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

  • End of the first week of my annual leave.

    End of the first week of my leave and one thing I am also looking at is getting some barbells to do some light weights when I am at home – when watching some television being able to get some reps in which will help to tone and define my arms (the walk I try to go on every night do the legs pretty well). I’m going to go for a quick look around at the shops on Monday it for no other reason than to get out of the house and get some fresh air.

    The one thing I hope is that with the collapse of MAGA that we’ll see a return of comedians who aren’t interested in having a podcast to suck up to those in power. The whole point of being a comedian is being an outsider, to punch up not punch down, to hold those in power accountable and not to spend time sucking up/defending those in power, be a social critic by holding up a mirror to society. Every time I see a comedian suck up to those in power on a podcast it reminds me of Bill Hicks retort of “government approved rock and roll” except replace ‘rock and roll’ with comedy and you get the vibe of what comedians appear to be doing these days.

    I’ve been following South Park and to be honest the best way to deal with this current political climate is to mock it relentlessly because it doesn’t deserve to be given the respect let alone a serious critique given the whole movement itself is based on vibes rather than a coherent philosophical world view. Sometimes the only way to adequately critique administration’s bad behaviour is to demonstrate how ridiculous they are in much the same way that Lewis Black did with their ‘Gay Banditos’ to demonstrate how ridiculous the Republican claim that same sex marriage was going to destroy ‘traditional marriage’.

  • Back to using WordPress.

    Today was rather quiet but I decided to use that time to go for a walk, tidy around the house and then head down to the supermarket to pick up some salad and chicken for dinner. After coming back home I put the chicken in the oven and while waiting I’m watching some YouTube videos along with updating my blog.

    I mentioned previously that I had MarsEdit installed and it is a wonderful piece of software however there are some things I rely on such as saving drafts to the cloud where as with MarsEdit it saves it locally which is a bit of a trouble when I jump between my laptop and my desktop depending on how I feel. The other thing that I miss is the writing prompt which I like using fairly regularly because it gives me inspiration regarding what I’d like to talk about.

    Don’t get my wrong, if you’re using to using a traditional blogging client then it is a great tool particularly if you’re just using one device. There is also the fact that you can create a post, insert photos/images, and then upload it all at once, the editing of code using traditional HTML is easier on MarsEdit etc. It is a good tool but I think I’ve become too dependent on the web based interface to go back to what I used to use a few years ago.

  • Feeling good.

    I went down to the shops today to have a walk around, had aa coffee and a muffin, had a look at some of the specials and see if there was anything that looked interesting. I went for a good walk around along with walking down to Harvey Norman as well then back up to Big Save and a few other shops outside of the mall to see whether they have any specials today. One thing I did notice is that none of the big names (Noel Leeming, JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman) had the the Apple HomePod or HomePod mini in stock – when I had a check online with the Apple for New Zealand they did have the speakers in stock which makes me wonder whether they don’t have them on stock because they’re not high demand product rather than it being the result of it being updated soon.

    After I came home, I had dinner and then watched a few shows and then I went for a walk – 17.4km and then combined with the walking from today the total number of kms would be around 20km. I’m trying to get back into a better routine because I know when I go for a walk every night I feel a whole lot better the next day. On Sunday I’ll probably go out a little but earlier, maybe around 8pm, and do the same 17.4km and I’m hoping that if I can keep that up to Christmas Day that I’ll make up for being lazy for the last week. Next week is when I’ll start doing some gardening around the flat to beautify the place but that’ll probably be on Boxing Day when I head down to Bunnings to pick up stuff to make the backyard a peaceful place to relax.

    Safari Technology Preview 234 has been released which has pushed the WPT score to 99 – it’ll be interesting to see what Safari 26.4 has in store – maybe we’ll strike it lucky and get to 100% implementation. More rumours are coming out regarding a Snow Leopard release for version 27 of Apple’s platforms but I’m also wondering whether some changes under the hood have been held back until version 27 because the performance hit on x86-64 would too great such as pushing more kernel modules into user space (I assume that in future x86-64 CPUs the adoption of FRED should address that issue – Linux has added support for FRED but regarding Windows, that is a big mystery).

