Matisyahu's Blog

I went out tonight with mum, sister, partner and two nieces for dinner to celebrate reaching the ripe old age of 44 years old. It is amazing how the years go so quickly and yet at the age of 44 I don’t feel old, I don’t feel like I’m slowing down or aging when compared to when I was in my 30s or 20s although I do prefer to hang out at home rather than going out like I did when I was young – maybe it has to do with the lack of novelty associated with going out now that I’ve seen and experienced it all not to mention that it is winter and I’d sooner be at home where it is cosy and warm.

My sister has decided to go to teachers training college so I helped her pick out a laptop (an ASUS Zenbook 14inch) and then set it up – installed all the latest updates so that everything is up to date along with firmware etc. When at dinner mum said it would be better for my sister to get my old router and access point since the modem they have is one provided by their ISP but the coverage is horrible. I finally got the UDM sorted out by putting it in recovery mode then upgrading it to the latest firmware – when I set it up I’ll register it to my UniFi account so then I can manage it from home.

One more week to go before the big WWDC Keynote and State of the Platform Union on Tuesday NZ Time (Monday in the US) – a lot of rumours are swirling around such as unifying the version number of all their platforms around a year for example it would make macOS 26 become the next release. For me the whole thing with AI is kind of secondary when compared to wanting to get the fundamentals nailed down or as Chris Luxon (NZ Prime Minister) loves to say “making sure the basics are done well” – not use boasting about Ai when Webkit is failing to keep up with web standards and implementing the MV3 extension framework in a timely manner or failing to fix up bugs around iCloud and macOS integration (as mentioned on a previous post about custom domain aliases not appearing in the Mail app on macOS).

The outcome of WWDC will pretty much shape my plans for the next couple of years – the experience of setting up my sister’s computer opened my eyes to the fact that Windows 11 is actually pretty good when it is paired with hardware from an OEM vendor that doesn’t chock it full of crapware. The laptop my sister got is an ASUS and the only crapware that was installed was McAfee which was easily uninstalled while everything else was exactly what was needed to make the laptop productive. If I ever did make the move then ASUS would definitely be a contender to replace my Mac or possibly Microsoft Surface. As for the desk, I’d probably build my own and have a 100% AMD based one – AMD CPU and GPU which woud give me the flexibility of installing Windows 11 on it and if at a later date I decide I’ll know that all the hardware will be supported out of the box with Linux.