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

  • A good first day at work.

    I woke up today at around 9am, I was deciding whether I should lay in bed for another half hour but I thought I may as well get out of bed because I’ll end up feeling more tired the more I hang around in bed. I got changed, warmed up with some stretching and then went for my morning walk – I was able to get down to 9 minute and 54 second for 1km meaning I was able to do 8km in under an 1 hour and 20 minutes which is around 6km per hour. Although my Apple Watch does keep track of the calories, the problem with the calories counter is that it isn’t always accurate but I tend to operator on 70 calories per kilometre so in a normal 8km walk I’m burning around 560 calories. The one thing I don’t do is include the calories burnt as part of my calories intake for the day because as I’ve noted in the past there isn’t a guarantee of always being able to get out for a walk especially during winter.

    The mobile phone carrier I’m with had a nationwide outage, nothing was updated on the outage page nor was it updated after the issue had been resolved. There appears to be a habit by businesses who think if they ignore a problem it’ll go away, if they hide the status of their service on their website then that ia good business practice because god forbid being transparent. As someone who works in a call centre, so many calls could be avoided if there was proper communication with the public which would avoid people from having to ring up to find out what is going on – whether it is an issue on their end or whether the organisation is having technical difficulties. I sometimes wonder why a business have a communications team given how often things are poorly communication or requiring those on the front line having to traverse through layers of bureaucracy just to get the information out there to customers. I’ve said it once and I’ll again – just because you ignore a problem doesn’t mean that it’ll go away.

    I’ve been having a look at the latest polls and it appears that there is potential for a centre left government but that is assuming the upswing in support for the Greens holds through to the election, The problem is at the moment is the fact that there are so many variables, there is the 60 day ceasefire where there is negotiations taking place but one thing to keep in mind is that even if an agreement is signed that agreement has to be submitted to congress, pass both houses and then signed by the president. There is also the uncertainty about whether Israel will abide by it given that if they do start attacking Iran or Lebanon that I don’t see the United States doing anything to bring Israel to heel meaning that the treaty maybe over as quickly as it was signed. Then there is the unclogging of the Strait of Hormuz which may take months or possibly years but that is assuming that in the meantime there isn’t a shift towards electric cars, hybrids and greater investment into public transportation so that there is greater resilience to future energy shocks and the industries that depend on that energy.

  • Back to work on Wednesday.

    Well, back to work on Wednesday after enjoying over a week off from work. I’ve got the alarm set for 9am and I’ll get up to go for a walk then when I come back home I’ll have my breakfast and a cup of coffee while cooling down then have a shower. The big question on my mind is whether I go into work or work from home – I’m leaning towards going into work because for the next three weeks there aren’t any bus replacements however in July there will be a bus replacement on Wednesday so I’ll work from home instead. Regarding the upcoming whether, for the next few days it is going to be fine so if I get up at 9am and head out for my walk at 9:30am then I can probably squeeze in a 10km walk or maybe more before work.

    Regarding what I did today, I had a lazy day at home then I headed down to the supermarket to pick up a few bits of food along with dinner – Tegel Louisiana Style Chicken Burgers, burger buns, coleslaw and some slices of cheese. It was a tasty dinner to have and we were able to catch up on the week – mum has been busy working and mum likes what I’ve done to the place which has made things a bit more organised. On the corner table I am looking at the possibility of a lamp so I can have some ambiance in the room but I want to make sure that when I do purchase one that it’ll fit the vibe of the place.

    Daily writing prompt
    What is something you wish you could tell your 20-year-old self?
    View all responses

    Don’t get hung up on where you are relative to where your friends are at their moment in life or where family members were at your age. There is also the temptation to look at other people and assume that based on their public persona that they appear to ‘have it all together’ when in many cases it can be like a duck floating on the water – calm above the surface but frantically paddling to try and keep up. It is a bit like Instagram and Facebook (along with other forms of social media) – you’re getting a curated experience, only the highlights akin to watching the highlights of a match and when you watch the actual match you realise that the match was pretty boring.

    Fediverse reactions

  • A good day today.