  • Why are people surprised. Republicans do what Republicans do.

    Well, the Trump administration has released some of the Epstein file and just as I supected they redacted a 100+ pages of the file resulting in next to nothing useful being released. Why aren’t I surprised? The moment I heard that the bill they passed included provisions regarding the ability to redact parts of the file in the name of an ’on going investigation’ along other loopholes, it was the moment that I knew that the full files wouldn’t be disclosed. Why do you think that so many Republicans got onboard? Because they knew that with the loopholes put in the bill it would enable the Trump administration to manage the fall out by redacting parts of the file in the name of some BS reason. Don’t expect any media on the right to hold the Trump administration accountable, expect them to come out and claim that it vindicates Trump’s claim that it was ‘all a hoax by the crooked Democrats’

    It’ll be interesting to see what happens with the MAGA base – there has ben a gradual shift away from Republicans identifying themselves as MAGA in favour of traditional Republican not to mention the fallout online of once Trump cheerleaders realising that the ‘cultural change’ that some talked about never actually happened – people voted for Trump in the belief that affordability would be solved and not because of anything to do with abstract culture wars that many online cheerleaders thought was the case. It’ll be interesting to see how much of any sort of change is due to the Epstein files and how much of it has to do with material conditions going from bad to worse.

    Unfortunately I am not optimistic about the future of the United States though – in my life time I’ve lived through 8 years of George W Bush and by the time Trump leaves office it’ll be 8 years of Trump. Two years after the George W Bush administration got the US stuck in two quagmires overseas along with crashing the economy the US citizenry decided to give Republicans a majority in both houses in 2010 – given the Republican track record, in any other country the party would be out of power for at least a generation yet in less than two years it appears that the US voter has collective amnesia and gave the Republican Party the reins of power Don’t expect any long term lessons to be learnt – if Democrats end up winning in 2028 then expect in 2030 for the Republicans in the midterms resulting in the damage from Trump being half fixed because the Republicans will obstruct every single step of the way.

  • All required shopping has been done for the week.

    I got up this morning at around 10am then headed down to a cafe in Petone with mum for an eggs bene and a bowl of mochaccino and then I had a second one because why the heck no, life is too short not to have a treat on occasions. We then headed down to the supermarket to do some shopping for this week and next week (I want to avoid the craziness of the stores next week due to Christmas being on Thursday). With that being said, when Boxing Day sales come around on 26 December I’ll see what specials are available but I’ll be cautious given that like Black Friday there is a tendency for businesses to use it as an opportunity to offload out of date products. This is the reason I posted a while ago on BlueSky that always check the system specs before buying – a great deal may end up being not so great when you realise that the process included with he laptop is 3 years old, lacking RAM and the storage is extremely limited and slow.

    One thing I am looking at is the possibility of purchasing are two Home Pods so then I can have a stereo setup and then I can switch between using them for my television or using them for my computer with the benefit of using wireless streaming. What is holding me back though is the possibility of seeing maybe a refresh or whether I would be better off looking at a more traditional speaker setup since I won’t be using the smart functionality other than the wireless streaming.

    Ubiquiti have released a firmware up date for UniFi Access Point (U7-Pro-Max, U7-Lite, U7-Outdoor, U7-Pro-Wall, U7-Pro-XG, U7-Pro-XGS, U7-Pro-XG-Wall) to version 8.3.2 – I up dated the firmware now and then after it rebooted (this process can take 5-8 minutes) and found there haven’t been any regressions, a slight improvement in terms of 6GHz signal strength (I have 5GHz and 6GHz on the same SSID but the connection defaults to 6GHz). Although my laptop, desktop and Apple TV 4K are on WiFi 6E the benefit of the ‘E’ means it can connect to the 6GHz frequency where, at the moment, no one is currently using it so as a result there isn’t any interference not to mention support for 160MHz channels so the connection to my access point is close to 2Gbps which is a good speed when I’m wanting to through files around the local network (the access point has a 2.5Gbps backhaul capacity so it is highly unlikely I’ll find that a bottleneck).

