Matisyahu's Blog

Finished work today and although the weather was looking pretty lousy I was able to squeeze in an 11.6km walk even with the drizzle. After coming back home, I grabbed a warm drink, showered then jumped into bed to watch a few YouTube videos and just as I did that I noticed that it started raining a lot heavier so I’m happy I took the opportunity to go for some exercise when I could. It appears that the wet weather will be with us for today and tomorrow but hopefully over the weekend the weather will get better and progressively get better as I get closer to my two weeks off that start on 15 December.

I’ve sold my Google Streamer and Samsung S25 Ultra so now I’ve got my Microsoft Surface Laptop – if I don’t sell it before Christmas then I might decide to give it to mum or just hold onto it for next year but there is no major sense of urgency since it isn’t a matter of needing the money. When I ordered the Mac Studio I got the base model since it has more than enough memory and storage for what I need it for:

It is schedule to arrive on Friday however it may end up arriving on Thursday because it has already left the warehouse in Australia. I guess one of the benefits of not customising it means that it is already in stock to ship. I was going to get the Mac mini with a M4 Pro but then I realised that after the customisation that I was better off going for the base model of the Studio where I could get the M4 Max along with extra GPU cores and slightly more memory bandwidth which will be great when gaming – something I want to get back into. I’ve given AdGuard Mini another try and it appears that the slow down and freezing of the web pages has to do with one of the additional bits of functionality for advanced blocking but when disabled the issue goes away. Although uBlock Origin Lite isn’t perfect it is free and doesn’t have the draw backs of AdGuard Mini but that being said I’m always open to alternatives if a superior extension appears.

One of the good things about moving back to the iPhone is being able to delete WhatsApp and being able to use iMessage instead along with cancelling the Pocket Casts subscription now that I’ve got Apple Podcasts which is so much better than YouTube Music which is the default podcast app on Android. It truly is amazing how Google had a perfectly good podcasting app aka Google Podcasts which was simple, straight forward and very responsive only to then replace it with the bloated behemoth that is YouTube Music. There is a reason why there are separate apps because Podcasts are different to Music which is different to the traditional YouTube yet for some reason the powers that be decided that throwing it all in one app makes a whole lot of sense.

Oh, and before I go, it appears that once again on a day that ends in a y we have conservatives playing the persecution card when they don’t get their own way (link) – wrote a lousy essay but apparently it’s everyone else’s fault that ‘because god said so’ isn’t a coherent argument when writing an essay at a university level course. I remember reading the article and I thought, “there are so many ways you go talk about this subject matter in interest ways and that was the way you decided to write an essay?”. I really do have to ask how on earth such people get into university when their critical thinking skills are that bad. Imagine if in response to someone asking me to justify my left wing world view my only response was ‘because Marx said so’ I wouldn’t blame them for marking my essay with a big fat zero.