms.

    While I was down the road I stopped in at the local Spark store to see the new Samsung Fold devices that were on display and the one that captured my attention is the Galaxy Z Fold8 – the passport style one. I love the design because it reminds me very much of the Microsoft Duo. I preferred the Microsoft Duo over the Galaxy Z Fold8 because rather than it having a foldable screen it was two distinct screens like how one would have with a multi-monitor setup.

  • End of the week, start of the weekend.

    Finished another week and looking forward to the weekend. I got around to washing the duvet covers that arrived and aired the duvet on the line along with airing out my bedroom – closed the door to my bedroom and then opened the widow to get some fresh air. After all that was done I made my bed and it is looking a lot nicer than it did before.

    On Monday I’ll be heading down the road to pick up two more pillows so that it completes my bed – I’ll walk down the road so then I can get some exercise in while also doing some errands. Funny enough when I uploaded the above photo it didn’t get stuck on the ‘uploading’ dialogue even after it had funny uploaded – did the powers that be at the WordPress HQ fixed the issue? I guess god moves in mysterious ways.

    Anyway, after getting all that soted I put together all the old sheets and duvet covers that I had and took them down to the donation bin that charities run. I’ve got a pair of trousers that I bought many years ago and I think that even if I do lose some more weight I don’t think I’ll ever fit them – I have thicc thighs and unfortunately the trousers are designed for those who have twiggy leagues. I guess he thicc thighs probably the result of the fat that I have short legs and a long torso but there is the benefit that I can bend over and not only touch my toes but my hands are flat on the foor – even at my age I have maintained my flexibility.

    Daily writing prompt
    What is your favorite quote?
    View all responses

    “Everything in moderation, including moderation” – Oscar Wilde

    Fediverse reactions

  • Almost the end of the week.

    One more day to go and I’m looking forward to the weekend. I was surprised today that the Ikea order arrived on a Saturday but it allowed me to unpack it all and wash the duvet covers along with the pillow cases. I’ve got the duvet covers outside drying and I’d say that by tomorrow they’ll be all dry and ready to take in and as for the pillow cases, I’ve hung them up inside and they’ve pretty much dried by now with a little help from the dehumidifier. On Monday I’m going to change the sheets on my bed, air the duvet and wash the duvet cover and the make the bed using the new king sized duvet and duvet cover.

    Another interesting thing happened today which was an email from the NZ Post YouShop to advise me that the items I had ordered form the Peanuts store had arrived at the depot. With YouShop you have to declare the value of the items along with the cost of postage and packaging and then you pay for the postage and packaging to New Zealand along with any GST that is owed on it. For me, I cannot buy the items in New Zealand so it isn’t really a situation of buying it from overseas because it is cheaper but rather because it is the only option available to me. It’ll take somewhere between 7-9 days to arrive in New Zealand so it may arrive maybe not next week but the week after. I’ve got another order on its way so it’ll be interesting to see when that arrives but I’m in no great hurry.