    It’ll be interesting to see whether a Safari Technology Preview 234 is released given that normally it is done a fortnightly cycle with the last release being done on 8 December so the next one would be around 22 or 23 December but then again that maybe too close to the Christmas break when many business shut down over the festive season thus leaving a skeleton crew to take care of any emergencies that may arise. The recent Safari Technology Preview 233 was pretty sparse which is inline with the Safari 26.3 and 26.3 beta that was released for the Apple platforms. In terms of progress, as of Safari 26.2 the compliance has improved immensely – Safari 26.1 was 66.6% and now Safari 26.2 is sitting at 98.3% so hopefully we’ll see Apple hit that 100% with the release of Safari 26.4 and the 26.4 update to the Apple platforms.

  • Getting the backyard sorted out.

    One of the things I am going to do be doing this year is to make the backyard a lot more hospitable – tidying it up so that during the summer or just on a nice day I can spend time outside. The first part will be cleaning up all the weeds around the place with a whipper-snipper along with cleaning up the two gardens at the side of the house where the weed mat isn’t doing that it is supposed to do. Then after that I an looking at cleaning the house down – it has been over a year since it was last cleaned so I’m wanting to wash it down (walls, windows and guttering). 

    Once all the yard has been cleaned up I’m going to head down to Bunnings to see if I can get some giant terracotta pots along with some treees to grow in them – lemon, lime, maybe some with flowers but basically I want plants that are easy to take care of – doesn’t require me to constantly spent the weekends preening and pruning them resulting in it becoming a full time job (I’ve already got one, I don’t need another one).

    I do have my shed as well with a broken door which I need to fix up because at the moment it isn’t looking the best so I’ll see if I can get that sorted out just so I can close it and make the backyard a little tidier. I’d like to get some outside seating, maybe an prebuilt canopy that’ll provide some shade as well as however I’m also looking at maybe the alterbative beign something my brother-in-law could build because I’m not really interested in a see through roof given how the plastic deteriorates and discolours over time due to UV exposure.

    The back fence however I need to have a look at making it a lot nicer – colour steel is my preference because what it’ll mean is that I don’t have to worry about panting it and it’ll take care of itself over the long term because at the moment I have a wooden fence but some of the planks are rotting along with the fence along the sides of the property that are looking a bit worse for wear. I’m also interested in putting some stairs on the back patio area because at the moment there are no one set which is at the end – maybe putting a wooden deck will make it a little but nicer but then again one thing to consider is long term maintenance.

  • A couple of settings can make all the difference.

    So I’ve changed the setting on all of my devices to ‘reduced transparency’ then voila the performance improves, the stuttering on my tvOS device disappears – I don’t know what Apple did in terms of their liquid glass transparency but holy heck it must have had performance penalty. My Apple TV 4K was a bit of a confusing one because before doing reduced transperancy it would stutter, hang etc. but when after enabling it I then rebooting the device just to be sure that there isn’t anything else going on then I found it is fast and responsive. I’ve now been running it for a few hours and everythhing is going well.

    Another interesting setting I came accross was the ‘prevent cross-site tracking’ setting within Safari:

    Unfortunatly in Safari it is an ‘all or nothing’ feature – either you enable it for all websites or you enable it for none of the websites. What I have found is that some websites break or don’t work as expected when it is enabled. For example, if you’re on a WordPress blog and you click on your notifications rather than having the menu drop down it takes you to another page. Another example is if you’re logged into your WordPress account and then visit a blog then you’ll find in the bottom right hand corner you will need to login again. Yet another couple of examples, I’ve also noticed it on Google Chat where videos being sent fail to play and instead are downloaded which is annoying because it is one extra step rather than it playing in the bowser. Tiktok is another website that also has issues – not that I have an account but sometimes I’m given a link for a video but the video doesn’t work properly such as not playing or the audio not working as expected.

