It is less of a single word but more the use of hyperbole loaded word(s) when talking about something that is more of a minor inconvenience rather than a major issue – it isn’t a major issue, it is just a slight annoyance. A major issue would be turning on your oven, you walk out of your kitchen, the oven explodes and takes out half of your house, what you experienced not being able to log into your lotto account is a minor inconvenience. There appears to be a section of the population who have convinced themselves that everything that occurs in their life is a ‘major issue’ – main actor syndrome where they believe that everything in the universe is created just for them and by virtue of existing that certain things should or shouldn’t happen to them and if it doesn’t go according to that plan the it is a great travesty of injustice.
"When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'"
-
I woke up early on Monday to jump on a bus to pick up some odd bits and pieces from the supermarket for the day with the big shop being done on Tuesday. On Tuesday I’ll be popping down but this time I’ve made sure I’ve actually got a list of things I need to purchase and if I have some extra money I’ll pick up a few extra items to have some extra food just in case I can’t get down to the supermarket for whatever particular reason. Tonight I went for a 20km walk – I needed a good work out after having a bit of a treat today, some fresh crusty bread along with a sweet treat on the side.
Samsung is looking at releasing One UI 8.0 (based on Android 16) in around September however they’re gradually rolling out the August 2025 update which will probably arrive in New Zealand around mid August or possibly towards the end the of the month. I’ve been watching videos and it is a sad state of affairs just how bad the Tech YouTube scene has gotten with the clickbait content, the hysterical nonsense where on one hand people complain that Samsung released an upgrade too early and how they should have tested it for longer but the moment that Samsung does take its time to ensure the release is solid then the same people are whining and whinging about how it is being delayed.
It is one of the reasons I’ve become less and less interested in those creating technology orientated content on YouTube because the environment has gotten so toxic and filled with people who have convinced themselves that being negative about everything somehow makes them better than those who cheerlead for companies and products that don’t deserve it. Do such people realise that they’re no better than the cheerleaders, that they’re pretty much doing the same thing but in the opposite direction? It reminds me of reactionaries during the COVID pandemic and how they convinced themselves that because they’re doing the exact opposite of what the experts were advising that it somehow made them ‘independent thinkers’. Being a reactionary doesn’t make you some sort of ‘independent thinker’ because ultimately you position regarding something isn’t based on a case by case basis but rather simply shaped by taking the opposite of whatever is the prevailing orthodoxy even if the prevailing orthodoxy is correct.
It reminds me of a YouTuber whining about how the Samsung S25 Ultra wasn’t a big change over last years offering but such people never explain what they actually want. It’s like when a customer complains about something and you ask them what they would like the organisation you for to do for them – a refund? yet they keep whining and complaining but never getting to the point. We’re at peak smartphones, people are keeping their phones for 3-4 years, maybe longer, the changes being made when it comes to the software and hardware is incremental because the heavy lifting/big changes were done over many years to get to this point. Most people who upgrade to the Samsung S25 Ultra are going to be someone who probably bought the S20 (or possibly Apple customer looking to switch) series and looking to upgrade just as people interested in the iPhone 16 or holding off for the iPhone 17 series probably have an iPhone 11 or 12.
-
Finally a night without rain which has allowed me to go for a 11.6km walk and when I came back I jumped in to have a hot shower. The weather is a bit cold outside but I can handle the cold with a good jumper and I guess it is a good incentive to walk at a fast pace to keep warm. It always feels good after working all day to get out of the house and get some fresh air, see the sights and sounds even if it is at 10-11pm – the night crew is out doing upgrades on the rail lines which is great to see.
I’ll be popping down to the supermarket on Monday to grab a few items to get me through the day and then on Tuesday I’ll do a bit shop because at the moment my cupboards are more or less empty with only a few tinned goods left. On Tuesday the Snakehive case for my phone will arrive which is a bit annoying because at the moment it is at the Auckland sorting facility so I would have thought it would come down on an overnight track from Auckland to Wellington but for some strange reason they don’t have a truck that does it – either that or the courier service I paid for doesn’t qualify for it.
I’ve been following the development of Windows 11 25H2, specifically regarding the work they’re doing around finding a way that security products can operate in user space after the whole Crowdstrike fiasco. What will be interesting is whether we’ll see maybe a solution to the persistent issues surrounding Easy Anti-Cheat causing kernel panics. In a perfect world gamers would flat out refuse to buy games that include Easy Anti-Cheat which would force the hand of the games companis to come up with a better solution but given how so many gamers are like drug addicts needing their fix – perpetually whining about the price, increasing system specs, buggy releases etc but ultimately caving in when push comes to shove.
