Matisyahu's Blog

Oh god knows I needed the week to be over and the weekend couldn’t have come soon enough. I’m relaxing in bed after going for a walk – it was spitting and really cold, a lot colder than the temperature is being reported by Metservice as 6°C but feels like 5°C. I’ve got my heater going and thank goodness I have insulation in the floor, walls, floor and double glazed windows to ensure that the horrible cost of heating will at least keep me warm. I’m enjoying some sandwiches and a biscuit then I’ll see if there are some interesting tv series that I can binge watch.

Something I noticed when using my phone is Samsung Files and how you can link Google Drive then download a folder from Google Drive to ones phone. I like to keep all my music backed up to my Google Drive so I decided to download my music collection (the ones encoded in AAC) to my phone which funny enough was as fast as it would be if I used OpenMTP on my desktop. I always thought that Samsung was needlessly duplicating apps but it appears that there is a good reason for those apps – even Google’s own Files app doesn’t allow you to download directories of files from Google Drive to ones phone which is kind of strange given that I would have thought that is a pretty common thing to do unless Google expects the user to cache their the director then point their music player to the Google Drive to play back music.

I go back and forths between my Apple TV 4K (128GB) and Google Streamer but I keep coming back to the Apple TV 4K because the experience is so much more fast, fluid and responsive vs the under powered device that Google put out. Sure, the Apple TV 4K is more expensive but nothing stopped Google from putting out a decent device akin to an nVidia Shield – it isn’t as though a set top box is something you buy on a regular basis but rather something you buy and keep for years and years until it stops receiving updates and then you upgrade. I’ve never understood the complaints about the price of the Apple TV 4K given that if you buy it and keep it until it loses support then it is costing less than NZ$1 per week – most people spend more on coffee per week than a device that’ll use for hours every day.