Matisyahu's Blog

Here was me thinking I had fixed up the issue I was having with AdGuard but it appears to have come back so what I’ve decided to do is uninstall AdGuard in favour of uBlock Origin Lite (which is the MV3 version of uBlock Origin) which isn’t 100% perfect but it is good enough that it blocks 99% of content that I want blocked. There is still a lot of work being done on MV3 particularly regarding blocking those popups that appear hen you click play on a video where as AdGuard appears to use a variety of Javascript to address the short comings of the declarative net request there appears to be work baking into the declarative net request the missing functionality so then the extension isn’t dependent on a complex array of javascript libraries. It appears that the reason why it worked was because when I disabled it the required files were cached but when I cleared the cache those files were deleted which is why it failed to load once again.

After running with a Pixel 9 Pro XL for the last three months I have decided to go back to my iPhone 15 Pro Max – sure, there is the Google ecosystem but it never really competes with the level of integration that exists in the Apple ecosystem such as being able to answer telephone calls on ones computer (if I had a Windows computer the integration would be a lot better, it rather chafes me that Google seem to put little or no effort in support Android users who also prefer running a Mac), being able to send texts via iMessage to other iPhones vs no one outside of the Android ecosystem is using RCS in New Zealand due to none of the carriers supporting RCS. I’ve sold the ‘Google Bundle’ and I’ve already had a couple of people interested – I’ll use the money along with this weeks pay to clear off my One NZ interest free so then I can also cancel the pay monthly plan which will save me $50 per month.

The Safari 18.4 beta nots are available and it appears that we’re in store for another big release that’ll be fixing up many, many, many bugs, removing deprecated non-standard implementations and much more which can be read here (link). Apple is making big progress closing the functionality gap and it’ll be interesting to see how this will flow through to mobile apps that heavily rely on Webkit at the core of the app (the place where I work makes extensive use of Webkit on iOS and Chrome on Android). It’ll be interesting to see how quickly Apple implement MV3 as part of Safari because at the moment not all of the Declarative Net Request has been implemented given that they’ve only just moved to the open source implementation so maybe it is a matter of seeing WECG stabilise the specification and then build out the functionality (which will hopefully mean uBlock Origin Lite making it’s way to Safari).

On Monday this week I went for a 14km walk and then the next day I went for an 11km walk, then on Wednesday and Thursday I went for 10km on each of the days. 10km is becoming the new standard and I have found that my fitness has been improving to the point that I am able to walk faster – one of things I really needed to work on.