Matisyahu's Blog

"When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'"

recent posts

  • Today was a good day.

    Today was a good day and I finally worked out what may have happened in Sunday – it appears that the AWS Connection integration with Salesforce goes pear shaped if you set yourself offline but not log out. Oh well, you live and you learn so tonight I made sure I logged out of Salesforce on Sunday so when I logged in on Wednesday I didn’t have an issue.

    Google released the weekly update for Chrome which updated it from version 139.0.7258.128 to version 139.0.7258.139 – I haven’t noticed any changes or regressions which is a sign of a good update. The uBlock Lite 2025.817.1539 has been made available however shortly after the 2025.818.x was released which is availble for Safari and Edge but it is still waiting for approval from Google (it is normally a 2 day turn around from when it is submitted). One thing to remember with Safari is if you’ve opened Safari it cane take a few seconds for uBlock Origin Lite to fully load so that is something you may want to check by clicking on the uBlock Origin Lite before loading any websites so then you know the extension is active and is ready to start content blocking.

    I went for a longer walk tonight because the weather was so good – wasn’t too cold, fresh air, with a total walk of 17.4km which took 3 hours. Today I had a calorie deficit plus the exercise I did today which offset a hearty meal I had at mums with soft shell tacos with plenty of salad along with the left over mince and salad I had when I got home because it was so tasty. If you’re wanting the Old El Paso style seasoning then Masterfoods in NZ have ‘Steak seasoning’ which has the same smell and taste which works great on a variety of different meat. I’m looking forward to having some lamb burgers on my day off – I went with the Silver Fern Farms rumps that’ll cook in the oven and I’ll match it up with some low carb burger buns with lots of salad, beetroot and some ploughman’s relish.

  • A night off from exercise.

    It’s cold, it’s rainy and it is miserable so I have decided to take a day off from exercising and instead enjoy a relaxing time at home with the heater going and keeping warm. I went to mum’s place to have dinner and order a ‘Beelink SER9 Pro AMD Ryzenâ„¢ AI 9 HX 370’ computer (link) to replace her current Intel NUC i3 (7th generation) that is too old to run WIndows 11 because it doesn’t meet the hardware requirements. I’ve ordered that online but we’ll be heading down to the local computer store to purchase the keyboard, mouse and monitor – we’ve also got to to organise the printer and scanner because at the moment the office is a bit chaotic. Regarding what will happen with the old computer, I’ll probably set it up as a Linux server on my network to operate as a streaming server for music and video with it setup in my office since that is where my router is located. I have to admit, I am tempted to move from having a Mac to having a AMD based computer but I’m going to wait until I see what happens with macOS 26 and Apple’s other platforms.

    The update for uBlock Origin has made its way to the Chrome store however it is still waiting for approval for the Mac App Store so it’ll be interesting to see what happens. There are a few bug fixes for Safari to work around bugs so I’m hoping that we’re going to see Apple move to fix those bugs in a timely manner although I am not confident given that the bug was reported in 2023 and it still hasn’t been fixed over 2 years after it was reported – but hey, I’d love to be proven wrong. What I’m hoping is that if it doesn’t get fixed in the first release of macOS 26 that one of the 26.x releases will receive an update. I guess it is a matter of priorities given that over the 15.x they’ve been making big updates to Safari in the 15.x updates.

    There has been a 7th beta released but I’m unsure how close they are to a release candidate but it’ll be interesting to see how far off they are from iOS stabilising given that there is the iPhone event in September so it’ll be interesting to see when the announcement is, when the phones will start shipping to customers and how that will line up with the release of iOS 26 (macOS tend to get released after iOS releases). The Safari Technology Preview 226 will be released in the next few days and tomorrow will be the release of an update for Chrome 139 with Chrome 140 stable marked for next week and then the following week it’ll be released to the public – the features that’ll be included with Chrome 140 can be found here (link). It is frustrating how Google can move so fast at addressing bugs and problems and yet, as mentioned before, there are bugs in the Webkit bug database over 2 years old and still not addressed. I could understand if Apple was some plucky small startup but they’re a massive company so there is no excuse for not hiring the man power to address these shortcomings particularly when you consider the recent layoffs of programmers from multiple companies – there is a massive talent pool they can choose from.

