My favourite as Indie and Alternative – not exactly good descriptions of the type of music but I’ll give some examples of the sort of music I like:
"When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'"
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Fine weather so I decided to take advantage of that and go for a walk tonight – just a small 8km walk but I needed to get out of the house after being inside all day. It’s good to get out of the house even if it is a bit cold – the fresh air relaxes me so that I am ready for a good night sleep. I’ve started my new work schedule of starting at 1:30pm every day which means I have a regular schedule rather than the starting time being different depending on the day.
The AdGuard team have released the AdGuard 5.2.25 beta for Chrome (link) which include many new features, bug features and enhancements. What I particularly interested in is the User Scripts API implementation should should improve the reliability of content blocking. As I’ve noted in the past, I was sceptical that MV3 would provide the same quality of content blocking that MV2 provided but as time goes on and the WECG developers for Chrome have listened to the feedback the functionality has improved to the point that I cannot tell the difference between the experience I got back in the MV2 vs what MV3 extensions are delivering.
As for the time frame when the stable version will be released? could be anywhere from a weeks to months but I’d say that given that amount of changes that I couldn’t imagine it being rushed because there will be a lot of testing that’ll be needed. I’ve got it running on my other Chrome profile and so far things have been very robust. For me the big excitement will be the support for ‘Third Party Filters’ that you add manually which should hopefully mean that it will be easier to keep filters up to date rather than having to wait for the latest filters to be bundled and then made available as an update through the Chrome store which has a lead time of around 3 days.
I’ve decided to make peace with the idea that maybe I shouldn’t get fixed over the idea that should try to have everything with one service provider. I’ve setup SmartThings from Samsung and realised that the Arlo security camera integration is so much better than with Google Home then I added my Bluetooth earphones and my television (which is a bit ancient given that it was released in 2018) however it integrated into SmartThings without any issues. I’m looking at upgrading my television soon to a 2025 model which has a more up to date smart tv software version not to mention better hardware which should provide a smoother experience and I’ll give my old television to mum because it is still in good working order.
While looking around at SmartThings I went on a bit of a side quest regarding Samsung applications for Windows – it appears you can have a pretty good ecosystem using a combination of Microsoft Windows and Samsung devices that produce the sort of integration one observes with Apple and it’s own ecosystem. If I ever went down that road I would keep Google Workspace given that I much prefer it over what Microsoft 365 offers but I could imagine Samsung does a pretty good job sewing together Windows and Android together.
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I was going to go for a walk tonight but I got 400m down the road and the heavens opened up – decided that maybe I’ll just need to head back home and relax for the rest of the evening. When I got home I did some computer cleaning – wipe them down then cleaned out all the old files that I no longer needed along with backing some stuff up to the cloud for safe keeping. Saturday and Sunday I have work then my weekend on Monday and Tuesday that I’ll be looking forward to. Oh, and I did my nightly constitutional of some mind exercises with Connections and Wordle – I like to keep my brain active along with exposing me to new words and terms that I don’t commonly use. Oh, and I finally got myself organised and setup an ‘Authenticator’ extension for Chrome so then I don’t have to keep getting out my phone everytime I want to log into websites I’ve setup with 2FA.
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I went for a 11.6km walk tonight – I was going to be lazy tonight but given how there could be rain for the next couple of days I decided to take advantage of the good weather to get out of the house to enjoy some fresh air and exercise. It is nice going for a walk after it has been raining, the fresh smell, the lack of cars on the road etc. makes the experience very relaxing.
There is a rumour that Apple is planning a notebook with an A18 chip inside it – I’m going to go out on a limb but what I think we’re going to see is clamshell notebook with an A18 chip inside running iPadOS (maybe they’ll rebrand it as something else) then call it the iBook which would fit with the whole iPad/iPhone branding. Basically splitting the product line between Macs for power users and iPad/iBook for consumers who want a computer that is like an appliance – switch it on, do a few things, turn it back off. Will be interesting to see what ends up happening in the end.
