Matisyahu's Blog

Finished wok tonight at 10pm and then went for a walk – even if I don’t do the same amount every night my goal is to at least get out of the house to get some exercise after being inside all day. The weather has been wonderful for the last couple of days and there are many people out even at that time of night enjoying the good weather, families getting together to enjoy BBQs, heading down to the local pub for a couple of pints, the local takeaways serving people who have come back from going to the clubs in Wellington.

One thing I noticed with Safari 26.1 has been how the look and feel of the browser matches the colours of the website for example if you go to WordPress.com it changes the UI to black, Arstechnica the same thing. I guess it kind of makes sense when it comes to web applications trying to make themselves look as native as possible by having a consistent look and feel between the browser interface and the website itself so then it ends up blending into a single UI look and feel rather than there being a dissection between the browser and the web app.

I logged into work today and Google had released an update to Chrome – no regressions with the websites I use for work, it was slightly snappier but then again that could be entirely due to a clearing of cookies and cache along with rebooting my laptop. In the world of Ubiquiti the early release channel there is ‘UniFi Access Point (all U7 and E7 models) 8.3.2′ made available’. If you’re into testing early releases then give it ago but personally I’m too paranoid to take a chance so I’ll leave it up to someone more adventurous. There is the UniFi Gateways 4.4.6 which was made available as a ‘release candidate’ and it has been 7 days so we may see that been made available in the next few days because generally, assuming no show stopper bugs, they move an update from release candidate to stable release 7 days after it has been released.

One thing I did notice with my MacBook Pro and my Mac Studio when setting it up that when I connected to my access point it would only connect via 5GHz however when I upgraded to macOS 26 both of my computers now connect by default to 6GHz. I couldn’t make heads or tails regarding it so I checked the ‘System Information’ and it appears that a firmware upgrade has improved support for 6GHz. The other thing I noticed is ‘IO80211_driverkit’ which tells me that IO80211 operates in user space – DriverKit is the user space driver API that was released a couple of years ago (link). If you check under ‘Extensions’ in ‘System Information’ there are quite a few DriverKit extensions so I wouldn’t be surprised if long term Apple is working towards slimming down the kernel so that only the bare essentials are running in kernel space with everything working in user space. From what I understand Microsoft is also doing that with Windows – it’ll be interesting to see whether the adoption of FRED (Flexible Return and Event Delivery) deals with the performance penalty and latency that is typically associated with shifting between kernel mode and user mode on x86/x86-64.