Matisyahu's Blog

I was hoping to get my power bills under control after having to have my heater turned on more often than I ideally wanted but it appears that mother nature must have shares in Meridian Energy which explains the current weather. I went for a walk last night but not tonight because the weather is too unpredictable – raining then not raining then raining again. I’ve been pretty good with my calorie intake today so I’m not to worried along with the fact that I keep reminding myself of the old adage “you cannot outrun a bad diet” – calorie deficits beat exercise given the amount of exercise one has to do to burn 300-400 calories it is best to control calories and any exercise is an icing on the cake rather than controlling weight being dependent on exercise.

I’ve been tracking my Snakehive wallet case shipping from the UK – it always amazes me how common place it is to simply jump online and buy from overseas where as when I was growing up it was a matter of “if it isn’t here then you’re out of luck”. These days if I can’t get it in New Zealand then I jump online and if they don’t ship to New Zealand then I can go through YouShop either in the US or UK then add on top of that Visa/Mastercard debit cards being available the whole process is as easy as purchasing something locally. I really do hope that one day the mobile handset vendors and mobile carriers get their act together and come up with at least some sort of ‘base level’ VoLTE standard that all carriers around the world confirm to so then it is possible not to he limited to what carriers sell in their country

It’s been a few months since I moved from my Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max to Samsung S25 Ultra – I have kind of floated the idea of maybe going to Pixel 10 Pro XL or maybe a Nothing Phone 3 but they come with their own set of challenges. Sure, the Samsung S25 Ultra have many features integrated into Android that I don’t use but features such as Google Home don’t work well with Workspace where as Samsung SmartThings does a good job integrating my Arlo security camera setup, bluetooth headphones and maybe in the future Samsung television running One UI which all integrates into a single ecosystem.

There is also something that may sound silly but it is a feature of Samsung’s file manager that I like – I can link the Samsung file manager to my Google Drive and then just download my music collection I’ve backed up to the cloud down to my mobile phone. Does it take a while? I’m on a 1gbps fibre connection so so the speed is no worse than if I was transferring it directly on my computer. The benefit of having that feature built into the Samsung file manger is the fact that I don’t need to worry about MTP synchronising applications because everything can be done via the cloud. I’ve got 2TB storage in the cloud, I may as well make use of it given that I do pay for it each month with the added benefit of always having an offsite backup of everything that I consider important.