Popped into work today to pick up a $100 Pak ’n Save voucher then I decided to join in on the end of the year get together at the local bowling alley along with some light refreshments and some nibbles. On Thursday I’ll head into the store to pick up some groceries – still tossing up between either getting a chicken, duck or lamb. There is the Peking duck on offer but I’m not familiar with how one cooks it but then again why not give it a try and see what happens. I’m also going to get some deserts – sure I could make it myself but these days the difference between getting one already done vs. doing it oneself is very small indeed.

There was an Ad Guard 1.11.9 but it is still very much hampered by the limitations of the APIs that Apple make available to developers. Those limitations are also present in Manifest V3 which, as of writing this blog post, Google has more or less have postponed it indefinitely. This isn’t surprising given that if you read through the various meeting minutes over over the Webextensions API on GitHub – it is clear that the scope of what they wished to achieve grew and grew as third party developers pointed out functionalitywthat was either missing, broken or not fit for purpose as manifest version 3 developed.

As Twitter keeps imploding even with the reversal of past decisions (see the banning of journalists then reversals of that only to result in journalists deciding to remain with Mastodon) we’ve had Vivaldi browser developers open up a Mastodon platform and now Mozilla have announced that they’re looking at opening a Firefox Mastodon instance (link) and even Washington Post is setting up an instance for their own journalists just as other outlets have done such as the Texas Observer.What will be interesting is whether we’ll see one of the big names like Microsoft, Apple or Google dipping their toe into the pool to see whether relying on Twitter given the mad king, who is currently running it, is good for ones brand long term in terms of the brand being associated with the Twitter platform.

I’m having a look at the Nothing phone for a replacement for my existing iPhone. Sure, it doesn’t have a power SoC but for someone like me I don’t need that power because I primarily use it for email, messaging, browsing the web, reddit, listening to music – basically a mid range SoC at half the price but a good support policy is good enough for what I want to do. When it comes to the desktop computer I’m macOS all the way but when t comes to the phone I’m open to both Android and iOS because I see merit in both platforms.What attracts me to the Nothing Phone is the fact that it is ‘crapware free’ – everything is very minimal so for someone like me I’m happy It doesn’t include things I’ll never use, they don’t reinvent the wheel for the sake of ‘branding’ as some OEMs do which means it uses all stock standard Google apps such as Google Phone, Messages, Contacts etc.

On the good news front Ubiquiti has released the first beta build of the 2.x UniFiOS for UDM and UDM Pro which will not only result in superior reliability, lower resource usage and lots more nice things, it also lays the foundation for future updates to come a lot quicker as they’re bought into alignment with the recent UniFI 3.x based products that are either in general release or currently being beta tested. It is good that things are making progress. I am still looking at eventually upgrading my base station to a Wi-Fi 6 but I’ve got to first check the mount bracket and PoE can be reused and then maybe I’ll sell it or maybe give mum or my sister it so they can have better coverage.

There was an issue with logging into my UDM via SSH and I couldn’t work out why it kept throwing a error saying it couldn’t make a connection even though I had SSH enabled in the Unifi Controller. So eventually I found the solution when Googling and that involved opening up Terminal (on macOS) then running the following command:

ssh -oHostKeyAlgorithms=+ssh-rsa root@192.168.1.1

Then I logged in as I usually would and voila, problem solved. Not too sure how the problem occurred in the first place but at least that is now resolved.

I’ve ordered a pizza for dinner tonight and will sit at my laptop watching news, maybe see if there is anything good on the Apple TV subscription where I have a 7 day trial so I might as well binge watch as many shows that appear to be interesting. I finished Invasion Season 1 so I am looking forward to Season 2 and how the story develops. Regarding politics, I’m avoding NZ politics but what I have glimpsed, Auckland is now going to feel the consequences of 1) Not turning out to vote 2) Allowing a loud mouth with simplistic solutions to complex problems to become mayor and have a council filled with politicians of a similar vain. On a good side, down in the good old Hutt Valley we at least avoided such an election outcome.

