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

  • So what was it all for in the end?

    Well, it appears that eight Democrats collapsed like a cheap lawn chair and agreed to reopen government with the last-minute agreement – and the base is livid. What was the shutdown for if you’re not going to force the Republican part to either a) force the Republicans to make a compromise by reversing the cuts to healthcare and make the increased subsidies permanent along with overturning the president’s recission powers or b) force the Republicans to get rid of the filibuster, pass the budget with simple majority and accept the fall out of the unpopular cuts they’ve made. The reality is that the Republicans do not want to get rid of the filibuster because then they would be the only ones voting for it resulting in them getting all the blame whereas what has unfolded today will result in the fall out of the cuts are now going to hurt both Democrats and Republicans. Mark my words, Republicans are going to make use argument that the bill was bipartisan when it comes to any question regarding the cuts – spread the blame so thinly that they can then play the game of false equivalency.

    This is what happens when you have a party leadership that is spineless, gutless and lacking in testicular fortitude – don’t be surprised if there is a backlash in the midterms if the public don’t see something positive come from the compromise that has taken place. I have to wonder whether the Democrats are either feckless or whether they’re just controlled opposition because even when they have a majority there is always an excuse for not getting rid of the filibuster, always an excuse as to why the US cannot have nice things like a single payer healthcare system so instead they pass a watered down Republican lite proposal that is so compromised it may as well not have been passed in the first place.

    Daily writing prompt
    If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?
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    If money was no object and I had a job lined up – outside of New Zealand, I’d either want to live in a) Melbourne b) New York c) London. Inside of New Zealand either Wellington or Christchurch – I’ve lived in both cities but I have a bit of a soft spot for Christchurch although I do like Wellington because it has a similar cosmopolitan vibe that Melbourne has with its cafe and arts scene not to mention both cities are great when the weather amazing. Christchurch has a great public transportation network, there is a laid back vibe, a different pace of life when compared to a bigger city like Auckland.

  • Thank goodness the weekend has started.

    Finished work early tonight at 7:30pm then I walked down to the supermarket and back again – there is a bus service but I would have had to wait as long as it took to walk down to the supermarket so I thought I may as well get back into a good routine by walking down there. I was able to pick up some butter and a few odd bits and pieces for dinner then walked home to prepare dinner. It felt good getting back into the start of a routine after having the last couple of weeks disrupted with a change in the work schedule. On a good side the temperature is rising and even on Sunday night I wore a lightweight zip up hoodie but I probably could have gotten away with just wearing a t-shirt since the temperature was comfortable.

    Daily writing prompt
    What book are you reading right now?
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    At the moment I am reading through ‘Chomsky on Anarchism’ which is a collection of essays – it is one of those books where you read a bit, think about it and then come back to read some more.

  • Early finish tomorrow.

    Final day of the week on Sunday with the added benefit that due to doing 2 1/2 hours worth of work on Friday I get to go home early on Sunday so I’ll be knocking off at 7:30pm. I’m probably going to head down to the supermarket afterwork because I need to purchase some butter and a few odd bits and pieces. Today was nice with not to many customer enquiries and in between I had a few cups of tea – I can see why mum and dad like having a cup of tea because of how refreshing it is not to mention it keeps me full in between meals so then I’m not tempted to snack thus making sticking to a good meal routine a whole lot easier.

    It appears that Windows 11 26H2 will be based on the 28000 series that was announced on the Windows Insider Blog (link). It looks like 26H1 will have the underlying platform updated so it is ready to support new hardware however the new features won’t be visible until 26H2 which kind of makes sense given how there appears to be a lot of work in terms of refinement of the user interface such as dealing with the inconsistent nature of dark mode. It’ll be interesting to see whether the 28000 also includes support for the Panther Lake and Nova Lake architecture such as APX, FRED, tagged memory support along with a lot more. I wouldn’t be surprised if it did given that Microsoft and Intel work closely together so it would make sense that as they developed these technologies that Microsoft were implementing them as they went then provided feedback to Intel which helped moved the technology forward.

    I find it funny that once again the political class and the noise makers in the media are trying to come up with some sort of complex analysis of what took place. What took place is that the anti-woke anti-DEI anti-CRT shtick has run its natural course – people are are tired, people just want things to go back to normal, where politicians talk about real issue such as the cost of living and not make believe scenarios that excite the lizard brain but have little to do with reality. The reason why the Democrats made gains against was because they focused on the ‘meat and potato’ issues – not abstract ideas but the real pocket book issues that people face or as Bill Clinton said, “it’s the economy, stupid!”. Every one of the candidates, whether they were moderate of democratic socialist talked about the bread and butter issues with the Republicans looking crazy as they dragged up conspiracy theories and culture war issues while the audience were looking at each other going “what on earth is going on here?!”

