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 week.

    Sunday is the end of the week for me and the beginning of my weekend. Tonight I went for a 14.2km walk because it stopped raining so I thought I may as well take advantage of the good weather given that these days the weather is unpredictable resulting in days of raining without any rest so when those moments of fine weather occur you make the most of it. I was able to order some groceries on line – I was really looking forward to some smoked salmon so I got that along with some salad mix which was a nice midday meal. Hopefully spring will up quickly because as much as don’t mind the cold weather I do mind the high power bills associated with keeping my home warm.

    The MAGA online influences are getting high on copium as they try to explain away the decision by the Trump administration not to live up to the promises made regarding during the election and afterwards. At the end of the day either a) Trump and his cabinet are part of the deep state or b) There was no deep state and the Trump campaign used it to convince rubes of something that doesn’t actually exist. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops and what kind of narrative is created to explain what has taken place – will there be a split with the ‘true believers’ insisting that it’s all part of a ‘grand plan’ aka 5D chess by Trump vs those who realise that they were used and are now trying to find a way to repair the damage done to relationships? I think eventually those who threw themselves into the cult are going to realise that Trump only cares about Trump – if you get something out of it then it is by accident rather than by design.

  • Another day, another pay.

    Work was uneventful and it has been raining all day so I decided to have tonight off from some exercise and instead chill out watching some tv series while catching up on some blogposts I’ve beem meaning to finally complete.

    An update to the AdGuard beta release has been made available along with the uBlock Origin Lite as mentioned yesterday has appeared in the Chrome store. More features are being added to uBlock Origin and AdGuard beta has been pretty rock solid in my experience – the issue regarding the Cloudflare check (the one that asks if you’re a human) hasn’t come back so it appears that the problem has been well and truly sorted out. Rumours are still circulating regarding extension support being added to Chrome on Android but from what I understand things are pretty buggy so I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up seeing maybe something around the time there is an announcement around the future of ChromeOS given that any sort of move to replace ChromeOS with Android would require support for extensions given how many organisations, both business and education, that rely on extensions as part of their work flow.

    I’m having a look at the Nothing Phone 3 and at the moment there is the Nothing Phone 3a – from what I understand it supports VoLTE on the three carriers but I wonder whether the Nothing Phone 3 will also be the same. The reason why I wonder is because there is a scheduled shut down of the 3G network towards the end of this year and beginning of next year so the 3G fallback for voice calls will disappear thus making VoLTE support a must. The Pixel 9 Pro XL works with VoLTE with all three carriers out of the so assuming no regressions then we’ll see the Pixel 10 Pro XL work out of the box as well. Both the Nothing Phone and Pixel promise 7 years of support so it’ll be interesting to see what is delivered when the Pixel 10 Pro XL is announced. As for my Samsung S25 Ultra, I might give it up mum when I upgrade and as for Google Home, I just use it for controlling the Google Streamer and eventually the Arlo security will be replaced with Ubiquiti which will avoid the whole mess of mucking around with recharging the camera battery.

    On a side note, I did give the Samsung Tizen a try on my television (keeping in mind my television is pretty old) and I much prefer using the Google Streamer – easier to navigate, more responsive, no strange bugs or quirks occuring. It’ll be interesting to see whether Google releases a ‘premium’ streaming box, something that makes use of the Google Tensor SoC, maybe we’ll see that when Android TV 16 is released and there is a move to 64bit Android TV – AV1 hardware acceleration for high definition streaming content would be a nice improvement. At the moment though the Google Streamer does a pretty good job for what it is designed to do although a faster processor would provide a more responsive experience when using Kodi.

    And Ubiquiti has released some beta versions as well and stable previews – the Ubiquiti UniFi Gateway Max is still in development but I’m guessing the version number doesn’t really reflect whether one product line is getting more attention given that the Ubiquiti UniFi Gateway Max lacks the built in UniFi Network Application hence the reason I have a Cloud Key although I am tempted to replace the two with Ubiquiti UniFi Dream Router 7 then setup the Ubiquiti UniFi Gateway Max and Cloud Key at mum’s place so then she can get a better more reliable experience vs the ancient Spark modem that she is currently using. I might make the big switch when I upgrade her computer so then we can setup the office, maybe even look at getting a laser printer and scanner all in one which will free up more space so the office isn’t as crowded.

