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 relaxing day at home.

    I woke up early today to the chime of a message being sent to say that the food I ordered was on its way. When it arrived I put it all away and then got to cooking up the mince – it had been in the freezer for quite some time, I cooked it up and it was truly awful. I’m unsure what may have happened but I’m going to remember next time not to freeze the mince for longer than a few months before the mince I had was all grey and dry – even cooking it with a decent amount of canned tomatoes didn’t fix it up. Unfortunately it was a bit of a waste of food but I had a plan (b) that I could turn to so I guess it wasn’t that bad after all but I guess it is a case of ‘you live and you learn’.

    I checked for updates for my software and uBlock Origin Lite 2026.322.1735 was released today. I wasn’t expecting an update so soon after the beta release but there are two notable updates for Safari – I quickly updated, cleared the cache, and set it up cleanly and I haven’t noticed any regressions so far. The update has ben made available on the Apple App Store (both iOS and macOS) and the Microsoft Edge store but it hasn’t arrived yet in the Google Chrome store yet – that may take 24-48 hours. On Tuesday we may see the 26.4 update (which would be Monday in the United States) but it could be possible that they’ll release it on Wednesday (which would be Tuesday in the United States).

    On a good side I ordered two CDs on Discogs: Grady Tate Movin’ Day and Grady Tate After The Long Drive Home which are getting shipped from Japan. The Arthur Adams CDs arrived and I ripped them to FLAC, backed them up to the cloud and then I encoded the FLAC to AAC for playback on my iPhone along with playing on my other devices. I’m getting back into listening to music and I’m tempted to buy a DVD player so that I can build up my DVD collection once again. At the rate things are going I may need to buy myself another bookshelf or do some rearranging of furniture around the home – I need some more space.

    Winter is coming in the next few months so one of the things I want to do is to setup a curtain on the side door where I can feel the heat escaping. I’m tempted to get some sort of ready made curtain that I purchase ‘off the rack’ but I’ll need to get a tape measure so then when I do pop into a place that sells them that I get the correct sized ones. In the area I have a wicker wood chest for my shoes but what I really would like to get is a proper shoe rack/cabinet – the one at Kmart looks good enough and the colour fits in with the other furniture (I’m avoiding the whole white furniture look because it would look out of place in my house).

  • I’m sorry, I don’t believe they’ve changed.

    I finished watching the following video – I can’t help but get the feeling that a lot of FAFO content is hopium for non-MAGA to believe that there will be this giant ‘ah-ha moment’ where those who voted for MAGA will realise how wrong they were and will become Democrats.

    I’m sorry but I don’t believe that these people will ever change given that their political world view is based on vibes not a robust understanding of reality. The people complaining how about Trump were the same people who, during George W Bush, would wear 10 gallon hats, cowboy boots, claim that ‘these colours don’t run’, would obnoxious talk about buying their ‘freedom fries’ and shout “freedom ain’t free!” along with “support our troops” with the icing on the cake being “we don’t cut and run”. Funny how 8 years later the economy crashed, the United States were stuck in two quagmires and these same people claimed that they were always against it or tried to excuse their support by claiming that they were lied into the war (even though there were millions of people in the US and around the world with the same evidence saw that it was a lie).

    The problem is that there is a sizeable section of any population whose understanding of politics is akin to supporting their local football team because they like they name, the cool jersey design, the prevalence of its profile in the community they live etc. The net result is that you have people who vote based on the vibes of a campaign – not an understanding of the policy platform but rather than vibes of the campaign and whether they resonate with those vibes. The net result? people who voted for George W Bush who then became involved with the Tea Party then jumped on board the Trump train aka MAGA – all contradictory movements and you’d be hard pressed to get many of them to explain their position regarding politics based on who they voted for.

    Getting back to the original point, long story short, you cannot reason someone out of something that they never reasoned themselves into. As so long as there are people who attach themselves to a political movement based on emotions then the idea that such individuals will suddenly change their world view is simply foolish. MAGA voters were warmed exactly what would happen, they ignored the warning and are only now caring because negative things are occurring to them but truth be told if those bad things were happening to other people but not themselves then they wouldn’t care – it’s all about the vibes until they’re negatively impacted. Time will pass and there will be another Trump, they’ll fall back in line and vote for Republican – nothing learnt, no evolution of ones political world view, just going through the motions.

