Matisyahu's Blog

Work was uneventful and it has been raining all day so I decided to have tonight off from some exercise and instead chill out watching some tv series while catching up on some blogposts I’ve beem meaning to finally complete.

An update to the AdGuard beta release has been made available along with the uBlock Origin Lite as mentioned yesterday has appeared in the Chrome store. More features are being added to uBlock Origin and AdGuard beta has been pretty rock solid in my experience – the issue regarding the Cloudflare check (the one that asks if you’re a human) hasn’t come back so it appears that the problem has been well and truly sorted out. Rumours are still circulating regarding extension support being added to Chrome on Android but from what I understand things are pretty buggy so I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up seeing maybe something around the time there is an announcement around the future of ChromeOS given that any sort of move to replace ChromeOS with Android would require support for extensions given how many organisations, both business and education, that rely on extensions as part of their work flow.

I’m having a look at the Nothing Phone 3 and at the moment there is the Nothing Phone 3a – from what I understand it supports VoLTE on the three carriers but I wonder whether the Nothing Phone 3 will also be the same. The reason why I wonder is because there is a scheduled shut down of the 3G network towards the end of this year and beginning of next year so the 3G fallback for voice calls will disappear thus making VoLTE support a must. The Pixel 9 Pro XL works with VoLTE with all three carriers out of the so assuming no regressions then we’ll see the Pixel 10 Pro XL work out of the box as well. Both the Nothing Phone and Pixel promise 7 years of support so it’ll be interesting to see what is delivered when the Pixel 10 Pro XL is announced. As for my Samsung S25 Ultra, I might give it up mum when I upgrade and as for Google Home, I just use it for controlling the Google Streamer and eventually the Arlo security will be replaced with Ubiquiti which will avoid the whole mess of mucking around with recharging the camera battery.

On a side note, I did give the Samsung Tizen a try on my television (keeping in mind my television is pretty old) and I much prefer using the Google Streamer – easier to navigate, more responsive, no strange bugs or quirks occuring. It’ll be interesting to see whether Google releases a ‘premium’ streaming box, something that makes use of the Google Tensor SoC, maybe we’ll see that when Android TV 16 is released and there is a move to 64bit Android TV – AV1 hardware acceleration for high definition streaming content would be a nice improvement. At the moment though the Google Streamer does a pretty good job for what it is designed to do although a faster processor would provide a more responsive experience when using Kodi.

And Ubiquiti has released some beta versions as well and stable previews – the Ubiquiti UniFi Gateway Max is still in development but I’m guessing the version number doesn’t really reflect whether one product line is getting more attention given that the Ubiquiti UniFi Gateway Max lacks the built in UniFi Network Application hence the reason I have a Cloud Key although I am tempted to replace the two with Ubiquiti UniFi Dream Router 7 then setup the Ubiquiti UniFi Gateway Max and Cloud Key at mum’s place so then she can get a better more reliable experience vs the ancient Spark modem that she is currently using. I might make the big switch when I upgrade her computer so then we can setup the office, maybe even look at getting a laser printer and scanner all in one which will free up more space so the office isn’t as crowded.

Oh while we’re at it, at work I use a Dell laptop running Windows 11 Pro and the experience so far has actually been pretty good. I’ve never been able to understand the mouth foaming hatred that far too many chronically online people have regarding Windows 11. What I am on the look out for is the Snapdragon X Elite Gen 2 that is rumoured to being announced in September this year and hopefully the indication of discounts for current ARM based Surface laptops point to maybe the Surface laptop getting a prompt update. The big attraction for me is the WiFi 7 support not to mention that it’ll work out cheaper than upgrading my existing MacBook Air to a newer version. I’ll compare that to what is announced when it comes to the x86-64 side because if I do go down that road then I’ll want to make sure that it has APX because the extra registers will result in greater efficiency and performance when Windows is recompiled to take advantage of it along with application software.