    Oh while we’re at it, at work I use a Dell laptop running Windows 11 Pro and the experience so far has actually been pretty good. I’ve never been able to understand the mouth foaming hatred that far too many chronically online people have regarding Windows 11. What I am on the look out for is the Snapdragon X Elite Gen 2 that is rumoured to being announced in September this year and hopefully the indication of discounts for current ARM based Surface laptops point to maybe the Surface laptop getting a prompt update. The big attraction for me is the WiFi 7 support not to mention that it’ll work out cheaper than upgrading my existing MacBook Air to a newer version. I’ll compare that to what is announced when it comes to the x86-64 side because if I do go down that road then I’ll want to make sure that it has APX because the extra registers will result in greater efficiency and performance when Windows is recompiled to take advantage of it along with application software.

  • Sometimes you just need to have a sandwich.

    I decided to head down to the local store that is open late to pick up some milk and while I was there I picked up a couple of sandwiches on multigrain bread (the health benefits are secondary to the the fact that I like the taste of multigrain bread) along with a slice. It’s an 8km walk to and from the store so it allows me to squeeze in some exercise after work while also getting something sorted out. On a side note, the milk is no more expensive than if I bought it from a normal supermarket so it isn’t as though I’m paying a premium for the convenience of getting it at a store which is open all hours of the night.

    I’ve got a freezer full of food plus a pantry of canned goods so what I’m going to be doing over the next few weeks is basically get to the point where I have an empty cupboard. I’ve taken out some pumpkin soup today from the freeze and I’ll work through that over the next few days then I’ve got some mince, sausages etc. I’ll probably get the mince out first since it is already cooked up and seasoned so all it needs to be is reheated. The sausages I’ll probably grab a few extra ingredients and make deviled sausages with the benefit being that any leftovers I can reheat the next day which is a quick nuke in the microwave (I only get 30 minutes for lunch so every minute counts).

    One thing I just noticed is that the Samsung S25 Ultra that I have is made in Vietnam – I heard that Samsung had moved some of their production out of China but it is interesting to see that at least in the case of the Samsung phones sold in New Zealand that they’re being assembled in Vietnam. The July 2025 update is rolling out gradually but unless it is really, really, really urgent we tend to get the update in around the middle to the end of the month so I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up seeing it close to the end of July/beginning of August (the June 2025 update didn’t appear until the later half of June). The build code they use in NZ is XNZ which is shared between the three major carrier so I wouldn’t be surprised that Samsung wait until they get the go ahead by all three carriers before an update is made available. It’ll be interesting to see when OneUI 8 will be made available – Android 16 is apparently being released in two releases with the first being the API stable and the second release including the user visible features. The latest test release of OneUI 8 has the kernel updated from 6.6.30 to 6.6.77 however that may change in the future given that there have been no firm dates on when it’ll be made available but with that being said I think we’re at ‘peak smartphone’ in terms of features – improvements are always welcome but they’re never going to be on the scale that we saw in the past such as Android making big under the hood changes that resulted in massive leaps forward in performance, power and memory efficiency etc. Google are still working on improvements, they’re noticeable but they’re not on the same scale in the past.

    It is interesting though that with the role of cloud computing coming to the forefront and just how much time is spend now in the web browser, the underlying operating system at least as so far as the desktop is becoming largely irrelevant. I remember back in the days on comp.os.linux.advocacy USENET newsgroups and the arguments between Linux and Windows users, how Linux wasn’t up to the task because it lacked <insert here big name title> but fast forward to today and unless you’re part of a legacy/establish business, most are using Google Workspace with Google Docs with most young employees exposure to that when they were at high school where they would have a Chromebook or a Chromebox, logging in, accessing their documents in the cloud, sharing them with classmates etc. so the idea of running a native application on the desktop is a rather strange experience for many which makes me think that even Microsoft is thinking of a post Windows future where Windows will hang around as a legacy system but eventually it’ll free them up to remove backwards compatibility as those legacy software titles are replaced with cloud based software running in Microsoft Edge (or whatever browser the end user prefers using).

    Side note: uBlock Origin Lite 2025.709.1622 has been made available. At the moment it is available on the Microsoft Edge web extensions store however it is still waiting for approval for the Chrome web extensions store. In the release there is the usual filters update but also support for custom CSS-based cosmetic filters has been added. It appears that gradually uBlock Origin Lite is acquiring many of the features that exist in MV2 uBlock Origin extension found on Firefox but hopefully with the work WECG are doing that eventually MV3 will provide pretty much all the functionality content blocking developers need be it requiring some change in their extensions to get it working vs how it was done with MV2 based API.

    Daily writing prompt
    What do you think gets better with age?
    View all responses

    LIfe gets better with age – what I mean by that is that with maturity you realise what is and isn’t important, what is worth getting worked up about, things that you were really interested in you quickly realised were a distraction. The benefit of getting older is the appreciation that you have a limited amount of time on earth and as a result you start to triage what you spend your limited amount of time on and what can be easily discarded or to quote Marie Kondo “does it spark joy?”.

