Matisyahu's Blog

Well, it was payday today – paid all the bills and then cried over what was left over but I am reminded it could be a whole lot worse. I’m having a browse through Woolworths and still deciding whether I should order a few things or just have unexciting meals for the next few days until I’m totally finished all that I have in the freezer and cupboards to then do a fresh order from Woolworths and get it delivered rather than trying to juggle multiple bags.

The update to Chrome was released which updated it from 138.0.7204.158 to 138.0.7204.169 – I ended up receiving the update for. my phone pretty quickly to along with the July Google Play Services was also updated as well. They were released pretty quickly which is a good indicator that there must have been some serious fixes they needed to get out to end users asap (link) (link) – so far everything is going well and Chrome 139 will be marked as stable and then released to the general public the following week.

Funny how yesterday I was talking about the beta 4 release and it was released today – reports have been they’re still making changings to the liquid glass, trying to fine tune the right balance between the vision they announced while also ensuring that legibility is maintained. There are also reports that debugging code has been either removed or minimalised in preparation of the public beta that’ll be released to the general public.and Safari Technology Preview 224 should be getting released in the next few days so it’ll be interesting to see what improvements have been made and whether those are going to make their way into the Safari that comes with macOS and iOS 26 or whether they’ll be tagged for the first or maybe second 26.x software updates.

I’m still folowing the Windows 11 development and it appears that the Administrator Protection maybe coming to Windows 11 25H2 but the big question is whether it’ll be enabled by default or whether it’ll be something that you’ll need to opt into. They may make it opt in because like UAC it will depend on developers updating their software so that it can operate at the lowest possible privilege rather than assuming that the user has administrator privileges. It appears that Microsoft’s focus on resilience maybe more than just a promise (anyone remember ‘secure computer’ from almost 20 years ago?) but as I’ve said on technology forum I visit, the litmus test will be when they’re confronted between either fixing a problem properly but breaking compatibility or making a half-assed fix for the sake of compatibility, it comes down to which side they’ll land on. I’d like to be optimistic and say they’ll break compatibility if it means fixing a problem and securing the operating system but past experience tells me that Microsoft values backwards compatibility even if it comes at the expense of security, stability and reliability.

On the topic of MIcrosoft, it would be nice if Microsoft didn’t create an artificial distinction between their business and consumer cloud offerings such as the inability to link the Samsung Gallery to a business OneDrive account for reasons unknown. I say this because I’d be very much open to the idea of using Office 365 for business if it worked like a consumer account. This is the same silliness when it comes to not being able to use a work account with an XBox but what happens if the business has a place where people relax and the business wishes to buy movies or games so employees can enjoy it on a break (while being able to manage it from a single administration area rather than having to create and maintain a seperate consumer account)? I’ve never understood why some software companies trying to draw an artificial line of demarcation between ‘work’ and consumer’.