    You can already see some politicians already making the move to a post-Trump future in much the same way that the compassionate conservatives became the tea party who then became MAGA and now those same politicians see a post-Trump future. When that post Trump future arrives it’ll be interesting to see whether the public remembers what they were like when they got into politics during the MAGA wave or whether, like how quickly Americans forgot in 2010 after the two wars and economic collapse two years earlier, will they vote for them again after they’ve rebranded themselves with the emergence of a new ‘movement’ that emergences from the ashes of MAGA.

  • Well, that was interesting.

    I got up this morning, started my day as usual, logged myself and it wasn’t until 4pm when I saw that my schedule hadn’t been loaded on Playvox so I asked my boss who then checked with the WFM team – it appears that since I worked on Tuesday I got to have my day off on Friday but neither my boss nor I were informed of what was taking place.

    Microsoft Edge released an update today which updated from version 142.0.3595.53 to version 142.0.3595.65 – I haven’t noticed any visible changes so far but it has been fairly reliable. A new build for the Windows canary channel has been made available (link) with the impression I get is that they’re still a lot of ‘under the hood changes’. We’ll probably see it become the basis of 26H2 in much the same way we’ve seen a tick-tock like strategy where there is a big platform upgrade then followed with refinement in the next yearly released then there is another big upgrade and so on. We saw that with the big upgrade with 24H2 with 25H2 being based on the same system core – pushing the platform forward and then working on refining it with the next release while stabilising the core.

    As we’ve seen, Microsoft is making use of Rust where it was used when re-writing the GDI region (link) so I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up seeing Microsoft move more of the functionality over to Rust. There is also the work being done on ram diagnostic (link) where I think that, combined with the work being done with ‘Administrator Protection’ and an API for security applications (to avoid another Crowdstrike fiasco) it appears that the promises of greater reliability and security is taking place with the establishing of tools that’ll enable them to address the issues as well as mitigate the issues with better APIs and using languages that make writing secure code a lot easier.

    There is a rumoured 26H1 that is specific for the Qualcomm X2 Elite SoC makes me wonder whether 26220.7051 being moved from the dev channel to the beta channel makes me wonder whether the 26220 build will be the basis of 26H1 which will provide a stable foundation for new hardware support with the 27982 build going forward will include under the hood optimisations, hardware support and user visible features appearing in 26H2. There are user visible features found in the current release but not visible in the canary channel but that has more to do with the fact that the features are built in but not enabled rather than the features not being present.

    Daily writing prompt
    What podcasts are you listening to?
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    I am subscribed to quite a few podcasts but the main ones I like to subscribe two are: Rev Left Radio, Guerilla History for long form left wing discussions regarding politics, religion and philosophy. Accidental Tech Podcast, Windows Central, Windows Weekly, 9to5 Happy Hour and a few others when it comes to technology. I also follow some news from New Zealand such as NBR (National Business Review), a few Radio New Zealand interview shows along with the Big Hairy News on the days when I miss seeing it live on YouTube. I’m not too sure whether it would be considered a podcast but Bradbury Group is a good weekly panel show – reminds me very much of the The McLaughlin Group and The Ralston Group with quick fire rounds of questions.

  • Getting back into a good schedule.

    I start work at 1:30pm but I set my alarm to 12:45pm however what I have been doing is pulling back the time I go to sleep so that when I get up in the morning I have more time before I start working. Before I went to sleep I went to bed at 3:00am where all my lights were turned off, laptop off etc. and I was relaxing before heading off to sleep and then I woke up at around 11:30am where I was dozing in the bed then got out before my alarm went off. I’m still deciding whether tonight I’ll set my goal to be in bed and lights out by 2:30am, set the alarm to 11:30am so then I’ll be up and around 2 hours before I start my shift – get some fresh air, maybe a walk around the block, have a cup of coffee to wake me up.

    I checked Chrome for updates which updated it from version 142.0.7444.60 to version 142.0.7444.135 and on the Chrome releases blog there appears to be a decent laundry list of security fixes as well as general improvements. Microsoft Edge will probably get updated on Saturday NZ time (which corresponds to Friday US time) although it’ll be interesting to see whether we’ll see patch Tuesday pushed back to fix the issue with ‘Task Manager’ – maybe break it into two parts with security fixes being made instantly available and then features being made available a week later.