  • A good workout.

    I’ve just come back from a 24km walk – my legs are sore, my feet are sore and I am exausted but I feel good after having a good work out. I guess that feeling is in part due to setting out a goal and then going to achieve it and not giving up at any point even though I was getting tired and my legs felt as though my feet were covered in cement. I’m now laying in bed relaxing and looking forward to a good night sleep after all that.

    On Tuesday I’m going to pick up some more groceries and maybe while I’m there I’ll pick up a few extra things from the butchers especially if they’re on special – maybe I’ll be lucky enough to find some lamb that is close to the best before date that they’ve marked down in price. I remember the last time I was at the supermarket I was able to pick up a rack of lamb for $10 off the original price so I grabbed the 2 that they had and when I got home I put them in the freezer to have on my day off. I’m still on the look out for the low carb high fibre burger buns because if I am going to have some lamb burgers I want to ensure that I’ve got some good macros rather than it being a meal of empty calories.

  • A good start to the week.

    I woke up this morning just before midday and headed down to Awanui Labs which does the blood testing – the test was for liver function and blood sugar to see how things are progressing. I’ve continued losing weight since my last blood test so hopefully that should translate to better blood test results but at the end of the day I’m doing all I can so hopefully it’ll translate to a good result.

    Another update has been released for uBlock Origin Lite has been released – uBOLite 2025.817.1539 has been made available on Edge but it is waiting for approval on the Chrome extensions store. It has quite a few changes so it’ll be interesting to see whether it’ll translate into any user visible changes that are noticeable.

    Oh how I love online banking – I had some money I inherited and like a good steward of my finances I put them into a term deposit for 6 months (I bank with ASB Bank) at 3.80%, if I wanted more than that I would have had to lock it away for 5 years and that is far too long. I’ve also paid off almost all the debt that I have which has put me on a much better financial footing long term. The whole experience has reduced the amount of stress down to zero or as close to zero as possible.

    On a side note, what we see with the Trump administration is the end result of congress for decades delegating more and more power to the executive branch which has allowed congress to abdicate their responsibility for holding the executive to account and make the tough decisions. Two things people need to realise is this a) Once power is consolidated in the hands of a small number of people or one person that power is never given up voluntarily and b) If you have a look at the dictatorships that emerged in the early 20th century their power grab was enabled through emergency powers granted in the constitution who made sure there was always a crisis or an emergency to justify that consolidation of power – “you need to give me the power to protect the country in this time of crisis” they will claim.

    We only need to look at the Trump administration invoking ‘International Emergency Economic Powers Act’ in justification of tariffs (tariffs are never mentioned in the bill itself but by the time something is done the damage is already done) with the court system so feckless and lacking in testicular fortitude to do something about it. I don’t expect the Supreme Court to do anything about it given that the ‘conservative’ judges (I put in quotations for the very reason that they’re as far from traditional conservatism as possible – a conservative would oppose the consolidation of power in the hands of the executive as many high profile conservatives have voiced their concerns going as far back as the passing of the Patriot Act) will roll over and allow the expansion of executive power to do whatever they want which of course will magically change the moment a Democratic president gets into the White House.

  • End of another week, start of the weekend.

    Finally made it through the week and I’m looking forward to the weekend. Today was kind of weird, I work from home answering calls but no calls came through, logged out and logged back in, refreshed the page etc. so I assumed that maybe I had been put one of the other queues. Long story short I spent all today replying to emails and other office work that needed to be done – I’m one of those people who can deal with ‘doing nothing’ for a short period of time but then I feel the need that I have to do something productive rather than just watching YouTube videos or read news. Long story short, I got a tonne of emails out of the way and other office stuff so at least if there is a follow up it isn’t as though I’ve wasted my time during the day.