  • Start of the weekend.

    I worked an extra hour on Saturday which meant i could finish and hour early on Sunday night with tbe benefit being that I could catch a bus to the supermarket to pick up some chicken nibbles and salad for dinner. Once I arrived home I jumped online to order for the next couple of weeks now that I worked through the stock I had along with taking the mince out of the freezer to defrost for dinner on Monday. When cooking chilli I tend to cook a large batch of it then break it into meal sized portions that I can use for later – makes life easier to have those meals ready to defrost and reheat rather than cooking them in smaller batches. The order I placed with Woolworths will get delivered around midday which will be enough food for 3-4 weeks but occasionally I’ll need to top up with the occasional trip into town.

    On Monday I’ll go for a walk, head down to the mall, look around at the stores and get some fresh air – it is easy to become a bit of a recluse so I try to get out of the home on my days off. I went for a walk this morning on Sunday which was a nice refreshing day to start the day with the sun out along with the shade provided along the walking path and there were plenty of people out doing the same thing. It is something that I want to keel up long term because although I’m inclined to not wanting to do it I also know that after having a walk I feel a whole lot better and more energy for the rest of the day vs getting up out of bed and hanging around the house watching YouTube videos before I have to log into the laptop for a day of work.

    I’ll be having a look at Google Workspace and have some experimenting around with the service although the coming week we’ll see 26.4 to be released, maybe uBlock Origin Lite stable version will be made available. When it comes to Ubiquit, the stable version of UniFi Gateways 5.0.16 hasn’t been released and UniFi Access Point (all U7 and E7 models) 8.5.18 has been made available on the early acccess channel – will be interesting to see when it’ll be released because there have been reports of improvements to the MLO implementation – I’m unsure whether MLO has come out of EA but then again most of the MLO implementations tend to be pretty flakey so I not surprised that Ubiquiti is pretty conservative in terms of no over promising.

  • The end of the week is near.

    Woke up this morning, went for a small walk before work and then caught up on the news before starting the shift. Tonight i worked an extra hour but on Sunday I’ll finish an hour early which will make the day go a whole lot quicker – I might even have enough time to jump on the bus down to the supermarket to pick up a few bits and pieces before the delivery arrives on Monday for the weekly shop I’ll place online once I come back from the store.- at this point all I feel like is some soup and fresh fresh for dinner on a Sunday night.

    uBlock Origin Lite 2026.320.1943-beta has been released – no major changes other than filter improvements although there appears to be some improvements in the area of popup blocking but I haven’t had a major in depth search around in the github source code to see what other changes are in store for the final release. I’m finding that uBlock Origin Lite works a whole lot better with Chrome than Safari and I think that has to do with how Apple implements the declarative net request API on top of their existing native content blocking API rather than implementing the declarative net request API natively as in the case of Chrome.

  • Two days to go.

    Work today was good, I decided to have a day of from exercise to allow my knee to recover from my fall and at this point I’m all good to getting up tomorrow at 11am for an 8km walk before work (maybe a little longer if I am making good progress). The day wasn’t too bad although there were a couple of special customers who can’t seem to grapple with the idea that laws are passed by the government and we (the industry being regulated) don’t get to pick which laws we wish to follow and which laws we find inconvenient. I really have to wonder whether there are a large number of simple minded people out there who don’t understand how the world actually operates – they’ve convinced themselves that the world is setup to annoying them rather than the fact that the we live in a society of rules.

    I’m gradually working through Fallout Season 2 episode 3 but I’d like to get it finished off by next week so then I’m all ready for some new releases that will be made available. On Saturday or Sunday night I’ll do some grocery shopping online to pick up some essentials although I have a voucher from work that I need to use up – I may hold onto it until the middle of April when mum has come back from her holiday around New Zealand to help pick up the extra bit of food from the supermarket so I can stock up the freezer before winter.

    Saturday will be when Microsoft will release an Edge update. I’ve also been following Ubiquiti and it appears that we maybe a while away before seeing an update for the non-Cloud gateways to receive an update. I’m always cautious about reading people’s horror stories given how many times I have seen people claim to have issues only to then see them later back peddle and admit that they had screwed something up by changing something in an undocumented way which caused a cascading set of issues.