    I’ve been following the recent elections in the United States and although there has been a lot of attention focused on New Jersey, New York and California but what has been left out are the elections at the local level. Utility regulation boards, school boards and so on – based on the news that is coming out it appears that the tide of anti-woke, anti-CRT and anti-DEI is coming to an end as parents realise that such ideologies lead to nothing positive other than undermining the quality of public education as grand standing mouth breathers use their office as a glorified platform for their tiktok influencer career. It appears that being a loud mouth fool rambling incoherently about nonexistent issues may get you elected if enough of your fellow travellers turn out but when the negative consequences are felt by those who are otherwise disengaged from politics then those people suddenly start becoming interested in whether you’re doing your job. To quote Anthony Albanese: “culture wars are a barren valley”, maybe it took a swing to the extreme for those sitting on the sidelines to actually get involved politically rather than leaving it up to the crazies.

    There are rumours making the rounds regarding the next version of XBox being a hybrid design – it’ll be interesting to see whether we’ll see a Windows core but legacy free running Windows App SDK based applications along with support for previous versions of XBox games. I could imagine a version of Windows stripped of legacy should result in a more streamlined and optimised system. There is a catch though which is a rumoured price tag raging from $800-$1200 but then again that could change – the current game consoles either sell at cost or below but the money is made on the royalties from the games sold on it. If they are going to move to a rumoured price range of $800-$1200 then are they going to move away from the current model to one where you pay upfront rather than recouping the costs with after sales? Then again, it’ll be interesting to see whether Microsoft make the leap to ARM or whether they keep with x86-64, maybe force AMD and Intel to compete for the contract.

    Apple released iOS 18.7.2 for those who don’t want to upgrade to iOS 26.1. At the moment I’ve left mum on 18.7.x because the change would require her getting used to the new interface not to mention I want to make sure that if we do make the switch that we setup the phone that makes the text readable by either enable tinting or disabling transparency in the accessibility options. It is one of the reasons I am waiting for not just the M5 refresh that is scheduled for next year but also what the 26.2 and 26.3 end up bringing to the platform with 26.2 most likely being released towards the end of this year an 26.3 being released early next year (based on the macOS 15.x release cycle).

  • Getting back into regular order tomorrow.

    The last couple of days it has been a bit chaotic with work, weather, people letting off fireworks not to mention my routine got all out of order but now that things have settled down tomorrow will be a reboot back into a good routine and with that hopefully things will get back normal again. Today I started work and then realised that the headset I use has a USB-C connector but on my laptop I only have two – one of them used for the power and the other for the hub but the hub has a USB-C but can only be used for power but there is insufficient power being provided to the laptop. Long story short, I chatted with my boss and had to pop out down to Noel Leeming to pick up a USB-C female to USB-A male adaptor since i had some free USB-A ports available on the hub. Once i got all that sorted then I was able to get to work.

    I’ve been having a read regarding the 26.1 updates that Apple recently made available and there has been a document made available over on Webkit outlining the changes (link). The fixes included seem rather limited which makes me wonder whether we’ll see a bigger set of bug fixes and improvements with 26.2 where as the 26.1 release was focusing on the low hanging fruit so maybe we’ll see more of the improvements seen in the Safari Technology builds making their way because based on what I see over on the wpt.fyi website they’re a lot further ahead than a few months ago when I prematurely suggested that they’re way behind from where they should be at this point. At the moment Webkit is sitting at 98% which is two points ahead of Chrome so maybe by early next year we’ll see Safari be in a position where the issues that many web developers talk about have been addressed or at least on the road to being fully addressed.

    There are rumours of an Apple TV refresh maybe later on this month – the big feature I hope will be the inclusion of their latest SoC which supports hardware accelerated AV1 playback. All the big streaming platforms have started using it for their high resolution streaming so hopefully it’ll be something we’ll see in such an Apple TV refresh. There is also rumours regarding an M5 refresh in around March next year – hopefully we’ll see maybe the N1 being used in the M5 Pro, M5 Max and M5 Ultra and then combine that with the GPU improvement it’ll make for a compelling upgrade. The iPhone delivery times are dropping and retail stores are getting them in stock and the Pixel 10 Pro XL is available although only the 256GB at the moment.

