Matisyahu's Blog

End of another week, looking forward to relaxing over the next couple of days, sleep in, got the dentist on Tuesday for deep cleaning of my teeth. Around 6 months ago they were able to finish most of it but I needed another appointment to finish it off then after I’ll schedule a yearly check up. One thing with teeth – leaving it for almost 5-6 years before having another check up isn’t a good idea. I didn’t have any major issues but it’s one of those things that if you have regular check ups it is easy to pick up a problem when it is early and can be fixed than waiting until it is a lot more difficult to sort out.

People ask me why I keep using Chrome – for me it is ‘Google Lens’. I don’t use the feature a lot but when I do need it I wish I had it which is why I kept using Safari for so long but now that Google can do what Safari can which is selecting text in videos and images to then translate or copy/paste, I’m a happy lad. The other interesting extension I tripped over tonight is the open source extension ‘Authenticator’ where you can manually add your OTP to it so then I no longer have to go fishing for my phone when I want to log in or make a change which requires me to authenticate myself.

I’ve been following the elections in the United States but given the possibility of Trump winning gives me horrible anxiety. As much as I feel the need that I must keep myself in the loop, to know what is happening out in the wide world. I guess it is trying to strike the right balance of being informed while ensuring one isn’t overwhelmed with the day to day ‘breaking news’ where the latest polling numbers show that candidate x is up or down 0.01 points then followed by someone talking extensively about horse race politics but nothing about policy.

I’ve been following the round of reviews and benchmarks of the new Intel Arrow Lake CPU release which, to put it mildly, receiving a bit of a rough ride in the press. I might write something up tomorrow about it because what I see is far too many self appointed hardware experts unable to see the big picture and convince themselves that the miniscule number of CPUs sold to enthusiasts is going to make a dent in Intel’s bottom line. When Intel sell CPUs their primary customers are OEM’s, not consumers.