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Went for a 11.6km walk tonight and although it was a little chilly it hasn’t gotten down to the single digits in a while – hopefully I haven’t tempted fate by talking about it but hopefully the temperature will stay at around the double digits until spring rolls around. There is a benefit to temperatures being where they are – when I go for my walk I’m not completely drenched in sweat when compared to going for a walk during summer where even at night there is still a decent amount of warmth in the air. I stuck to my meal plan today although tomorrow I’ll probably walk to to the store to pick up some coffee concentrate so I can have an ice coffee at home – I like to have some extra supply of stuff at home so that I’m always stock with it rather than running it down to nothing then suddenly realising that I need to buy it.
The housing situation stumbles from one crisis to another but that shouldn’t be surprising when you have a government that ideologically does not believe in teh idea of public housing or public involvement in the building and provision of housing (link). As I’ve said in the past, we need to rebuild the Ministry of Works and invest in creating an army of skilled tradespeople who can engage in nation building – turn Housing NZ into the primary provide of rental accomodation resulting in the de-commodification of housing. Unfortunately I don’t see a National government making it happen but the Greens have talked about something similar so lets hope if there is a sharp swing to the left that it is one policy that Labour definitely picks up as part of a coalition agreement.
Ubiquiti has released a firmware update for the U7 Pro Max today which updates it from 8.0.19 to 8.0.49 – so far things have been pretty stable. At the moment there the gateway firmware and UniFi OS are in beta testing at the moment but it’ll be interesting to see how things develop particularly the gateway which has been sitting on 4.2.2 which makes me wonder whether we’ll be seeing them jump straight to the 4.3.x series. I haven’t enabled MLO yet on my access point because it is still considered ‘early access’ and I have heard some people having compatibility issues but I’m sure the engineers taking care of things so when it does launch it’ll be robust enough for mainstream use.
Windows 11 25H2 is rumoured to be a smaller update when compared to the big upheaval that came with Windows 11 24H2 where the underlying operating system was upgraded as well. It’ll be interesting to see whether Microsoft adopts a ‘tick-tock’ strategy like Intel did many years ago where every 2 years the underlying operating system is upgraded then the next year is focused on refining it, tying up loose ends, implementing features that don’t require under the hood changes etc. The reason I wonder is because if Intel APX does make its way into products in 2026 it would be interesting to see whether we see Microsoft recompile Windows 11 26H2 to take advantage of APX with those extra registers – I wouldn’t be surprised if there maybe some things that need to be done under the hood.
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Came back from my walk tonight around an hour ago – 20km walk in total, my legs and feet are sore but I feel good knowing that I set a goal and achieved it. I’m a bit stiff in the legs but a good night sleep will allow me to recuperate and ready to work on Wednesday and go for a walk after work.
Chrome is going well and AdGuard has been also performing well – the functionality gap that once used to exist between uBlock Origin LIte and AdGuard has pretty much disappeared so now it is just a question of personal preference. There was recently a merging of code from version 5.2 of AdGuard so it’ll be interesting to see when there will be either a beta release or a final release. There have been some fixes merged into the github source which makes me wonder whether they’re doing internal testing before having a public beta. On a side note, with the work being done regarding Safari and declarative net request I wonder whether we’ll see AdGuard just bring their Chrome/Firefox extension to Safari rather than maintaining a special codebase for Safari.
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Finished the first season of Paradise and funny if there appears to be a good amount of overlap that I see with Silo and Fallout along with a few other dystopian films I’ve watched in the past. It’ll be interesting to see how it developers going into the second season how it develops particularly when he goes looking for his wife.
Google has pushed out an updated today for Chrome which bumps the version from 138.0.7204.50 to 138.0.7204.93 (link) – it was probably released early (normally it is Tuesday US time (Wednesday NZ time)) because there is an exploit out in the wild (mitigation was made available 26/06/25) with a proper fix to fully address the issue. As for the performance, no regressions as far as I have noticed and uBlock Origin Lite/AdGuard are working smoothly so that is always a good sign that the update did what it was supposed to do.