  • MAGA voters leaving MAGA and rebranding themselves as Republican.

    I’ve had a theory running through my head and I’ve touched on the theory in the past but I’ve never really gone into it in great detail. The reason I bring this is up is because of the recent news story regarding Susie Wiles and the inside workings of Whitehouse (link). My theory goes like this – the Republican Party establishment have tried to deal with Trump the following ways:

    a) Ignore him – they tried that in the 2016 election believing that he wasn’t a serious candidate, it was a branding opportunity and then when he loses he would use it to launch a new business venture. In other words they didn’t see Trump as a serious candidate and thus could be easily dismissed (on the other hand, the Democratic Party employed the ‘pied piper strategy’ of getting Trump to be the Republican Party candidate through disproportionate air time in the belief that he was so odious that people would be more or less forced to vote for Hillary Clinton because the alternative is so much worse).

    b) Fight him – during the primaries, in both 2016 and 2020 there were attempts to fight and push back (in 2020 primaries there was Bill Weld and I think another candidate but the primary was wound up with an uncontested coronation of Trump) but the reality is that the more they fought the higher his profile got as he played into the narrative that he was an outsider and those attacking him were part of the establishment.

    c) ‘Professionally guide him’ – once in power the establishment believed they could ‘professionally guide him’ (a term I borrow from the show ‘Yes Prime Minister’) in the right direction but the reality is that Trump will do what Trump wants to do and it is an act of delusion if you believe you can ‘professionally guide him’ in a direction that that Trump isn’t interested in going in even if the consequences of following the advice would also benefit him.

    After going down those three avenues I believe that the establishment are on option d) which is to let Trump and MAGA fail – if it is going to happen then let it happen rather than trying to fight it because the more it is fought the more Trump can blame someone else “well, I would have gotten it done but it was the deep state and the establishment that stopped me!”. It reminds me of the rope-a-dope strategy that James Carville’s was talking about in a recent article – I remember watching a video of JD Vance boasting about how Susie Wiles doesn’t try to interfere in what Trump wants to do which makes me wonder whether JD Vance is also in on it knowing that if Trump is left to his own devices he will self destruct. Allowing Trump to crash and burn has its risks but the risk of not allowing it to happen will result in MAGA continuing to be a thorn in the side of the body politic whose continued existence will metastasised into something even worse. Like an alcoholic, does MAGA need to hit rock bottom or are there a sizeable number of MAGA who are in such denial that even after hitting rock bottom they’ll still insist there is a nebulous force or forces out there that they’ll blame as the cause of why their ideology failing in the real world.

    We’re already seeing some polls out recently where half of Republicans no longer consider themselves MAGA but instead just Republican which makes me wonder regarding the time line ahead whether that number will get a lot lower to the point that only the absolute had core vibes based voters are left. I also wonder whether the change in category denotes an ideological change or have they held onto their ideology but realised that the whole MAGA brand is so toxic (if that is the case the change is superficial rather than something profound self-awareness). There is also the other side of the equation and those who are the group of people who now call themselves ‘America First’ who are closely associated with an online group known as the groypers who believe that MAGA/Trump didn’t go far enough – how many will move in that direction? I guess only time will tell.

    What can the Democratic Party do? Learn from the Zohran Mamdani victory in New York – material conditions matter and if you fail to deliver materially for the masses then don’t be surprised if a sizeable portion of the population fall for someone like Trump. Yes, that means you’re going to tax the top end of town, rebuild unions with employee representation on corporate boards (elected through the union), dealing with monopolies and have an active federal government that doesn’t sit on the sidelines expecting that any time soon the magic of the free market will deliver prosperity or that tax cuts at the top end of town will materialise in peoples material reality improving. Yes, that will mean setting up a ministry of works, having large scale public works projects, a pathway from high school to polytechnic to apprenticeship scheme so that a skilled army of tradespeople can be built so that we can get back into the much needed task of nation building – a career of meaningful work and sense that you’re contributing to something larger than yourself.