As for the whole Intel situation – I think the end goal is to spin off the fabrication side of the business into a joint venture with either Samsung or TSMC then Intel signing an exclusive contract with that new joint venture. At the moment I have heard that they’ve got issues with their 18A technology and the 14A is looking uncertain unless they can secure a big customer such as Apple. I could imagine Apple maybe pushing TSMC into buying half of the spun off Intel chip fabrication business which would ensure that TSMC has Apple, AMD, nVidia and Intel locked which would help the tech giants avoid the significant tariffs that Trump recently announced. The benefit to Intel of selling off half of its fabrication division would bring in enough money to make the big investments to catch up to AMD. It will be interesting to see what happens given that Intel has many challenges ahead of itself but then again this is the end result of being at the top for so long that they took their position in the market for granted and are now realising that being at the top doesn’t last forever – you have to continuously fight to maintain that position.
-
I’ve been following the development of iOS 26 and macOS 26 to see what ends up happening – I’ve held off from any major criticism because when a product in beta is released the focus is seeing how well an idea works in the real world when normal people use it then make tweaks accordingly. I found a video that really articulates the issue I have with the direction taken by Apple:
For me, I liked Aqua when it was first launched with the ‘lickable’ interface elements, the pinstripe look – then combine that with the fun colours of the iMac, it made the idea of using a computer ‘fun’ rather than some burdensome thing that one wishes to avoid at any cost. What I see with the ‘liquid glass’ is a faux futurism of glass surfaces, the sort of see through touch screens you see in movies like the ‘Minority Report’, a substitute for actual genuinely improving products so instead giving them the thin veneer of progress in much the same way that Trump uses guilding to make an another wise cheap item appear to be luxurious to those who believe money can buy class.
As I come back to what I said about iCloud, Webkit and other key parts of the Apple platform ecosystem, they’re not making the investment in the areas that matter – they may not be something the user know about but they certainly know when something goes wrong. A bit like water pipes and water treatement, no one thinks about it when it is working fine but they certainly are thinking about it when things go pear shaped.
When Apple fails to keep up with web standards in terms of compliance and fixing implementation bugs then it isn’t surprising that Chrome has a massive lead in market share on macOS. It should be a wake up call to Apple that even though Safari is bundled with macOS that people are going out of their way to install Chrome on macOS. Why does that matter? because market dominance dictates how much influence Apple has when it comes to shaping the web standards of today and in the future, whether certain standards gain traction based on if or when they’re implemented – does Apple want to be a follower or a leader? Do they want to have a chair at the big table where the decisions are being made or are they going to let the likes of Microsoft and Google shape the future of the internet?
The other problem is halo effect of the ‘friend who is good with computers’ or the ‘family member who is good with computers’ where Apple may have won them with their hardware and macOS but lost them when they cannot run their favourite extensions on Safari because the implementation of MV3 is half baked at best. Such individuals have a halo effect in that they also influence their friends and family – if you lose them then you lose the normies. This is the big problem that impacted Windows Vista, they lost the ‘friend who is good with computers’ or the ‘family member who is good with computers’ to the point that normies would repeat ‘I heard Windows Vista sucks’ even before giving it a chance (don’t get me wrong, it was far from perfect but after the first service pack many of the issues were resolved – see the ‘Mojave Experiment’).
It reminds me of the customer satisfaction survey term called Net Promoter Score (NPS) where a customer will rate their customer service experience from 1-10 and the score given by the customer that customer is categorised as either a detractor, neutral or a promoter. The best way to visualise a promoter is someone who will talk positively about your company to friends and family, for example, you’re talking about banks and they’ll talk positively about the bank they bank with – they would be considered a promoter. You can spend all you want on marketing but what has the biggest impact are the experiences friends and family relay to each other because they are considered to have come from a trustworthy source whereas the only impact marketing has is to tell people that the product exists but it is very rare to win over the hearts and minds to the same extent as endorsements from those they trust.
-
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.
-
I’ve finally got my act together and ordered a proper case for my phone after rocking along with this el cheapo one I picked up when I bought the phone. The problem is that the plastic holder that the phone sits in, the plastic is cracking, the corners are chipped – long story short the plastic is flimsy and I don’t think it is going to hold up so I decided to purchase a case from Snakehive which will be arriving by either Monday or Tuesday next week – the case being a leather wallet style case which will protect it along with having all that I need when I leave home.