    Daily writing prompt
    What was your favorite subject in school?
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    I had more than one favourite subjects, I had three favourite subjects at school which were history, economics and religious studies. Economics because it allowed me to understand how the economy worked so rather than viewing things in the news as random events it was possible to understand why interest rates were going up, why the government was focused on trying to get back into surplus, why the government passed a particular reform and what they hoped it would do for the economy etc. History allowed me to understand how we go to where we are – the events that led up to WWI and how that fed into WWII then how those events shaped the cold war. Rather than just a series of events that occured in isolation it allowed me to see how they were all linked together – the relationships between different events. Religious studies allowed me to learn about other religions, how they formed, the similarity to Catholicism etc. which lead me to want to learn how group identity help form individual identity, the creation of myth and ritual to build a sense of community through a shared set of beliefs, the idea of sacred history which shaped a community’s world view.

  • A long day at work. It feels good to be home.

    After an early start this morning I am happy to be at home after being in town. Dinner at mum’s was nice along with getting her technology up to date although I have kept her iPhone on 18.7.1 until I am confident that macOS 26.x changes aren’t going to disrupt what she is currently used to. At the rate things are going I might end up waiting for 26.2 or maybe even 26.3 given that Apple’s platforms have had quite a substantial change so I’d sooner wait to see what it’ll eventual look like after most of the rough edges are sorted and the UI glass interface is toned down to something that only a small number of people are complaining about. I’ll probably make a more exhaustive post later on after watching some television shows.

    Daily writing prompt
    How do you manage screen time for yourself?
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    When I use technology I ensure that I have objective(s) I want to achieve when using it rather than just aimlessly doom scrolling – that goes for updating my blog, checking out key YouTube videos regarding news and documentaries etc. By having clear expectations of what I want to achieve it means that any screen time I do have is being used productively. It is one of the reasons why the most commonly used app on my phone is PowerAmp because outside of reading news I get board of social media unless it is informing me of something I need to know about – linking to an interesting article covering subject matter that I am interested in.

  • Thank goodness the week is over.

    I swear I was losing it towards the end of my shift but thank goodness it is over and I can relax. I’ve got the roast chicken out of the freezer so when I wake up tomorrow it’ll be all defrosted so then I can put it in the oven along with some roast vegetables – I’ll have a bigger meal during the day because on Monday night I’ll be going to bed early because I’ve got a 6am start on Tuesday where I’m having to go into the office.

    There was an announcement regarding an agreement between China and the US regarding trade but personally I think it is all rather meaningless given that it isn’t a real treaty and more importantly Trump can just decide for ever reason to break what ever arrangement there is. Unfortunately we have another 3 years of this chaos and because the US is the biggest players in the world the result is that the rest of the world gets dragged into their lunacy whether we want to or not.

    There are rumours regarding the Trump administration is wanting to make the US dollar weaker to encourage an export led recovery but the problem with that is a) if you’re running a massive budget deficit then it is inevitable that the value of the dollar will go up because the US is seen as a safe haven – when you buy US debt you need to buy US dollars to do so thus pushing up the value b) they’re wanting to have more investment into the US but how can you do that without having to first buy US dollars to make the investment? c) they haven’t announced that they’re getting rid of the ‘strong dollar policy’ so how serious are they went they cannot even give a signal to the market about the administrations intentions?

    The problem is that with the New Zealand economy is just how exposed we are to the international economy because of how small our domestic economy is – sure, there are decisions that the current government are making that aren’t helping the situation but that being said I think we’d still be struggling even if a Labour led government was in power (probably less so than the current situation but still struggling). I have to admit, I do like the capital gains tax and the focus on spending it on healthcare reminds me very much of Helen Clark and the pledge card from around 25+ years ago that was used to explain what the top tax rate of 39% would pay for.

    Personally I think they need to go further and setup a Ministry of Works with a focus on turning Housing New Zealand into the primary provider of rental accomodation with income related rents. If there is a focus on decommodifying housing it should result in the demand for houses as investment properties stall as those who rent go into the public sector (the private sector cannot compete with the interest rates the government can borrow at along with the rent being income related thus putting it below the market rate) and empty houses go onto the market which will hopefully either stagnate (so it stays the same nominal price but in real terms going down in price) or going down in price. I’d love to see that but something tells me it would scare middle New Zealand who see themselves as a would-be landed gentry.

  • Preparing for the upcoming week.