    It is the one habit I have to admit I’ve taken from working in the fast food industry which is the idea of not leaving work for the next crew who comes in or in my case when we closed up at the end of the night the last thing the morning crew want to do, on top of preparing for the day (cutting tomatoes, preparing the condiments for the burger board etc) to clean up what should have been done properly by the night crew. It is the reason I don’t like the idea of leaving stuff that rolls over to the new week because the problem is that eventually it builds up as a little bit is left over at the end of each week. A bit like cleaning, if there an extra bit of detailed cleaning done each night then it means there doesn’t need to be a big top to bottom clean and a mad rush around when head office come in to have a look around.

    That does into my bigger pet peeve which is the mythology of being more efficient by multi-tasking – the reality is that you’re better off focusing on one thing at time, giving it all your attention rather than switching between tasks and giving each task part of your attention. The problem is if you only give part of your attention then you’re bound to make mistakes. The best thing to do is set a list of tasks and work through then one after the other, giving each task your full attention and getting it don’t quickly. It is the reason when I worked at a supermarket when I came in at around 6am I would bring the pallets out before the shop opened and just go hard at it filling up the freezes for around 4-5 hours so then by the time the first wave of customers came in the freezers were all topped up and it was just a matter of topping up during the day without having the stress of running around all day.

    In a recent developer release of Windows 11 it appears that Microsoft is focusing on unifying their UI around a common UI framework. This was uncovered by phantomofearth over on X/Twitter:

    It is work in progress but the one thing people need to recognise is the fact that yes Apple were able to deliver dark mode but that was because they rewrote Finder back in Mac OS X 10.6 in Cocoa (along with remaining components still using Carbon to be moved over to Cocoa) around 16 years ago meaning that making dark mode available was a fairly easy process. In the case of Microsoft not only are they gradually replacing the components of the Windows shell but they’re also creating a new framework as they go about doing it (see Windows App SDK, XAML and all those other wonderful projects on Github). It’ll be interesting to see what happens with Windows 11 25H2 – personally I don’t see it being released for 25H2 given all the rumours that it’ll be a relatively conservative update so it wouldn’t surprise me if 26H2 ends up being an update with a UI refresh, maybe an official announcement that Control Panel has been removed? one can only hope I guess.

    On Monday I’ll visit mum and organise ordering a Beelink SER9 Pro AMD Ryzenâ„¢ AI 9 HX 370 running Windows 11 but I’ll order a new keyboard, mouse and monitor from a local reseller. Regarding the phone, I’ll see what mum is interested in given that she is looking for a phone with a big screen but I’m wondering whether she would be better off getting an Android phone such as one from Samsung given that her laptop is a Chromebook and computer is running Windows 11. Regarding the laptop, I wonder whether we should replace it with one running Windows 11 given how it would work better with Android or an iPhone through the use of the Phone Link that Microsoft provides.

  • That was a long walk.

    I decided to go for a longer walk than usual tonight after work, 16.2km, and when I came back the hot shower felt so good soothing the muscles in my legs and my sore feet. It is funny how the small things in life such as a hot shower can bring so much joy after a long day at work then followed by a power walk. I’m might watch a video television shows before going to bed although if I am too tired I might just wait until tomorrow or maybe Monday – no urgency to see then, they aren’t going to suddenly disappear.

    Monday I’m going to head in to get a routine blood test to see how things are progressing – ensure that my blood sugar is normal (hba1c test) along with any other things that need to be on the lookout for. Although it is annoying it is best to keep up routine checks and catch a problem early when it is treatable vs when it is caught too late resulting in a lower quality of life (and possibly shortened life).

  • An expansive vision of Windows for the future?

    There has been a lot of noise made about the person in charge of Windows speculating about the future of the Windows platform (link) in particular there was a focus by many on the comment regarding the use of keyboard and mice. What I think was lost in translation is the fact that behind the vision of the future there appears to be a renewed focus on Windows as a living and breathing platform rather than a platform in retreat. I say that because ever since shutdown Windows on smartphones the general vibe from Microsoft was a future of Microsoft where their operating system is a legacy system that will be kept around for desktops and laptops but Microsoft had no interest in developing Windows beyond that. Long story short, Microsoft had given up on trying to put Windows on any other device other than the devices it was already running on.