  • You win some, you lose some.

    Well, I got up in the morning at 10am then headed out for an 8km walk, came back home, had a shower, got changed then headed out to work – things were going great until I tripped over an uneven surface when walking to the train station and landed on my hands resulting in some nasty cuts on my hands. I got back up, lucky that I had some tissues in my pocket, I got to work and was able to clean myself up and start work. I have a sore knee and it makes walking a little difficult so I’ll just take the next couple of days to recover by doing some free weights but as long as I stick with my meal plan I should be all good.

    I thought to myself that “oh great, another one of these days when everything bad all comes at once” but I actually things started to improve when my doctor came back to me with the blood and test results. The HbA1c came back as stable at 37 and the urine testing came back that my kidneys were doing what they were meant to do – all the results are back within the healthy range which is a good sign that few years I was over weight hasn’t had an a permanent impact on my health so now it is just a matter of keeping on track with a healthy lifestyle and keeping tracking of those numbers so that there are issues that pop up that they can be addressed with lifestyle changes and/or medication if need be.

    I’lll be working from home on Friday, Saturday and Sunday but I’m hoping that by Saturday I’ll be able to get in some light exercise but I’ll take it easy. I’m looking forward to next week when Apple is scheduled to release 26.4 of their platforms to the public and I’ll be able to see how much Safari has been improved when compared to 26.3. On a side note, I mentioned that I checked out on macOS 26.4 that there were some frameworks that were modified and it appears that the update released recently was fixing a security issue in Webkit which lines up with the frameworks that were modified.

  • Off to work.

    Woke up before my alarm went off this morning, went for a 5.8km walk, showered and I’m relaxing before leaving home to go to work. I haven’t got the test results back but I’m hoping that if it is below 40 then I’ll be happy although I have a bit of work to do because my goal is to get my HbA1c down to the low 30s which will stabilise things over the long term. I think having a good routine in the morning will also help with a morning walk to get things moving.

    Google has released a Chrome update and I got it installed, it was a pretty big jump from 146.0.7680.80 to 146.0.7680.154 – I’ll check out later on today what the changes were. Apple also released a 26.4 release candidate for their platforms with speculation that a final release will appear around this time next week.

  • One day down, four more to go.

    I woke up this morning and my foot was feeling a bit better – I think what I need is some heel balm because the cracks in my heel can be painful at times. This morning I decided to work from home so I went for an 11.6km walk, came home, freshened up and then gently got into the rythm of work. At 10pm I finished work and then went for another 11.6km walk before freshening up again and then jumping into bed. I think what I’m going to do is stick to a 10am start everyday so then I get up at a consistent time rather than on some days I get up at 11am then on other days I get up at 10am with the benefit that my body will get used to that routine.

    I checked for updates this morning and Google didn’t release an update for Chrome – I’m unsure whether that is an indication that the extra update release last week covers this week or whether it is just a matter of requiring an extra day of testing before making the update available. There was a minor update that was made available for macOS and iOS today in the form of 26.3.1 (a) (25D771280a) which has been labelled as a ‘background security improvement’ but little in the way of details has been disclosed so I guess we’ll need to play the waiting game for someone in the tech enthusiast community to find clues in the files that were changed during the update to give an insight regarding what fixed. I’ve had a quick look myself and I don’t see any extensions updated however I have seen a few frameworks that have been updated with the date modified being 03/03/26 which makes me wonder whether the update has been in the works for the last couple of weeks,

    I’m going to get up early on Thursday but I’m tempted to head into the office if no other purpose to at least make an appearance and because they don’t have the bus replacement I’ll get home at a decent time so I can go for a walk before heading off to bed for the night. I want to squeeze in as much exercise as I can before we get into winter in the next few months and the weather can get unpredictable although the walk in the morning should mean if it does get bad at the end of my shift I can still take the win of having gotten some exercise in for the day.

  • Returning to work.