It appears that there is light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to water infrastructure in the Wellington region (link) along with continued discussions about the idea of having a ‘Wellington super city council’ like what exists up in Auckland. Personally what I would like to see is the setting up of provincial councils that replace the individual city councils in a particular region then central government to devolve power but keep centrally funding where appropriate (there would be 16 provincial councils in total). It is good to see that there is progress none the less after much upheaval post election where 3 Waters was scrapped in favour of ‘Local Water Done Well’.
What I do find rather interesting is the discussion regarding localism and the National led government justifying the ‘Local Water Done Well’ by claiming they’re pro-localism but then turn around in regards to local planning, zoning etc. by directly intervening. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen some local city councils to do a horrible job when it comes to making housing more affordable and building them in a timely manner but politicians should avoid taking absolutist positions – if you believe that 3 Waters would result in a massively bloated institution that would collapse under its own weight then make that argument. If you believe that you generally support localism but sometimes the central government needs to intervene because the inability for an council to ‘get it right’ impacts too many people to ignore it the great, make that argument – reminds me of the quote from Star Wars “only a Sith deals in absolutes”, that there are exceptions to a general rule and if there is then make a robust argument as to why this or that situation fits into that exception.
Anyway, I’m going to go for a good long walk tonight – after being lazy for a few days I need to get off the couch and burn some calories. I’ll probably just keep walking for as long as I can – I get a bit antsy if I haven’t had some exercise in a few days.
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I went for a walk today down to the supermarket to pick up a few things and I walked back – squeezing in some exercise to make it part of ones normal every day routine rather than having to set aside time to do it. To be honest, the amount of time it takes to get down to the store, even on the days where I work from 11:30am to 8:00pm means that I can easily walk down to the supermarket and make it with plenty of time before the store closes. One of the benefits of not having a scooter is that it has forced me to be more active and get the exercise in during the day without even thinking about it which results in it becoming a normalised part of my life.
The next update Intel will release for it’s CPU family will be Nova Lake with rumours that the APX extension, which increases the number of registers from 16 to 32, will arrive on that platform (although other reports state that Panther Lake will be the CPU that’ll APX to market) – it’ll be interesting to see how Microsoft handles that given that Intel notes that a recompile is all that is required (link) will we see Microsoft recompile Windows and create a fresh ISO that takes advantage of the APX extension. It’ll also be interesting to see whether we’ll end up seeing Zen 6 microarchitecture from AMD will include APX and AVX 10 – I could imagine it is highly desirable for that to be the case so there is some harmonisation between the two vendors given the benefits in terms of performance and power efficiency that come from the APX extension being made available. Nova Lake is scheduled to be released in early 2026 for mobile and towards the end of 2026/early 2027 for the desktop version.
That being said, in the future I might end up having an ARM based laptop running Windows and a x86-64 desktop running Windows – I like to keep my options open. There is one thing that I am interested in setting up though which is setting up ethernet cables under the house – one for the desktop in the lounge room given that I’d sooner have a robust connection when uploading gigabytes of data to my Google Drive.
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A good start to my weekend I went down to Pak ‘n Save to pick up some groceries along with dinner – a butterflied tandoori chicken along with a caesar salad for dinner. At the moment I am up to episode 4 from Season 1 of Paradise (link) which has turned out to be a pretty good show so far and it appears that show itself has got plans for 3 season in total so it’ll be interesting to see how it develops. On Monday I might also start watching Black Mirror to see what it is like plus looking at a few more tv series that I’ve missed out on.
I’ve got two profiles on Chrome, one for the gmail account and the other for the Google Workspace account – on the gmail account profile I’ve been testing AdGuard to see how it performs and I noticed there have been some big improvements such as the browser no longer hanging when visiting television streaming websites I visited where it would freeze then suddenly start working but these days it is all very much working as it should. I kind of wish that Chrome for Android would have support for extensions but rumour has it that that it is being worked on not to mention the fact that one mainly uses apps so it is of limited use but it’ll be interesting to see it happen. There is also the rolling out of having the address bar at the bottom of the screen like Safari on iOS so I am looking forward to that eventually arriving.