    What I thought was interesting, that many people overlooked from the video, when talking about moving beyond keyboard and mouse I think the context that was lost wast the implication that Microsoft was going to start looking at Windows being on form factors beyond the traditional laptop and desktops. The whole vision, to me at least, implied that their retreat from expanding beyond laptops and desktops has stopped and that they see a future where Windows will be in more devices – maybe we’ll even see a return of Windows on the smartphone? there is already work being done to address the much reported situation of handheld games consoles performing worse when running Windows when compared to the exact same hardware is running Linux. The idea of Windows on a the smart phone again isn’t all that far fetched given that a portable games console isn’t too far from a smartphone especially given that many include a web browser, app stores etc.

    Maybe this is the way in which Microsoft can see themselves getting back into the smartphone market – through portable gaming consoles then working their way up from there. It’ll be interesting therefore to see what Microsoft will do to slim down Windows to make it more efficient on the same hardware that Linux is being offered on. Many things are happening around the world that are disrupting the old order – at the moment Apple Pay and Google Pay along with Visa and Mastercard are they way people conduct contactless payments but in the European Union there is work being done on the digital Euro and linking it to ones bank account so that it bypasses the Visa and Mastercard system along with not relying on Google Pay or Apple Pay. Large numbers of applications these days are multiplatform and depend on web technologies which put Microsoft at an advantage when they embraced Chromium as the basis of their web browser along with it also WebView2 forming the basis on which applications written using web based technologies can run. Most of the games that exist depend on DirectX which means that many of the legacy win32 components aren’t used by games so even if Microsoft start pruning off parts of the operating system thus requiring minimal changes by developers all for the sake of getting a more efficient operating system then opportunities may open.

    The reason why I bring this up is because the issues that lead to Windows Mobile never gaining traction are different this time and if Microsoft positions its platform to take advantage of the changes taking place then the models on which Apple and Google built their mobile business may not longer hold true in the future. In the past these platforms could hold onto customers because they were locked into their ecosystem but as new options open the lock in becomes weaker to the point that the ability to move to a different platform becomes easier. This is the reason why Apple jealously guards it’s iMessage protocol while doing a half assed effort at their RCS implementation because the moment Apple implements RCS or allows iPhone users to make use of the Jibe RCS network Google runs (particularly in countries where carriers don’t offer RCS – see New Zealand as an example) is the moment that one of the lock ins disappear thus making moving between platforms a lot less painful experience.

  • Another chilly night.

    Came back from my nightly 11.6km walk tonight around an hour ago, I quickly jumped into a hot shower to warm up along with making a mug of instant miso soup to warm me up further. It really is something that is so satisfying and the calories are so miniscule that I think the next time I go shopping I’m going to buy a few more packets of it for good luck. For me, I put two sachets in a cup because the sachets they include are only for 160ml where as my bug is more than 300ml. I can never work out why coffee and soup companis have such bizarre cup sizes given that almost every cup, even the Arcoroc Coffee Fumer Mugs are 250ml so I’m trying to work out who has a 160ml or 187ml cup?

    On some good news, uBlock Origin Lite 2025.812.1339 is now available on both the Mac App Store as well as the Google Chrome extensions store. Nothing to report regarding Chrome but what I can report is that the few strange bugs on Safari have been fixed (I’m running Safari 18.6) but it’ll be interesting to see how performs with the Safari included with macOS 26 an whether the fixes related to the subframe issue has been fixed the lingering issues that have cause a world of pain for extension developers wanting to target Safari. I’m looking forward to see what happens when macOS is released because if it turns out that the issues I have experienced with Safari are addressed then I maybe heading back from Google Workspace to iCloud (along with moving back to having an iPhone).

    I really need to wait until macOS 26 is released before making any judgement because I could imagine if there are going to be major overhauls in the browser then it is something they’ll hold off for a major release with the current release receiving incremental improvements. It is one of the things that is frustrating about the reviews of the beta releases of macOS 26 is the lack of any coverage regarding Safari and how it performs in regards to extensions, website compatibility, speed particularly on websites that make heavy use of javsscript, web assembly, web workers etc. There also hasn’t been any coverage of Mail and custom domain support etc. so I guess it’ll end up being me writing a multipage dissertation when macOS 26 is released.

