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

  • End of the first week back at work.

    Had a great day today, finally caught up on some office work that thad been building up and hopefully that as long as the team on Monday and Tuesday keep on top of it then it should mean it doesn’t build up again. I ordered some shopping online from Woolworths because I wanted chicken burgers tonight for dinner but I lacked coleslaw and some sauces. The sauces I ended up getting were: Sidecar aioli garlic, Sidecar mayonnaise original and Sidecar mayonnaise smokey habanero. The Sidecar mayonnaise smokey habanero is what I put on my burgers and good lord it is so good – the spiciness, the smokiness coming through. I then paired it up with the spicy Tegal chicken burgers, Japanese coleslaw, pickled red onions and Swiss cheese – a meal fit for a king and a lot cheaper than if I bought it from a takeaway store.

    On Monday I’m going to head down to Bed, Bath and Beyond as well as check out a few other stores regarding sheets and duvet covers. I did buy some sheets a while ago but they were these cheap polyester sheets and the problem is with them is that they don’t ‘breath’ and become quit stuffy and uncomfortable particularly during summer. I’m going to have a look at getting some 100% cotton sheets with a high thread count – even though they cost a bit more than the cheaper low thread count mixed fibre blend, I find that they last a lot longer and you don’t get the sort of pilling that I’m currently getting with the cheap ones I bought (the ones I bought are less than 6 months old).

    Daily writing prompt
    Who are you most inspired by?
    View all responses

    I’m inspired by Henri Rousseau – a self taught painter who created his own style of art that people are only now are appreciating it for its uniqueness. Charles Mingus because of his music style that paid respect to the past, acknowledged the present and pushed boundaries in future directions to where music could go. Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson that developed C, UNIX and other key pieces of technology that even today form the foundation for so much of what we take advantage of – things we create today that we think will never be a major force in the world suddenly take on a level of importance that would have been difficult to predict (which reminds me of this comic (link)).

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  • A very productive day today.

    I got up this morning and it was raining so I did some free weights before work. It wasn’t too busy but there was a back log of office work that needed to be done with all the excitement about the Football World Cup. I love how it is now possible to work from home and being able to avoid the nasty weather which makes life a lot easier but even without going into the office we (my workmates and I) all keep in contact via Slack so one doesn’t feel isolated.

    I was watching a video on YouTube of the trams that used to operate in Wellington:

    And it reminds me of a conversation I had my grandma a few years ago about how the trams in Auckland were ripped up and how the council are now talking about putting down light rail. My grandma pointed out how silly it was to rip up the tram lines in the first place and now the rail lines are being put back down again. It appears that there is a habit in society of discarding something because it isn’t considered ‘modern’ or ‘the in thing’ only to find out years later that there was actually some wisdom behind having that there. I’m a firm believer in the idea of ‘Chesterton’s Fence’ – find out why it was there and is the reason for it being there and ask whether its usefulness still holds true today. I wish that humanity would learn from past mistakes but I guess humanity has a lot in common with the movie ‘Groundhog Day’.

    What I find rather funny is how the AI industry is playing on this nonsense of every new model being ‘so super dangerous’ is starting to backfire on them. Well, they thought it was a great marketing gimmick but it has backfired with the government now putting export restrictions on Anthropic models and I could imagine now Anthropic are probably wondering whether their whole marketing hype has actually backfired and maybe they should just be honest with the public about what the model its actually capable of doing. On a side note I always find it funny when I hear the Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei talk about how Mythos is super scary and very dangerous it is but the claims have all the credibility of a new chicken wing restaurant opening up in town and their shtick is “we have the hottest wings in town, they’re super dangerously spicy so we’ll get you to sign a waver so we don’t get sued”. The hype dies down after all the influencers upload their obnoxious TikTok videos only for the general public to realise that the chicken wings are tasty but they certainly don’t live up to the hype of being super dangerous.

  • Another good day.

    Woke up this morning and went for a walk but I decided to go for the walk a little later – left home at around 11am and go back in time to have a shower and get ready for work.. The one thing I found out is that tI thought two table spoons of chia seeds equalled 100gm (50gm per spoon) when in reality it is only 25gm (12.5gm per spoon). Not that it mattered a great deal when it came to calorie counting given that I calculated on a larger number of calories but in reality I was eating less than what I had calculated. when you do the numbers of the chia seed pudding with the Up and Go it works out to be around 330 calories which is a good breakfast to start the day.

    I was checking for updates over on Ubiquiti and have released UniFi OS 5.1.19 for my Dream Router and everything is going very well. On the UniFi Dashboard I am being shown the following message which disappeared for a while but suddenly appeared again:

    Spark appears to be testing ipv6 and I’m guessing they’re wanting to test the various modems they’ve handed out over the years that there aren’t any compatibility issues and if so whether a firmware update can be pushed out or if it is out of stock then maybe offering customers a free upgrade to a newer router. I generally hang out on Geekzone so I’m sure if there is going to be any announcement then I’ll see it pop up there but I guess if there is going to be a big change then the few Spark employees who hang out on Geekzone have to get the boss to sign of before they can disclose anything online regarding any thing happening in the future.

    I wanted to see how much Safari had progressed so I’ve installed Safari Technology Preview 246 which includes most if not all the improvements that now appear in Safari 27 beta on Apple’s next OS release. So far I’ve been giving it a try with all the website I visit and the performance is definitely noticeable on the more heavier web app websites or websites that use a decent amount of JavaScript. I’ve also noticed that resolving host names and loading websites feels a lot faster and when I ran the Speedometer3.1 benchmark on Safari 26.5 I got 46.4 and on Safari Technology Preview 246 I got 51.66. Then I ran JetStream3.0 benchmark on Safari 26.5 and I got 410.55 and on Safari Technology Preview 246 I got 438.42. There has been a big uplift in the speed of the WebAssembly implementation although I haven’t been able to find a benchmark specifically to stress test the JavaScript implementation.

  • A good day but a cold night.

    I got up today at 9:30am and went for a walk before work and came home to have a chia seed pudding (100g of chia seeds soaking in 250ml of ‘Up and Go’ protein drink) – decided to work from home. The day was pretty uneventful and when I clocked off from work tonight I was happy that I made the decision to go for a walk in the morning because the temperature outside at the moment is around 5°C and could drop even lower. Funny enough a couple of days ago I was thinking that we’ll end up having a mild winter based on the few days – got the heater running and keeping warm in bed.

    For dinner tonight I had some fish pieces but I’ve used the last bit of aioli but I guess it is good that I used it up because I hate the idea having to throw out food that is no longer edible. I’ve got some beer battered fish fillets that are a reasonable size and I like to have them with some steamed vegetables. The great thing with these fish fillets is that they’re actual real fish fillets rather than the sort of mashed up processed stuff that don’t even resemble anything fish like. Tomorrow I’ll go for a walk before work but I’ve decided to keep this blog post quick as I’m going to head off to sleep so I’m all rested for a fun day at work on Friday.

  • 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.

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  • 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.

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