I’ve setup my DMARC on my DNS settings – unsure whether it is absolutely necessary but all the writing I’ve seen so far said it is recommended so I’ve set it up on both of my domains that I own. I’ve got that all sorted out and the email has been running rock solid. During that time checking through the various online accounts I have, I checked to see if my details were up to date and many of them were out of date so it worked out for the best. I also organised my email alot better – there is such things as too much organisation by having too many folders and subfolders so I’ve simplified the oraganisation which has made it easier to navigate on the Android GMail app.
I’ve upgraded Chrome from 138 to 139 along with the latest version of uBlock Origin Lite being made available. There are quite a few serious security bugs that were fixed in the release so I’d advise that if you haven’t updated yet to check to see whether you’re up to date. So far I haven’t noticed any regressions and the recent uBlock Origin Lite upgrade is slightly faster on sites where a lot of filter rules are being applied. Even though updates to filters need to be submitted like one updates the whole extension the 2 day processing time hasn’t appeared to be too much of an issue in terms of keeping up with pace at which web content needs to be blocked at. I’ve had a look at the changes planned for Chrome 140 (link) and some of the functionality gap is being closed between Chrome on the desktop vs Chrome on Android – bringing SharedWorkers to Android since MV3 heavily relies on the use of service workers infrastructure I wouldn’t be surprised if it is part of the larger goal of bringing extensions support to Chrome for Android.
Just on a side note, if you are thinking of moving to Android I would suggest subscribing to Pocket Casts because it is a far better alternative to Apple Podcasts than YouTube Music. It is the one thing that is annoying which is the fact that Google Podcasts was a great service built on top of Google Search. I can see the reasoning behind wanting to standardise media, be it video, music or podcasts, to be under the same YouTube brand umbrella but the problem is that the music functionality leaves a lot to be desired – tap on artist and rather than it being broken down to albums then to individual songs it just comes up with an almighty list of music and god help you if you have a big library of music because it more or less cripples it – works great I guess as a music streaming service but to play back locally stored music then you’re better off buying PowerAmp which can handle libraries of up to 6000+ music tracks without breaking a sweat.
-
I mentioned previously about experimenting with iCloud custom domain hosting and getting around the 3 aliases per domain by making use of subdomains thus a theoretical 15 aliases if one were to use a domain plus 4 subdomains. When experimenting it found a few problems with the idea with the first being that there were several services I tested it with (sending email from a subdomain) resulted in it being sent straight to to the spam folder. I thought it may have had something to do with a lack of a DMAC entry in my DNS settings so I ended up giving it a try again but the same issue occurred.
Long story short, it sounded like a good idea at the time but if the emails you send have a high likelihood of heading to the spam folder then it is going to cause problems particularly when emailing people who aren’t tech savvy resulting in people never receiving the email. What I decided to do is keep with Google Workspace, Chrome and Android.
-
I made a blog post not too long ago about waiting for uBlock Origin Lite to appear in the App Store and within a few hours of making that post it suddenly appeared. I’ve installed it on my Mac, copied the settings over from when I had it installed on Chrome and started using it straight away. One thing to keep it mind is that if you’ve installed it may take a few seconds for it to load but most of the time if you’ve already setup up uBlock Origin Lite then you’re probably not going to be clicking on it straight away once the browser has loaded. Apart from that little quirk I am very happy – tested this newer version (the previous were tested using the TestFlight build) with several websites and it is running perfectly.
So I’ve spent today migrating all my emails from Google Workspace to iCloud, setting up the new domains including subdomains for emails, cancelling the subscription on Pocket Casts, Google Workspace and then doing a bulk delete of YouTube subscriptions on my Gmail account then downloading the YouTube subscriptions from my YouTube account on Google Workspace to the YouTube on my Gmail account. Tomorrow I’ll be getting paid so I’ll get YouTube Premium working on my Gmail account and in the mean time my Apple TV has been configured so that it is now logged into the correct YouTube account.
One weird quirk I noticed is that I signed out of my Messages app then logged in – before I had done that I had manually added the aliases for my custom domain however when I opened up the Mail app the aliases had automatically populated with all the aliases I have. It would be nice if Apple ensured the behaviour was consistent – even a button where one could press to manually synchronise settings would be a good start.
-
The one thing I found limiting about iCloud custom domain support was the limit of three aliases per domain but I could never get my head around the idea of how to setup a subdomain so then the number of aliases can be 15 in total (3 aliases per domain/subdomain). There is a difference regarding the instructions Apple sends and what you enter. For example, below are the instructions but you remain @ with the subdomain.