    Unfortunately it is still raining outside but I have to admit I love the pitter patter of rain on the roof – when I have difficulty getting to sleep at night I sometimes play rain sounds on my phone that allow me to drift off to sleep. There was a small lull in the weather so I went for a small walk around the block to get some fresh air and for dinner tonight I had some tacos with plenty of vegetables although I don’t like cheese that much so I left that off. It is funny how the last couple years I’ve been avoiding stuff with cheese on it or at lease excessive mounts of cheese – I’m all good for a sandwich with a slice of cheese but I avoid things like macaroni and cheese like the plague.

    On Tuesday I’m going to have dinner with mum coming over but I’m unsure what I’ll end up having – maybe a roast chicken? I’d love to have some vegetables and a tandoori flavoured roast chicken. I’ll also need to get organised to return to work on Wednesday and according to Metlink there aren’t any bus replacements for the Hutt Valley line until July then at which point I’ll just pop in on Thursday but work on Wednesday at home because taking the bus replacement is an inconvenience not to mention the fact that it takes longer to get home at the end of the shift. I’m back meal prepping again and I’ll use the insulated bag that I got from work to carry my lunch to work each day – got some soup I picked up from the supermarket which will be warming during the winter.

    The UniFi Dream Router 7 is going really well and as I’ve noted I’ve kept it on the default settings except I’ve changed the IP address range to 10.0.1.1 which is the same range that the old Apple Airport used to use. When it comes to the internet connection I’ve decided to use the DNS settings provided to my router by my ISP because in the past I had used a third party DNS resolution service (Cloudflare) because I was going through a patch of unreliable DNS resolution but that appears to be a non-issue these days.

    In the last few days I’ve cleaned up all the file tags on my FLAC backups of my CDs so now it only has the required tags needed. After cleaning up the tags I then recompressed all the music again using the new version of dbpoweramp and enabling a few additional features then after I backed the FLAC files along with the newly created AAC files to the iCloud Drive so then I have my backups uploaded to the cloud just in case something happens to my external SSD.

  • A rainy day to today.

    I woke up this morning, pottered around the house and I was going to head down to the store to pick up a few items but it started raining – I’m one of those people who would sooner avoid the weather and stay inside rather than ploughing along to do something that isn’t all that urgent. I’m sorting out my office and what I’m going to do is move the clothes horse out of the lounge room into the office and then move the shelf that is in the office into the lounge room – the big question is whether I put in on the right hand side of the television or whether I put it over where I’ve got the seat at the moment (below the Joan Miro print on the wall) then put that seat over on the right hand side of the television along with the wooden draws (or maybe just put the draws in the office since I have plenty of space to put it there).

    Edit: While thinking about it I ended up going with the plan of putting the bookshelf below the art print (I tried it on the right hand side of the television but it didn’t look balanced – probably due to the television cabinet being wide than the bookshelf which made it look ‘off’. I then moved the chair to the right hand side of the television along with the porcelain elephant from the left side of the television to the right hand side so it is now visible when you enter the room. Regarding the office, I’ve put the draws in there and there is also enough space to put the vacuum cleaner in there too so now it is no longer tucked away as you enter the hallway (not too sure whether it qualifies as a hall way since it is more like a landing pad than anything else). This is what it now looks like in the lounge room:

    Regarding the office, at the moment I have the two monitors I have been given to me by my work but I want to replace it with a single wide screen monitor that can also act as a USB-C hub which will make the desk a lot tidier. The one I’m looking at is the Samsung ViewFinity S65UC 34″ Ultrawide QHD 1000R Curved Business Monitor – it is around the same width as what I have at work and it also means I can then use the monitor as a hub (it includes USB ports, ethernet port etc) so then it is a matter of just attaching it up to the laptop and everything works smoothly (I’ll send the work one back).

    A bit of a surprise today was the release of uBlock Origin Lite 2026.614.1502 which was updated automatically through the Mac App Store (I’m now back to using Safari) and the experience keeps getting better and better. The changes in Safari 27 should also result in better for extensions that make use of JavaScript – AdGuard makes use of JavaScript quite extensively so I’m interested in seeing how well it performs when compared to AdGuard running on Safari 26.5. It’ll be interesting to see what the web benchmarks are like when comparing Safari 26.5 to Safari 27 along with the Web Platform Tests and the implementation along with the level of compliance the implementation is.

