Matisyahu's Blog

I’ve been sick for the past few days – making sure I get plenty of fresh air, rest, drinking lots of water to keep hydrated. I took a day off from going for a walk at night due to it raining on and off – I didn’t want to get stuck in a downpour only to find that the cold has made me even sicker. It is probably just a combination of stress regarding the upcoming blood test on 14 April where I’ll get to see whether all the work over the last 3 months have paid off with better health statistics. I guess I need to learn how to deal with stress a lot better and recognise that getting worked up doesn’t really change the outcome – do the best you can and then deal with what ever the fallout is.

There is a love/hate relationship between Arlo and myself, specifically their website and how it says it has sent an email to my email address but nothing arrives, when I try to ring their 0800 number in New Zealand the line goes silent then I get hung up on but if I then try to use the online chat I get told to sod off because I don’t have a subscription. I then posted a reply on their forum which was about as good as a pocket on the old proverbial singlet so in the end I setup a new Arlo account, reset my security system, re-established it with my new Arlo account and called it a day. On a side note, it appears that if you have set up your Arlo devices using Homekit it can cause problems if you don’t reset the hub and set it up again for Google Home – I found that I had set it up on Google Home then suddenly it disappeared from the app with the notification saying that I had removed it, which I hadn’t. Funny enough, I tried to log into my old Arlo account and it suddenly worked – I deleted the account since I have a new one, I’ve also made sure that I’ve included an extra way to login just incase I don’t receive an email or a text message.

Spark is gradually updating the way in which their fibre connection is dealt with – at the moment for Spark (and their sub brands such as Skinny and BigPipe) there is the use of PPPoE (on Spark it uses VLAN tagging of 10) however they’re gradually moving to DHCP. They’re first rolling it out to Spark customers then it’ll be rolled out to Skinny and BigPipe customers. I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up seeing this as the start of an eventual IPv6 roll out maybe in the future but then again due to Spark having the legacy of being a former state owned enterprise that was privatised over 30 years ago they still have a lot of IPv4 addresses so the sort of urgency isn’t as great than is with the case of smaller players who are fast to adopt IPv6. I’m hoping that once it becomes available for Skinny customers it will result in an improvement in the latency spikes that I’ve seen pop up in the last few weeks – some have already notice a modest improvement with the shift on the forum that I frequent (I’ll stick to using Google Public DNS).