Matisyahu's Blog

Fine weather so I decided to take advantage of that and go for a walk tonight – just a small 8km walk but I needed to get out of the house after being inside all day. It’s good to get out of the house even if it is a bit cold – the fresh air relaxes me so that I am ready for a good night sleep. I’ve started my new work schedule of starting at 1:30pm every day which means I have a regular schedule rather than the starting time being different depending on the day.

The AdGuard team have released the AdGuard 5.2.25 beta for Chrome (link) which include many new features, bug features and enhancements. What I particularly interested in is the User Scripts API implementation should should improve the reliability of content blocking. As I’ve noted in the past, I was sceptical that MV3 would provide the same quality of content blocking that MV2 provided but as time goes on and the WECG developers for Chrome have listened to the feedback the functionality has improved to the point that I cannot tell the difference between the experience I got back in the MV2 vs what MV3 extensions are delivering.

As for the time frame when the stable version will be released? could be anywhere from a weeks to months but I’d say that given that amount of changes that I couldn’t imagine it being rushed because there will be a lot of testing that’ll be needed. I’ve got it running on my other Chrome profile and so far things have been very robust. For me the big excitement will be the support for ‘Third Party Filters’ that you add manually which should hopefully mean that it will be easier to keep filters up to date rather than having to wait for the latest filters to be bundled and then made available as an update through the Chrome store which has a lead time of around 3 days.

I’ve decided to make peace with the idea that maybe I shouldn’t get fixed over the idea that should try to have everything with one service provider. I’ve setup SmartThings from Samsung and realised that the Arlo security camera integration is so much better than with Google Home then I added my Bluetooth earphones and my television (which is a bit ancient given that it was released in 2018) however it integrated into SmartThings without any issues. I’m looking at upgrading my television soon to a 2025 model which has a more up to date smart tv software version not to mention better hardware which should provide a smoother experience and I’ll give my old television to mum because it is still in good working order.

While looking around at SmartThings I went on a bit of a side quest regarding Samsung applications for Windows – it appears you can have a pretty good ecosystem using a combination of Microsoft Windows and Samsung devices that produce the sort of integration one observes with Apple and it’s own ecosystem. If I ever went down that road I would keep Google Workspace given that I much prefer it over what Microsoft 365 offers but I could imagine Samsung does a pretty good job sewing together Windows and Android together.