  • End of the week, start of a new week.

    Today was a good day, just spent the day hanging out around the house, tidying things up along such as cleaning my dehumidifier, folding the sheets I washed last night before I went off to bed and then after dinner I went for a 16km walk. After completing my work out I came home and had a shower – felt a bit sore – sore legs and sore feet but it felt good having had a good work out. Although it is meant to be the start of winter the temperature is around 13°C which makes me wonder whether we’ll have a mild winter or have I jinxed it by saying we’ll have a mild winter only for it to be the coldest winter on record.

    I haven’t decided what I’ll do on Monday but I think it’ll be a low key affair, maybe a walk down to the mall which will get my exercise in for the day, have a look around at the stores and then walk back afterwards. I am looking at a couple of new duvet covers as well as some sheets because I got a cheap one awhile ago but it has a low thread count, it is mainly polyester and I’m now pills all over it. If I am going to make what I have a whole lot better I may as well replace the whole lot – three sets of sheets and three duvet covers which will replace what I have at the moment because right now it is a bit of.a hodgepodge of Manchester that I’ve accumulated over the years.

  • A good day today.

    I have a nice sleep in today and woke up just before midday, I had a quiet day at home and then headed down to the supermarket to pick up an HDMI cable for my Blu-Ray player that I picked up. After arriving home I had some soup and fresh bread for dinner, watched a few YouTube videos and then went for a 16km walk after being lazy for around a week. It felt good getting out to have some exercise and I worked up a good sweat even with the cooler weather.

    I generally like watching ‘Washington Week’ over on YouTube because it tends to have pretty good guests on and the moderator does a good job keep the conversation flowing however the most receive episode really got under my skin with one of the contributors playing the game of false equivalence:

    The comparison between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders along with the usual nonsense of the ‘horse shoe theory’. It is the usual game that the liberal establishment or more correctly the ‘enlightened centrists’ like to play because they’ve convinced themselves that if you’re in the middle it some how makes you the ‘reasonable’, ‘sensible’ and ‘the adult in the room’. There is no comparison between Trump and Sanders – Trump is a reactionary and Sanders is in the same tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Trump’s politics are xenophobic and reactionary, Sanders is left wing internationalism and understands the importance of the institutions that were set up post-WWII to attempt to deal with conflicts without them descending into another war.

    I’m usually pretty happy to hear alternative points of view but when you play the game of false equivalency then any respect I may have had for you and your opinion instantly disappears out the window. The reality is that the left wing politics Bernie Sanders engages in is centre left – it doesn’t upend the capitalist system but attempts to smooth the rough edges, put some sensible regulation in place and ensure that those with market dominance don’t abuse that dominance in the market. In other words, he isn’t some sort of reincarnation of Vladimir Lenin but as noted previously he is in the same tradition as Franklin D. Roosevelt. If you’re scared of tepid social democracy or equate tepid social democracy to the train wreck that is taking place under Donald Trump then I really cannot take your opinions seriously.

    Daily writing prompt
    Do you think humans will ever colonize Mars? What would life there actually look like?
    View all responses

    I think that humans will eventually colonise Mars but I don’t think it’ll be in my life time barring some sort of massive leap forward in technology. To really make it work you’d need to build a space craft in space (which would never land but remain in space permanently) with enough capacity to store all the necessary food and water, a power source to provide additional power to the solar panels along with ensuring sufficient shielding from not only cosmic radiation but also micrometeorites.

    Once you get that sorted then you’ve got the matter of setting up a base on Mars which would involve creating an artificial magnetosphere (link) however the habitats would have to be inflatable along with small scale nuclear reactors for power along with solar as well. Then there is setting up hydroponic for food production while ensuring that you have enough long life food just in case there is a crop failure.