  • Getting back into using MarsEdit.

    For a while now I’ve been using the web based interface however given that I have a copy of MarsEdit I thought I may as well give it a try again. The one benefit of having a native app is the ability to work offline. I’m going to give it ago and see how it all works out. I made a few tweaks to the blog template in terms of the logo next to the name of the blog so that it gave more room on the left side of the screen for the category and recent post links.

    Regarding the recent announcement regarding enshittification Firefox – this is the vibe that I get from Mozilla:

    Once again we have developers in Silicon Valley huffering their own farts and convincing themselves that what they’re offering is what the end user is requesting when it comes to features/functionality. It shouldn’t be surprising given that I gave up using Firefox over a decade and a half ago when they were continuously denying that their app leaked memory, it was bloated and slow – a tonne of bug reports and nothing ever done about the reported issues. At some point, having reported issues and many other users reporting issues, you have to give up because it is like yelling into an blackhole and instead you look for greener pastures. It appears that many years later they still don’t ‘get it’ so the ramming of AI into everything continues. Oh well, maybe Apple lagging behind the competition will be a bless in disguise and combine that with the increasing profile Linux is having in the gaming community it appears that the damage has already been done to the Windows brand (even though they’re talking about gamer targeted features coming next year) and as long as Wine/Proton improves, more of the DirectX stack is implemented to support older versions of Windows games then I wouldn’t be surprised if we see an uptick in the number of Linux computers on Steam’s statistics that are collected each month.

  • Finally settled on a new theme.

    I’ve been spending a few days trying to find a fresh new look and I finally found one that is a good balance between simplicity so that the content is the focal point of the blog but not so simple that it looks boring. I was going to go for a dark theme but I couldn’t quite tweak it the way I wanted it in terms of font size and making the blog balanced. I’ll see how this goes but so far I’m pretty happy with the outcome.

    I’m enjoying my time off, being able to sleep in and relax, binge watch television series, do some gardening, head down to go for a walk around the shops then enjoy a coffee and a muffin for afternoon tea. It is funny how, after getting so used to a frantic pace at work, leaning how to unwind and just enjoy the moment, getting out of the mindset of trying to schedule every day as if relaxing is something that needs to have a rigid schedule to some how maximise relaxation time.

    Once again the politics side of the internet is excited about the latest idiotic thing that Trump has posted along with a split in MAGA, some posting now that they ‘realise’ that ‘MAGA was a pysop’ and that they’re now going to back to being a traditional Republican, then there is plenty of FAFO content of people unhappy about the high prices. Whenever I see this sort of discourse I am once again sceptical that people have actually changed.

    As I’ve said the past, the benchmark of whether there has been a change will be what takes place in the mid terms – are we going to see MAGA politicians get primaries and replaced with traditional ‘Mitt Romney style Republicans’? are we going to see the Democratic Party win a veto overriding majority in both chambers? if we don’t see a change in substance in the mid terms then it tells me that the theatrics by many online are performative – if your unhappiness doesn’t translate to a change in voting habits then it tells me that it is all performative done for engagement rather than genuine anger/frustration.

    Apple has released the 26.3 update for their platforms and as I speculated earlier the update to Safari 26.3 will be rather sparse (link) which makes sense given that it is being developed over the festive season. There is a rumour that 26.4 will be a bit heavier in terms of features and bug fixes but that makes sense given that Microsoft has done the same thing with their December patch Tuesday they released – enabling features already baked in, fixing up bugs but leaving any sort of major change until next year.

    uBlock Origin Lite 2025.1217.1755 has been released and it appeared promptly in the macOS and iOS App Store – it appears that the length of time for review is very much dependent on what has been updated, the nature of the update and how complex it is. I’ve still been following the sub_frame Declarative Net Request bug and it appears that it is slowly making progress – hopefully we’ll see some movement being made and Safari will get to the point that content blockers that make use of the Declarative Network Request API aren’t faced with bugs that only Safari related.