Matisyahu's Blog

I start work at 1:30pm but I set my alarm to 12:45pm however what I have been doing is pulling back the time I go to sleep so that when I get up in the morning I have more time before I start working. Before I went to sleep I went to bed at 3:00am where all my lights were turned off, laptop off etc. and I was relaxing before heading off to sleep and then I woke up at around 11:30am where I was dozing in the bed then got out before my alarm went off. I’m still deciding whether tonight I’ll set my goal to be in bed and lights out by 2:30am, set the alarm to 11:30am so then I’ll be up and around 2 hours before I start my shift – get some fresh air, maybe a walk around the block, have a cup of coffee to wake me up.

I checked Chrome for updates which updated it from version 142.0.7444.60 to version 142.0.7444.135 and on the Chrome releases blog there appears to be a decent laundry list of security fixes as well as general improvements. Microsoft Edge will probably get updated on Saturday NZ time (which corresponds to Friday US time) although it’ll be interesting to see whether we’ll see patch Tuesday pushed back to fix the issue with ‘Task Manager’ – maybe break it into two parts with security fixes being made instantly available and then features being made available a week later.

I’ve been following the recent elections in the United States and although there has been a lot of attention focused on New Jersey, New York and California but what has been left out are the elections at the local level. Utility regulation boards, school boards and so on – based on the news that is coming out it appears that the tide of anti-woke, anti-CRT and anti-DEI is coming to an end as parents realise that such ideologies lead to nothing positive other than undermining the quality of public education as grand standing mouth breathers use their office as a glorified platform for their tiktok influencer career. It appears that being a loud mouth fool rambling incoherently about nonexistent issues may get you elected if enough of your fellow travellers turn out but when the negative consequences are felt by those who are otherwise disengaged from politics then those people suddenly start becoming interested in whether you’re doing your job. To quote Anthony Albanese: “culture wars are a barren valley”, maybe it took a swing to the extreme for those sitting on the sidelines to actually get involved politically rather than leaving it up to the crazies.

There are rumours making the rounds regarding the next version of XBox being a hybrid design – it’ll be interesting to see whether we’ll see a Windows core but legacy free running Windows App SDK based applications along with support for previous versions of XBox games. I could imagine a version of Windows stripped of legacy should result in a more streamlined and optimised system. There is a catch though which is a rumoured price tag raging from $800-$1200 but then again that could change – the current game consoles either sell at cost or below but the money is made on the royalties from the games sold on it. If they are going to move to a rumoured price range of $800-$1200 then are they going to move away from the current model to one where you pay upfront rather than recouping the costs with after sales? Then again, it’ll be interesting to see whether Microsoft make the leap to ARM or whether they keep with x86-64, maybe force AMD and Intel to compete for the contract.

Apple released iOS 18.7.2 for those who don’t want to upgrade to iOS 26.1. At the moment I’ve left mum on 18.7.x because the change would require her getting used to the new interface not to mention I want to make sure that if we do make the switch that we setup the phone that makes the text readable by either enable tinting or disabling transparency in the accessibility options. It is one of the reasons I am waiting for not just the M5 refresh that is scheduled for next year but also what the 26.2 and 26.3 end up bringing to the platform with 26.2 most likely being released towards the end of this year an 26.3 being released early next year (based on the macOS 15.x release cycle).