    Then there is the impact of micro gravity and low gravity – the length of time travelling to Mars, how do you deal with the long term impact of micro gravity, what is the impact on health? then there is going from a micro gravity to a low gravity environment such as Mars which has only 38% of Earth’s gravity – is that enough to avoid health related issues? will there be additional exercises and/or nutrition that will be required?

    Many things need to be addressed and I have a feeling that we’ll need to use the moon as a training ground because unlike the Moon, if something goes wrong on Mars you’re on your own. The benefit of starting off on the Moon is the closeness to earth incase something goes wrong along which allows trying things out, finding out what works the best before takin it from the Moon to Mars.

    Fediverse reactions

  • The week wrapped up well.

    I woke up today and headed down to the store to pick up the last few things I have been putting off but had on my list of things to do. All the old pots and pans I had I took down to the local Salvation Army because I’d sooner someone in need have them rather than them just sitting in a bag in my cupboard or being thrown out at the tip. After dropping it off at the Salvation Army I then headed down to Farmers that had a 55% off sale and I bought another pot because at the moment I just have the Dutch oven but I’ve bought another dutch oven but slightly smaller since it was cheaper than getting a pot so I’ll be using that in future to boil things that I cannot put in the microwave such as pasta. While I was down there I popped into Bed, Bath and Beyond to pick up a throw rug and an extra pillow for my seat which has made it very comfortable with the throw rug providing protection on the seat. I also bought a Blu-ray player so then I could play back the DVD collection I have although I’ll need to go for a walk tomorrow to purchase an HDMI cable since there wasn’t one included in the box.

    I mentioned how there is a big push by Apple towards making the default being on device LLMs and the exception being workloads that cannot be done locally to be done in the cloud. I was having at look at the Windows App SDK on GitHub and I’ve had a look at the latest experimental release for the 2.2.2 branch (link). What stood out to me was the feature “Language Model APIs on GPU [Experimental]” in the list of features added to the build. As Ed Zitron has pointed out, the much of the data centres that have been announced have either been cancelled, not started or severely scaled back as a result I can’t help but get the feeling that with Microsoft adding such functionality to the Windows App SDK that Microsoft are hedging their bets – that maybe the future is edge (running on the end users own computer) rather than it being cloud based except for those work loads that need to be run in the cloud. It makes me wonder whether we’ll see OpenAI offer scaled down versions of their LLMs and charge a subscription that will provided regular updates to their models that developers can download and use locally then jack up the price of cloud based models to cover the fulling cost of running it in the cloud.

    On a side note, there were some Wharfdale speakers I was going to purchase from JB Hi-Fi that looked like a great deal until I found out that it required the purchase of an amplifier thus making it a complete overkill for what I needed it for (the original plan was to get it, hook it up to a WiiM Mini Wireless WiFi + Bluetooth Audio Streamer then having wireless streaming from my computer, Apple TV 4K etc). What I’ve decided to do is instead what for the HomePod refresh to be announced (rumour has it that’ll be released this year along with an Apple TV 4K refresh). I’d be looking at getting two HomePod speakers so then I can have stereo sound at home then use Airplay 2 to stream my music so then I’ll have good sound regardless of the device I am using.

  • Heading off to sleep.

    I had a bit of a late night tonight but I’m going to head off to sleep. I gave the new seat a good test run and I have to say it is a huge improvement over my old chair. The old chair has been moved into my bedroom and the chair I had in my bedroom is now sitting in the lounge room (in the photo I had uploaded earlier, the chair is th one sitting under the outside chair cushions). The temperature is cold at the moment so I’ve turned my heater on to keep warm – hopefully this winter won’t be too cold.

  • The lounge is complete.

    The chair for my desk has arrived after ordering it in the early hours of Monday this week and it actually turned out to be smaller than expected which is a good thing. The website said it was 82cm wide, 82cm deep and the seat height is around 42cm high which left me concerned that maybe it would be too big for the place where I was going to put it (thus requiring me to move the furniture around to make it fit). I think the measurements they give on their website was the box itself because the seat height is around the same as my previous seat and the width and depth isn’t anywhere near around 82cm but I’m happy with the dimensions and it is very comfortable.