    Just on a side note, I’m hoping to get a couple of days off when macOS 26 is released so then I can spend all day geeking out, upgrading all my devices and if it works out well I’ll pop down to the store to buy an iPhone 17 Pro Max (I’m going to be saving up over the next couple of months so I can pay cash for it). I’m happy to hold off puchasing because I don’t imagine seeing Snakehive having a product ready on launch day not to mention that if a refreshed Apple TV is launched then I may also have a look into getting one particularly if it ends up having WiFi 7 support which will take advantage of the 6GHz band on my access point.

  • An uneventful start to the week.

    It was a rather uneventful start to the week – work was the usual and nothing out of the ordinary. I have to admit, I did enjoy having a full fridge rather than the last couple of weeks of working through what I had left in my cupboard. After work I went for my nightly walk, 11.6km, the temperature is pretty chilly out there being 6 degrees celsius but I wrapped up warm with my oversized hoodie and tracksuit pants although I’m sure when the weather warms up I’ll be complaining about how it is too hot and I’m sweating too much.

    A Chrome update was released today which upgraded it from Version 139.0.7258.67 to Version 139.0.7258.128 which is a bit of a leap when compared to the previous updates. Plenty of bug fixes and security fixes so it is best to get onto it. I also checked my mobile phone and the upgrade to 139 appeared so I updated to that as well. After coming home from my nightly walk I checked for updates and Samsung had released the August 2025 update which is around 550mb or so:

    There were also a few updates from Samsung through the Samsung Store so I got that all updated as wel, a reboot and then I was back online again. I haven’t noticed any changes which is a good sign that the update was uneventful just like any good update should be. The Google Play Services update for August hasn’t been released yet but they tend to come out at random times rather than some sort of schedule (even when I had a Pixel they would come out at random times). uBOLite 2025.812.1339 has been released on Microsoft Edge but not available on Chrome extensions store or the App Store.

    macOS 15.7 RC2 was released recently so it’ll probably be released either towards the end of this week, assuming there is a critical update that they need to get out to users, but I’d say the most likely scenario is the release being done on Tuesday or Wednesday NZ Time. Beta 6 of the next platform release by Apple was made available but the release date won’t be known until the iPhone event in September so it’ll be interesting to see how. much of a gap between the iOS release and macOS release is – macOS 26 being released maybe at the same time a 26.0.x release is made available could be a possibility.

  • That weekend went quickly.

    The weekend ended up finishing a lot quicker than expected. I went for my big grocery shop today and funny enough the amount I spent was less than expected – not because the prices of food went down (wouldn’t that be nice!) but rather because I first of all had something to eat so I wasn’t buying on an empty stomach and secondly I went in with a plan rather than rather than just randomly purchasing things that I thought I need but there was no plan how I would see how it all worked together to make meals. I bought a few extra items for the freezer although I skipped the lamb – I would have loved to get some but the price is too high so I couldn’t justify to myself purchasing it but I’m sure it’ll come on special at some point at which time I’ll grab a few extra items for the freezer so I can use it at a later date.

    I went for an 11.6km walk and I thought I would still be sore after the 20km walk on Monday but I actually felt pretty good after wards. I think that with more frequent walking it has allowed my body to recover from exercise sessions with the benefit of walking over running as a big guy meaning the impact on the joints is a lot lower. When I was slimmer when younger I couldn’t stand running – I looked horribly uncoordinated and it was not enjoyable where as a brisk walk at around 5.8kmph is good enough to burn a few calories and get some fresh air.

    On Wednesday there is patch Tuesday for Windows 11 24H2 and Chrome – will be interesting to see what Chrome brings with the update. I also checked over on Github and uBOLite 2025.812.1339 has been released which will appear in the Chrome store and Apple store in the next few days. There are a lot of new features along with bug fixes relating to Safari with many features that impact all the supported platforms. It normally takes 2 days for it to appear on their respective stores – for some reason it appears on the Microsoft store before the other two which makes me wonder whether it is due to the volume of extensions that Microsoft receives is lower or Microsoft has review teams in more locations around the world so that there is never a backlog of things needing review and approval.