Matisyahu's Blog

I had a good night sleep but I’m still feeling sick with a sore throat and coughing but not sick enough to take time off from work so I’ve given my boss a heads up that I’ll be working from home all this week. I’ve been making sure this week that I’ve been having a good balance of fruit, vegetables and lean meat – hopefully I’ll be feeling better soon but in the meantime I’ll take it easy.

uBlock Origin Lite 2026.301.2014 is now in the App Store for both iOS and macOS as well as in the Chrome Web Store and Microsoft Edge Store. I’ve got it updated on all my devices as well as the Chrome that is installed on my Surface Laptop and next week there will be patch Tuesday which will include security updates as well as the enhancements found in the preview release which was released last week. Chrome 146 will be getting released tomorrow so that’ll also be interesting to see what improvements have been made as well.

Apple has released the third beta of 26.4 for iOS, iPadOS but macOS has been left out but then again a last minute show stopper bug could have been found so maybe that is the reason for it being held back. There appears to be quite a few interface related bug fixes relating to Liquid Glass and there are quite a bit list of changes for Safari as well, I’m also tempted to give Chrome 146 a try and see how well it performs.

Although Safari has made some significant improvements there are still bugs that keep appearing – videos that randomly pause where as with Chrome they stream smoothly, on YouTube the video will play the first 5-10 seconds then suddenly start the video again for no apparent reason plus other weird behaviour. I’m unsure whether it is a bug with Safari or whether it bug with the website where they only test with Chrome and if it works with any other browser then it is by accident rather than by design.

I’m up to episode 4 of Paradise with episode 5 will be released at the end of this week but I’m gradually catching up. I’m also working through Fallout so it’ll be interesting to see how the story evolves going forward. There are a few television shows that’ll be coming out later on this year such as Silo, Foundation and others so I’ll be keeping an eye on when they are launched.

Oh, and today I got out of the house to head down to the local cafe for a coffee and a muffin, I then had a look around at JB Hi-Fi and they have the Samsung S26 Ultra in stock running One UI 8.5. The interface has a few elements inspired by Liquid Glass such as floating toolbar at the bottom and a bubble that highlights the element you have selected. It is running version 6.12 of the kernel which is the long term support branch. It is similar to One UI 8.0 but it has further refinements which make sense given that smartphones are mature tech at this stage so any improvements aren’t going to be massive leaps forward but rather incremental improvements and refining what already works. Rumours are circulating that One UI 9 will be based on Android 17 but no details have been released nor any leaked screenshots but given how close Google and Samsung work I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a beta not too long after Android 17 public beta is shown off this year by Google.