Matisyahu's Blog

Went down the road today and bought a tandoori seasoned chicken for dinner along with some Japanese coleslaw – sitting in the oven cooking and will be reading in around 45 minutes. Given how easy it is to put together a half decent dinner at home these days I very rarely go to a restaurant – unless of course someone else is paying for it.

Giving Chrome a try with the latest build of AdGuard and things are getting better – it looks like the functionality that was available in their MV2 is being recreated in their MV3 version by adding more functionality to TSWebExtension, TSUrlFilter, Scriptlets and ExtendedCss. The reason I’m also back using Chrome is because increasinly I am finding that extension developers for Safari are slowly giving up – the AdGuard for Safari has been on life support with many promises of a native version (strangely enough their iOS version does a better job blocking ads).

The other fact is my interest in my return to Chrome is an interest in Google Workspace because of the fact that I can get up to 30 aliases, it doesn’t suffer from the weird behaviour that when I setup iCloud on my MacBook Air (the aliases I created in iCloud don’t appear as being available for me to send from not to mention that the ‘hide my email’ isn’t necessarily a good way where you want to apply for something but you want the email address to still appear to be serious to a potential employer), the Google Drive synchronisation is faster etc. But with Google Workspace it has it’s own drawbacks if you’re using an iOS device because the integration experience isn’t as good as if one were to have Android devices. Before I do anything I’m going to get my interest free iPhone paid off because part of that also going back to my old cell phone provider (Skinny Mobile) since it has better coverage than One NZ where I live (One NZ seem to have an aversion to making greater use of 700MHz).

One thing I noticed though about Chrome was ‘Google Lens’ which provided the functionality that I missed from Safari where it was open to copy and paste text from an image to a text file (for example) – I had only just noticed that recently at work when I did a ctrl f and then noticed the option of ‘Google Lens’ where curiosity got the best of me and realised that Chrome actually did have the feature after all. It was one of the last remaining features that kept me staying with Safari since I ued it so often – particularly useful when there are subtitles in Chinese and there were no English subtitles available so I could stop the video, select the text in the video then translate that text into English.

If am do look at getting an Android phone it’ll most likely be a Pixel 9 Pro XL with 256GB or 512GB storage but the big qustion is whether I go for a trip to Australia for a holiday and then buy it or just get it through a local parallel importer. I’m tempted to maybe got for a trip next year, visit my brother, buy my nieces some presents and spend some time chilling out. The Google TV Streamer is looking pretty good at NZ$175 – it supports AV1 playback(link) along with integration with Google Home not to mention the reviews have been positive so far it it’ll be interesting to have a nosy when I get out of the house tomorrow for a walk around at the mall.

Ubiquiti has release an update for UDM, UnifiOS v4.0.20, installed without any problem and it appears to be slightly more snappy in terms of the internet connection so maybe the bug fixes done on PPPoE has resulted in slightly better performance and reliability. It’s funny how the reliability of my internet connection when working from home is a lot higher than when I work in the office. At work we have a Dell monitor which acts as a USBC hub which includes display, ethernet etc. which causes nothing but trouble but some how the cheap USBC hub I bought from ‘The Warehouse’ works a whole lot better long with the internet connection itself running a lot more reliably.