Matisyahu's Blog

A good start to my weekend I went down to Pak ‘n Save to pick up some groceries along with dinner – a butterflied tandoori chicken along with a caesar salad for dinner. At the moment I am up to episode 4 from Season 1 of Paradise (link) which has turned out to be a pretty good show so far and it appears that show itself has got plans for 3 season in total so it’ll be interesting to see how it develops. On Monday I might also start watching Black Mirror to see what it is like plus looking at a few more tv series that I’ve missed out on.

I’ve got two profiles on Chrome, one for the gmail account and the other for the Google Workspace account – on the gmail account profile I’ve been testing AdGuard to see how it performs and I noticed there have been some big improvements such as the browser no longer hanging when visiting television streaming websites I visited where it would freeze then suddenly start working but these days it is all very much working as it should. I kind of wish that Chrome for Android would have support for extensions but rumour has it that that it is being worked on not to mention the fact that one mainly uses apps so it is of limited use but it’ll be interesting to see it happen. There is also the rolling out of having the address bar at the bottom of the screen like Safari on iOS so I am looking forward to that eventually arriving.

One UI 8 is getting closer to release but funny enough the more I use my Samsung S25 Ultra the less I miss my iPhone. It is working well with Skinny Mobile, getting updates regularly (on the June 2025 update at the moment) along with getting great battery life. Although I do pay for YouTube Premium which gives me access to ad free YouTube and YouTube Music I still prefer paying for Pocket Casts because it gives a much better podcast experience than using YouTube Music. I also use PowerAmp for my music player because YouTube Music does a pretty lousy job performance wise when dealing with large libraries (mine is around 65GB in size) along with the fact that the navigation is bad – select ‘Artist’ but rather than then offering a list of albums it just dumps all the songs from that artist where as PowerAmp you tap on ‘Artist’ then a list of albums are provided which you then tap on the album to list all the tracks in that album – for $10 it is a fair price for something that I’ll be using for many years to come.

I’ve been having a look at the Surface 15″ Laptop with the Qualcomm X Elite – lots of specials on at Noel Leemings and other vendors. I was going to eventually replace my S25 with a Pixel 10 but if I end up liking the S25 I might end up saving the money and instead looking at upgrading my laptop with the added bonus that the Android phone integrates with Windows as smoothly as an iPhone does with macOS – being able to answer and make phone calls, sending text messages not to mention MTP synchroising being a lot smoother and faster due to it being natively built into Windows.