MarsEdit 5 has been released and I’ve upgraded from version 4 to version 5 – it is a lot faster and responsive. Although I could use the WordPress website I much prefer using an application like MarsEdit as it allows me to work offline, the experience is more responsive than using the website. I’m eventually going to grab the Affinity software and upgrade my copy of dbPoweramp – yeah, I’m one of those who still buy my music in physical form then use dbPoweramp to back up the music in FLAC format with both a copy in iCloud as well as on my external hard disk. Long story short, I’m a happy lad.

Back to work tomorrow – I was hoping to get a job in another department but unfortunately I didn’t get the job. I’m all good about the end result, I’m sure there were plenty of people who applied and missed out and keeping in mind that there may have been only one position available but with that being said I’m going to chat with my boss to see if another departments are looking for people and see if I can get my name in early. It’s no major issue given that I’m satisfied with my current position and in around a week I’ll be on holiday for around two weeks over Christmas break.

I’m giving Apple TV a 7 day trial to see what it is like as I am watching Invasion – it’s a slow burn but so far I’m pretty happy with the programme. I have a tendency to prefer the slow burn – allowing the story to be fully fleshed out, the characters developed, for mini-narratives to develop alongside the main narrative in much the same way Bosch and Bosch: Legacy episodes would develop over a season. That being said, the show contain some annoying characters – they have the opportunity to stay at a house and remain safe until the morning but nope they just had to keep moving. Gah, the frustration of characters who seem to avoid engaging in some commonsense – it’s almost as though the authors of the show are hell bent on getting the audience frustrated.

Since we’re heading into a new year I thought I might as well do some freshening up of my blog so I decided to change the theme to something that is a bit more minimalistic.

Woke up this morning and installed the latest update of Chrome only to find that it has fixed the issue I was having with the bookmarks menu – I tried searching through the change log but I couldn’t find anything that specifically noted the fix but I’ve had it running on my laptop and the issue with the bookmark menu hasn’t occurred yet (fingers crossed). Although I do love using Safari because of its efficiency, Chrome does have the benefit of having a feature rich extensions framework – even with all the criticisms regarding Manifest V3 changes they are taking onboard a lot of feedback and even pushed back the phasing out back from their original date to ensure that it is feature complete when it launches such as user script API. That being said, I’m back to using Safari – it’ll be interesting to see the improvements that’ll come in macOS 13.1 and iOS 16.2 in terms of what Apple have been working on in Safari 16.2.

At the moment I’m still sent my CV off because I’m looking at applying for a position in a different department – one that isn’t customer facing which will enable me to just focus on work all day without the drama of being used as a sound board for customer’s emotional temper tantrums. If there is going to any change it’ll be probably be after Christmas but I am also looking at other jobs that are available but I’m no urgency so I’ll ‘bide my time’ as they say and wait it out for a better job to come along rather than just picking any job that comes along.

AdGuard 1.11.8 was released around a week ago which addresses the issue of the previous version claiming that it hit the maximum number of filters limit (150K per extension, I’m unsure whether there is a global limit) but it appears it was a bug so it was quickly fixed along with updating other parts of the AdGuard extension.

In the area of schadenfreude, I’ve been having a wonderful week so far, scalpers of Nvidia video cards are finding that no one is interested in purchasing them and retail stores aren’t willing to give them cash refunds. Twitter is spiralling downwards with a low uptake of their Twitter Blue, dealing with security woes, advertisers who are either walking away or doing the bare minimum required by they contract just to avoid being associated with the toxic atmosphere being created by Elon’s decision to allow a complete free for all when it comes to racism, bigotry, conspiracy theories, misinformation and disinformation bot farms being run by state actors etc. basically it is the hellscape that Elon promised Twitter wouldn’t turn into.

On a good side, in the wake of Twitter imploding from within, Mastodon has reached over 8 million people using the service – averaging 3000-4000 new accounts ever hour. I guess the blessing in disguise of Twitter going down is that it has forced many to reconsider who they have use for social media – even Tumblr has had a massive uptick in the number of people using their service. Maybe we can see the eventual demise of Facebook in the not too far distant future – we can always hope and dream for such miracles to occur.