Matisyahu's Blog

One of the great things I like about my current employer is the fact that I can work from home 3 days a week and in the office 2 days a week. Sure, ones of the benefits being that I can work from home in my tracksuit pants and a tshirt but the other is working at a comfortable desk, fast computer, great reliable internet and not having to jump on my scooter and deal with the cold. There is a downside which is the fact that I have keep the home warm when working from home but most of the time that just involves setting my heater to 18 degrees celsius then combine that with good insulation and double glazed windows results in the heat being retained meaning the heater doesn’t turn on very often to maintain the temperature.

Last night I did a small shopping (I’m getting my financial house in order so that means – debt and bills first, then everything else comes second) and I noticed some new range of soups from F. Whitlock & Sons (link)

I’m going to give them a go – the Capscium and Corn Gumbo would sound great with some roast chicken from the previous dinner, same can be said for the Moroccan Spiced Carrot and Lentil Soup. Another quick meal is the Naked Locals Thai Green Curry, fry up some prawns in chilli and garlic butter then add it to the Thai Green Curry. Unless you’ve got a family and use the ingredients regularly it ends up costing more for a single person to have many of the ingredients hanging around in the cupboard as they’re more likely to go pass their best before date – spices deteriorate pretty quickly and lose their flavour. Tonight I’m going to have Tomato and Capsicum soup with ciabatta bread rolls heated in the oven then layer on a good helping off the garlic and chilli butter.

Regarding Android and the Nothing Phone, it’s the six month mark and I’m pretty happy with how things are going so far – the withdrawal symptoms of not having an iPhone have subsided lol. On a good side it appears that MV3 supported version of uBlock Origin has launched to version 1 (link). I’ll keep using the MV2 ‘classic’ version of uBlocker Origin until I’m forced to move from but I hope that by the time I am forced to make the move that the Webextension API developers have taken onboard extension developers concerns by addressing the shortcomings in the various components that make it up, I also hope that Apple get their A into G so that some time in the future it’ll be possible to load the uBlock Origin MV3 version on Safari.

Nothing has announced that Nothing OS 2.0 (Android 14) will arrive for both the Nothing Phone 1 and Nothing Phone 2 in August this year (link). What I looking forward are all the under the hood improvements such as memory management, power management, improvements in privacy with the introduction of new APIs. It appears that the sharp contraction of ad revenue has forced Google to improve the focus of their non-ad businesses. I was just thinking about the relationship between Google and Google’s Ad business has similarities to countries and the ‘Resource curse’ – during good times there is little incentive to diversify but when there are the bad times then people become risk adverse and decide that it isn’t the right time to take risks. The net result of that situation are companies that get stuck in a rut only to find out the hard way when a more nimble competitor over takes them. This isn’t unique to Google, Microsoft was in the same mindset with Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows, both products feeding off each other to maintain each others dominance but that was quickly upset with the rise of Google and Apple which forced Microsoft to evolve and move outside its comfort zone. If a competitor doesn’t arise then we can always hope that a regulator is willing to knock some heads together and shake things up (link).