    Getting ready to go back to working, did some washing however I couldn’t go for a walk today because I have sore feed – there is a crack at at the back of my heel and it hurts when walking on it, the skin is dry and cracking so I wonder if that has something to do with it. I’ve applied some skin moisturiser and one of those band-aid ‘second skin’ to it but I’m unsure whether it just needs some rest over night so that I can go for a walk tomorrow before work – I’ll try to at least get a small one in so then I’ve got some fresh air before work.

    uBlock Origin Lite 2026.315.1814 is now available in the iOS/macOS App Store and the Chrome Extension store and I haven’t noticed any regressions and there have been some improvements with a few websites that resulted in some of the content getting through. It is kind of annoying that any sort of update to the filtering needs to be bundled with the extension rather than being updated remotely but maybe we’ll get lucky and WebNN will enable the use of LLMs created to help improve the content blocking experience. I remember there was discussion about extensions making use of LLMs for content blocking but I didn’t see much come of it so maybe the discussion of WebNN will make some of the ideas floating around will become reality.

    I was watching the the latest episode of ‘Bradbury Group’ and although the number of construction businesses going to liquidation has increased what wasn’t discussed (and I thought it was bought up by a NZ Herald business journalist) that many businesses were on borrowed time when it came to the loans provided during COVID with both Labour and National kicking the can down the road to eventually the loans had to be called in. The reality is that many of these businesses would have gone under if it were for the IRD giving out 2nd and 3rd chances but in reality some of these businesses just simply weren’t viable.

    With that being said, when the National-ACT-NZ First government got into power one of the first things they did was to reset the infrastructure pipeline meaning that for many of these businesses who looked to that pipeline as a way for their business to be saved ended up going under. With all that being said, it goes back to what I suggested which was to nationalise all these struggling construction companies, put them under the umbrella of a newly formed ‘Ministry of Works’ and then use that army of skill trades people to engage in nation building sized projects with housing being at the centre of it – decommodifying housing by turning ‘Housing New Zealand’ into the primary provider of rental accomodation and rallying the skilled trade people of New Zealand to build a robust supply of houses close to where the jobs are.

    There ist much discussion regarding petrol and diesel supplies – once again just like back in the 1970s when National cancelled the investments into electrifying the rail network and failing to support Mayor Robbie’s mass transit system for Auckland, they’ve cancelled renewable energy investments, rebates for solar energy and batteries for homes and removing the assistance to make EVs more affordable. What is the old saying – history doesn’t repeat but it rhymes, and National have demonstrated they haven’t learnt a single bloody thing and unfortunately the situation is made worse when the collective memory of New Zealand is that of a goldfish (which isn’t unique given that after 8 years of George W Bush causing in two quagmires and an economic collapse resulting in Barrack Obama being elected then 2 years later the Republicans being given a majority in both houses not to mention flipping a whole heap of state houses in the process which laid the foundation for a decade of gerrymandering that cemented a permanent majority for the Republican Party).

  • A productive day.

    Woke up at 11am, got dressed and then headed down to the blood testing lab for a blood and urine test – just the usual testing to make sure everything is on track and that there aren’t any sort of issues regarding my blood sugar. I think I’ll be all good but my main focus will be what the stats will be like in another three months after doing the new routine of getting up, going for a walk in the morning and then having a walk at the end of the day after I come home from work.

    While I was down the road I picked up a couple Mexican salad mixes, one for Monday and the other one for Tuesday, along with a few other bits and pieces and then on the home I stopped off at the bakery I picked up a filled roll for lunch. Once home I had lunch, watched some YouTube videos and tidied up the house then around 5pm I put on dinner, a butterflied roast chicken, and I had that with the salad mix.

    I watched a few more bits of news – trying to keep up with what is happening with the world but at the same time avoiding getting too overwhelmed with the world going to hell in a handbasket. After catching up on the news I went for a 13.8km walk – the weather was nice, a slight bit of coolness in the air but it was comfortable enough to be able to walk wearing tracksuit pants and a t-shirt. After I got home, I had a shower then jumped into bed.

    uBlock Origin Lite 2026.315.1814 has been released but at the moment it is only available on the Microsoft Edge store with the other stores pending approval. I can’t work out how Microsoft approves it quicker than Google and Apple – I guess that it’ll be just one of life’s mysteries lol.