One UI 8 is getting closer to release but funny enough the more I use my Samsung S25 Ultra the less I miss my iPhone. It is working well with Skinny Mobile, getting updates regularly (on the June 2025 update at the moment) along with getting great battery life. Although I do pay for YouTube Premium which gives me access to ad free YouTube and YouTube Music I still prefer paying for Pocket Casts because it gives a much better podcast experience than using YouTube Music. I also use PowerAmp for my music player because YouTube Music does a pretty lousy job performance wise when dealing with large libraries (mine is around 65GB in size) along with the fact that the navigation is bad – select ‘Artist’ but rather than then offering a list of albums it just dumps all the songs from that artist where as PowerAmp you tap on ‘Artist’ then a list of albums are provided which you then tap on the album to list all the tracks in that album – for $10 it is a fair price for something that I’ll be using for many years to come.
I’ve been having a look at the Surface 15″ Laptop with the Qualcomm X Elite – lots of specials on at Noel Leemings and other vendors. I was going to eventually replace my S25 with a Pixel 10 but if I end up liking the S25 I might end up saving the money and instead looking at upgrading my laptop with the added bonus that the Android phone integrates with Windows as smoothly as an iPhone does with macOS – being able to answer and make phone calls, sending text messages not to mention MTP synchroising being a lot smoother and faster due to it being natively built into Windows.
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I mentioned earlier about adding a declarative net request filter for websites that you want to allow ads on – I’ve just realised that I made it a whole lot more complex than it is meant to be but I had a good reason. Normally when you click on the extension icon in the toolbar and then click on the slide or the ‘turn off’ button that tends to be a universal setting so if you set it to ‘no filtering’ then it would apply to all websites you visit however in uBlock Origin Lite when you select ‘no filtering’ that is only specific to that particular website and that setting is saved in the develop area under filtering mode details where the website is added under the no filtering section. So after going through all that work manually creating declarative net request filters I realised I could just add the websites – I’ve since corrected the mistakes and things are working wonderfully. The added benefit of setting up the allow list properly is that the icon displays accurate information regarding whether there is filter and what has been blocked.
I’ve been following the recent events regarding Israel, Iran and the United States – the biggest problem is the hubris of those involved convincing themselves that they have more control over the events taking place. Anyone who knows anything about history knows how quickly something can spiral out of control, where those involved have convinced themselves that they have more control over the situation than they do, that they have an understanding of the variables or as George WIlls noted regarding the neo-conservatives, convinced themselves that the power and influence of the United States is actually more powerful than it actually is in reality. Then combine that with the ego of Trump desperately looking for the approval, to either look up to a father figure or appear to be powerful so he has the illusion he has more control over the situation than he really does, then the neoconservatives probably convincing some in power that “one more war and we’ll finally be able to get out of the middle east”. Power plays and vying for influence – for all of faults that Democrats have at least they’ve never put someone like Trump in the Whitehouse and the question is whether the American people need to hit rock bottom before things change given that large parts of the world are already planning for a post-US world.
It is interesting how Nothing Phone 3a has come to New Zealand via 2 Degrees Mobile which will make the Pixel 10 launch be particularly interesting to see whether it comes to New Zealand in some official capacity or whether I’ll go through Mighty Ape (which is owned by Kogan). Now that roaming is officially supported in New Zealand (funny enough for VoLTE Spark has noted that the Pixel 9 is supported on the Spark network – indication sometime in the future they maybe the Google launch network?) meaning when 3G is turned off that VoLTE will work, it’ll be interesting to see how things go. OpenMTP does a pretty good job for synchronisation but long term if I eventually move to Linux then I’ll get the benefit of all the work the libmtp project does along with how things are improving when it comes to hardware support I could imagine myself maybe in the next couple of years running Fedora on a Dell laptop and a Dell desktop (or one I assembled myself).
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