    I’ve finally got my lounge room looking like I want it to – natural colours, use of wool, cotton, wooden furniture which gives the space a cosy feel which will be great during the winter.

    As for dinner tonight, I’ll be popping down to the supermarket and I was hoping to have some Silverfern Farm lamb rumps along with a salad or maybe some roast vegetables. I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I get there – I guess the other option is to have some venison with plum sauce.

    On the matter of politics, I was watching the following video:

    And it reminds me of the same sort of logic that took place regarding how neoliberalism would result in world peace – the idea that if we created a world where we’re so intertwined, so interdependent that no one would be stupid enough to blow up the whole system that it would secure long term peace. The whole argument being derived from the idea of rational self interest or more correctly the assumption that prosperity being the motivating factor for leaders of individual countries. There is a small problem with that thesis, as we’ve seen that firstly not every nation is motivated by the same incentives and when you have a situation like the United States where a moron like Trump is voted in then the system that was dependent on rational self interest now has an irrational person in a position of leadership who upends the system.

    What amazes me though is this idea that the United Staes can be trusted given how Trump has made it clear that even countries that the United States has agreements with are simply being ignored. The United States has a free trade agreement with Australia but that didn’t stop Trump from imposing tariffs onto the Australian exports to the United States. If the president can just unilaterally decide to walk away from a treaty then what does it say about any of the other treaties that the United States have signed up to? why would anyone take seriously the idea of having an agreement with the United States when the current president or a future president can just walk away the moment it becomes politically inconvenient without the legislative body going through the process of debating and the repealing the legislation that enabled the treaty to be enforced.

    From the New Zealand perspective we (both National and Labour led governments) have attempted to get a free trade agreement with the United States without much success. When one considers how the United States have treated the Australia, given that there is a sign treaty, maybe this is the moment for both major parties in New Zealand to wake and stop wasting time believing that a free trade agreement is just around the corner. Let’s assume that through some divine intervention that there was a free trade agreement with the United states – how do we know it won’t be undone by the next president? let’s assume that the next president signs up for the CPTPP – again, what stops the president just deciding unilaterally to walk away from the agreement?

  • An enjoyable day at home.

    I had a great day to day, got a text message from the courier company with the tracking number and it appears that it had arrived in wellington so I had the expectation of delivery on Wednesday but it didn’t work out . I’ll be getting up early on Thursday because I want to catch them before they arrive. If all that goes well then I’m going to put on my sneakers and exercise gear to then go for a long walk – getting back into exercise after being a bit lazy for a week and a bit.

    There is some good news on the Webkit/Safari front with the focus of the next Safari release focusing on fixing up bugs, compatibility, compliance and under the hood optimisations (link) and along with that was the Safari Technology 245 release being made available (link). I’m looking forward to the release version 27 of Apple’s platforms because I have a feeling that one is going to have experience the changes first hand, that many of the improvements will require one to test it using websites one goes to rather than relying on what others have reported. I’ve been following the web platform test and the one thing to recognise that there is a big difference between implementing something and passing a test vs implementing it and it working in the real world. It is easy to charge ahead to implant something but if the implementation is broken hen it may as well not even exist. Something like over 500 bug fixes have ben made to Safari and some parts have been completely rewritten.

    There is the developer beta however the one thing to keep in mind is that at this stage there is still plenty of changes that take place not to mention debugging code is included which can reduce performance. One thing to remember that in the beta process that the major heavy lifting has been done and during the beta cycle it is about fixing up reported bugs, putting on the finishing touches, addressing developer feedback regarding new features etc. If version 26 is anything to go by then I wouldn’t be surprised if we end ups seeing it being released around mid to late September but that is very much dictated by the progress being made – generally iOS gets released before to line up with the launch of a new iPhone and possibly an early release of tvOS to coincide with the rumoured Apple TV refresh.

    Something I forgot to mention from the past blog I made regarding WWDC is how there is a big focus on optimisations. I guess that even if you’re not a Mac Neo user that you’ll get the benefit of Apple optimising their operating system for their new entry level operating system which will flow up to the higher specced devices. The following video gives a good overview on what one can look forward to: