I decided to head down to the local store that is open late to pick up some milk and while I was there I picked up a couple of sandwiches on multigrain bread (the health benefits are secondary to the the fact that I like the taste of multigrain bread) along with a slice. It’s an 8km walk to and from the store so it allows me to squeeze in some exercise after work while also getting something sorted out. On a side note, the milk is no more expensive than if I bought it from a normal supermarket so it isn’t as though I’m paying a premium for the convenience of getting it at a store which is open all hours of the night.
I’ve got a freezer full of food plus a pantry of canned goods so what I’m going to be doing over the next few weeks is basically get to the point where I have an empty cupboard. I’ve taken out some pumpkin soup today from the freeze and I’ll work through that over the next few days then I’ve got some mince, sausages etc. I’ll probably get the mince out first since it is already cooked up and seasoned so all it needs to be is reheated. The sausages I’ll probably grab a few extra ingredients and make deviled sausages with the benefit being that any leftovers I can reheat the next day which is a quick nuke in the microwave (I only get 30 minutes for lunch so every minute counts).
One thing I just noticed is that the Samsung S25 Ultra that I have is made in Vietnam – I heard that Samsung had moved some of their production out of China but it is interesting to see that at least in the case of the Samsung phones sold in New Zealand that they’re being assembled in Vietnam. The July 2025 update is rolling out gradually but unless it is really, really, really urgent we tend to get the update in around the middle to the end of the month so I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up seeing it close to the end of July/beginning of August (the June 2025 update didn’t appear until the later half of June). The build code they use in NZ is XNZ which is shared between the three major carrier so I wouldn’t be surprised that Samsung wait until they get the go ahead by all three carriers before an update is made available. It’ll be interesting to see when OneUI 8 will be made available – Android 16 is apparently being released in two releases with the first being the API stable and the second release including the user visible features. The latest test release of OneUI 8 has the kernel updated from 6.6.30 to 6.6.77 however that may change in the future given that there have been no firm dates on when it’ll be made available but with that being said I think we’re at ‘peak smartphone’ in terms of features – improvements are always welcome but they’re never going to be on the scale that we saw in the past such as Android making big under the hood changes that resulted in massive leaps forward in performance, power and memory efficiency etc. Google are still working on improvements, they’re noticeable but they’re not on the same scale in the past.
It is interesting though that with the role of cloud computing coming to the forefront and just how much time is spend now in the web browser, the underlying operating system at least as so far as the desktop is becoming largely irrelevant. I remember back in the days on comp.os.linux.advocacy USENET newsgroups and the arguments between Linux and Windows users, how Linux wasn’t up to the task because it lacked <insert here big name title> but fast forward to today and unless you’re part of a legacy/establish business, most are using Google Workspace with Google Docs with most young employees exposure to that when they were at high school where they would have a Chromebook or a Chromebox, logging in, accessing their documents in the cloud, sharing them with classmates etc. so the idea of running a native application on the desktop is a rather strange experience for many which makes me think that even Microsoft is thinking of a post Windows future where Windows will hang around as a legacy system but eventually it’ll free them up to remove backwards compatibility as those legacy software titles are replaced with cloud based software running in Microsoft Edge (or whatever browser the end user prefers using).
Side note: uBlock Origin Lite 2025.709.1622 has been made available. At the moment it is available on the Microsoft Edge web extensions store however it is still waiting for approval for the Chrome web extensions store. In the release there is the usual filters update but also support for custom CSS-based cosmetic filters has been added. It appears that gradually uBlock Origin Lite is acquiring many of the features that exist in MV2 uBlock Origin extension found on Firefox but hopefully with the work WECG are doing that eventually MV3 will provide pretty much all the functionality content blocking developers need be it requiring some change in their extensions to get it working vs how it was done with MV2 based API.
LIfe gets better with age – what I mean by that is that with maturity you realise what is and isn’t important, what is worth getting worked up about, things that you were really interested in you quickly realised were a distraction. The benefit of getting older is the appreciation that you have a limited amount of time on earth and as a result you start to triage what you spend your limited amount of time on and what can be easily discarded or to quote Marie Kondo “does it spark joy?”.
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