TXT:
Type TXT
Host @
Value apple-domain=<redacted>SPF:
Type TXT
Host @
Value “v=spf1 include:icloud.com ~all”MX:
Type MX
Host @
Priority 10
Value mx01.mail.icloud.com.MX:
Type MX
Host @
Priority 10
Value mx02.mail.icloud.com.DKIM:
Type CNAME
Host sig1._domainkey.<insert subdomain here>
Value sig1.dkim.<insert domain/subdomain here>.at.icloudmailadmin.com.I’ve got 21 aliases in total with some of those being consolidated and then eventually getting it down or below 15 in total – why have a separate one for utilities and insurance when inreality they’re all bills so they may as well be put under the same email as the utilities. Yeah, I know, I could use the ‘hide my email’ but sometimes you want an alias with professional name rather than giving out your main email address. I’m going to keep the domain setup and keep regularly testing it to see whether I have any problems with it because if everything keeps going well over the next 2-3 months I may end up getting an iPhone and passing my Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra to mum since she is wanting to have a phone with a larger screen – I’d sooner give it to her rather than trying to sell it online and only getting a fraction back of what I originally paid for it.
The good news keeps on coming with the icing on the cake being the release of uBlock Origin Lite for Safari (link) which at the moiment is pending approval but having run the recent beta/testflight versions it is up to the same filtering standards that I have come to expect from uBlock Origin Lite running on Chrome. I’ve been running it with a few websites that tend to be a bit crafty and can work around content blockers I’ve used in the past but uBlock Origin Lite does a good job stamping out those attempts to circumvent the content blocker. It’ll also be available for iOS as well – which is one of the things I miss from iOS is the fact that Apple doesn’t cripple Safari on iOS by not allowing extensions like how Google does with with Chrome (although that may change with the move to replace ChromeOS with Android given the number of businesses that use ChromeOS that also depend on extensions – the workplace where I work being just that).
-
With all the kerfuffle occurring regarding Trump and his administration there has been a trend developing of decoupling from the United States or more specifically United States based technology giants in favour of domestic providers of cloud services. There is the ‘European Alternatives’ website (link) that I mentioned before which provides a pretty good list of providers but the big stumbling block is in regards to finding DeGoogled phones that are also compatible with carriers in New Zealand. In the past it was fairly easy because all you had to do is find out whether the phones supported the frequencies for your carrier and if they did then it was all good to go but unfortunately with the move to 4G and 5G, and shutting down the 3G network, the fall back to 3G voice will be removed resulting in VoLTE being the only option. The problem is that VoLTE is a minefield due to the lack of any sort of consistent standards that are mandatory along with a whole lot of optional features resulting in the mess that exists today – your phone may support VoLTE but your carrier may not support your phone.
I say that because I was looking at the Fairphone 6 running /e/os which is a DeGoogled version of Android but the problem is that it may not work in New Zealand and I haven’t heard anything back from the company that sells it so I’m left with a situation of no choice in the matter. It is kind of frustrating that there hasn’t been one standardised way for VoLTE to be setup which would allow you to buy a phone from anywhere in the world, throw in a SIM and everything just starts working. The other option I’m having a look at is buying a Pixel 9 Pro XL and then installing GrapheneOS onto it but I’m concerned that I’ll lose VoLTE compatibility given that the Pixel Pro XL works in New Zealand on Spark and Skinny but will I lose that compatibility if I install GrapheneOS onto it? I’m wondering whether it is more of a hassle than it is worth in the end.
With all that being said, I’m pretty happy with what I am using at the moment – Google Workspace, Chrome, Samsung S25 Ultra for my phone but I’m sticking with macOS for both computers along with an Apple TV. If there is going to be a change it’ll be upgrading my television by giving my old one to mum and then buy a new one with the OneUI Tizen which integrates into Samsung’s SmartThings which does a better job than Google’s own Home application which has issues when used in conjunction with a Workspace account. I am looking at moving to Quic for my internet service provider because the price is better, more features and less drama when I want to get something done such as changing an email address or phone number so I’ll look at moving ASAP but I’ll stick with Skinny for my mobile due to Skinny Mobile having the best coverage at a reasonable price although if a better offer comes along I’m not going to turn it out. I guess I am a creature of habit where in the past I tend to stay with a provider in the mistaken belief that loyalty is rewarded when in reality if the business doesn’t provide you with what you want at a good price then you should take your business elsewhere.
Matisyahu's Blog 