    Next week will be a 6 day week so I’ll be making sure I get a good amount of sleep on Sunday and Monday so I’m all prepared for a long week. I was going to make a grocery order online on Sunday night but I decided to do it Saturday so then it guarantees that I have a delivery window on Monday where as if I left it until Sunday there is a good chance that I’ll have to go through the drama of heading down to the road myself and have to battle with the crowds etc that I’d prefer avoiding.

    After finishing work I opened up my laptop and noticed that Microsoft has made available a software update for the Surface Laptop 7 (link) – the install was pretty quick but that is probably because it was downloading in the background so then by the time I did a restart most of the work was already one. Microsoft Edge has been updated to version 142 and I haven’t noticed any regressions however there is a preview available of the next update for Windows there have been reports of regressions so I am hoping that Microsoft is working on getting that fixed before it appears on patch Tuesday (normally the second Tuesday of the month) but according to the preview notes they have acknowledged the problem (link).

    One thing I have noticed is that the desktop on Dell I’ve been eyeing up for the last couple of months has dropped by $200 which was probably the result of Intel cutting prices in preparation of the Arrow Lake refresh. It’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next few months particularly as more information regarding Panther Lake is known – I could imagine some of the mini pc vendors are getting ready to release a refresh of their line up with the new processors. There is also the new Qualcomm based devices next year which will be interesting to see whether we see some mini pcs make an appearance to give Apple a bit of competition.

    There are quite a few interesting things that the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group are working on – the standardising on feature sets (link) but also I noticed there is work being done regarding firmware unification (link). A lot of what is mentioned in the link should be pretty much transparent to the operating system on top but it should hopefully produce a more reliable experience over all because engineers aren’t having to reinvent the wheel. It is funny how it has taken this long for this sort of thing to happen but I guess it is the old story of ‘better late than never’. Here is an interesting article regarding what AMD is doing (link) – it is amazing amount of interesting things happening that are given very little coverage unless one is out there looking for it.

    Ubiquiti has released some early release and release candidates over the last few days – MLO on access points appear to be getting a good amount of attention, the gateways are being bought almost up to date with the cloud based gateways (it is a bit confusing but the non-cloud ones rely on either the cloud or a cloud key where as the cloud based gateway have the software built in). For me everything has been working rock solid but then again I don’t have a complicated setup – it is just me, this laptop, my work laptop, Google Streamer and nothing else so it isn’t as though it is a massively complicate setup.

    Daily writing prompt
    What are your favorite websites?
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    My favourite websites include Arstechnica, Reddit, YouTube, WordPress, 9to5Mac, 9to5Google, along with Radio NZ and a few news websites internationally. I like to keep up to date with the news but at the same time with all the craziness and chaos on the world I try avoid getting too fixated on the news because it is easy to get stuck in a doom spiral and having ones anxiety being raised as a result. It’s good to keep up to date to be remain informed but at the same time there is a limited to zero impact if all one does is fixate on the constant doom and gloom that the news so readily reports on.

  • Keep hanging in there.

    I keep reminding myself to keep hanging in there – I’ve been at my current job almost 8 years but I think I am getting to the point that maybe, when the economy gets a bit better, there will be more opportunities that are available. I love the workplace and my work mates but holy crap some of the customers don’t see to have the ability to engage in the most basic amount of willingness to learn new skills. It is amazing the number of people who talk themselves out of actually spending time learning how to do something – learning how to do something has little to do with actually having an interest in a given area but rather it is about having the skills so that you’re able to solve a problem when it arises rather than having to rush to find someone who can do it for you. I’m not to sure about anyone else I find it empowering when I gain the ability to fix a problem myself knowing that I am self reliant rather than always at the mercy of whether someone else is able to help me.

    It reminds me when I got into computers when I was in the Scouts and I was working towards my technology badge. For me learning how to use a computer wasn’t for the sake of an interest in technology but more the argument of “here is a tool, I’m going to learn how to use that tool” which then developed into “if I am going to use the tool then I may as well have a good understanding of how it works so when I have a problem I can fix it myself”.

    Daily writing prompt
    Invent a holiday! Explain how and why everyone should celebrate.
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    I suggest that we change the calendar to 13 months with exactly 28 days each month and on the 365th day of the year is a public holiday (every leap year you get 2 days off) where those or 2 days aren’t counted as part of normal calendar year but just an extra day. Everything would close for the that one day, except for critical services, and everyone gets that time off with the week leading up to it where every person receives a bonus from the government that can be spent on food, presents etc to be shared with friends and family.