  • An uneventful day.

    I had work today which was rather uneventful which is always good – no drama, just serving customers and helping them to do what they want. After work I went for an 11.6km walk – still a little sore after the 22km walk on Tuesday but I’ve recovered pretty quickly although I did avoid the optimistic idea of getting up at 11:30am because when I did wake up I still felt pretty sore but by the end of the day I felt a lot better.

    Mum is looking at getting a new computer, television but also looking at a new mobile phone. What I tempted to do is suggest a Pixel 9a (when the Pixel 10 comes out I’ll move over to that) given that she wants something with a bigger screen along with the fact that the Pixel integrates better with Windows than the iPhone does along with the fact that Pixel doesn’t include confusing crapware that Samsung does (the main reason I prefer a Pixel over Samsung). I’ll end up selling the phone once I get my Pixel – I don’t expect to get a huge wad of cash but if I can cover half the cost of a Pixel 10 Pro XL then I’ll be a happy chap. Personally I think mum should also look at getting a Windows laptop as well so then we can centre everything around One Drive – I’m tempted to maybe just give mum my phone and then buy the Pixel Pro XL since the Samsung already has a decent amount of Microsoft integration.

    It’s funny because following on what is happening with Apple it appears that Apple have done the impossible – they’ve actually made Windows 11 desirable. If Apple can’t even get the basics done properly such as Mail on Mac setting up the aliases for my custom domain on iCloud or fix the issue where from out of nowhere it asks me to choose the outbound server and emails fail to send (which can only be fixed by logging out of iCloud then logging back in on macOS) I really have to ask what am I paying a premium for? For years the premium being paid was for the promise that ‘it just works’ but now increasingly more things aren’t working – the lack of investment into Webkit/Safari resulting it trailing behind the competition (standards compliance, implementation of web extensions API etc), the Mail issue that I outlined, user interface changes that make the user interface more difficult to use in terms of readability thanks to the whole ‘liquid glass’ – heck the butchering on iOS has made me love Samsung OneUI things are getting that bad (I’ve learned to live with things Samsung includes that I won’t end up using – as noted on a previous post the SmartThings app is pretty good, very comparable to the experience one would have with HomeKit).

    Oh, and I’m using WhatsApp – does a good job keeping in touch with mum when she is overseas in Europe and I’ll probably just end up keeping it on my phone long term. That reminds me, I’ve got another idea for a blogpost I want to write – this one will be a bit of a spicy one where I talk about disinformation and misinformation on social media. Oh, and today (Wednesday) Google released an update to Chrome, haven’t noticed any difference however there are a small number of fixes (link). If you want to keep up to date on what is planned for future Chrome releases the information can be found over at the Chrome Platform Roadmap which includes links regarding whether other browsers have implemented it, if they haven’t why so, what the feedback web developers are etc (link).

    Daily writing prompt
    What time do you go to bed and wake up currently?
    View all responses

    I work from home where I work from Wednesday to Sunday, 1:30pm to 10:00pm, I get up at around 12:30pm each day which gives me time to have a coffee, maybe cook something for the first meal of the day (I only have two meals, a ‘brunch’ then a dinner at around 5:00-5:30pm depending on when my break is scheduled. As for when I go to bed, it can range from 2:30 to 3:30am depending on how I feel but a lot of the time if I do go to bed early what I tend to do is relax in bed listening to some podcasts.

  • Routine reset.

    I’m at the halfway point in the year so I want to ramp up progress on reaching my goal of being below 100kg by the end of the year. Tonight I went for a 22km walk and tomorrow I set my alarm for 11:30am rather than 1:00pm which will allow me to get up, go for an 8km walk, arrive back home, freshen up and then start work then after work I go for another walk to unwind then combine that with getting back on track with a sustainable meal plan should result in me getting to my goal hopefully before the end of the year.

    Part of that meal plan involves working through the food I have and then when mum comes back from overseas I’ll do a big shop with a grocery list that’ll be based on a fortnightly meal plan so then it is easier to budget for going forward. Basically what I want to do is to use up all the food I have at the moment so then I start from a blank slate and work up from there – maybe bulk buy things that can be frozen then from there it is topping up and buying things like milk that cannot be bought in bulk (I guess I could get the shelf stable UHT milk but it ends up costing more than just buying the normal stuff).

    ASUS is looking to announce on 22 July an nVidia based ARM CPU/GPU combo (link) and Lenovo is also looking at launching one as well (link) – there isn’t anything mentioned about the operating system but given that the Lenovo one be available in the 3Q of this year I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up seeing Windows 11 25H2 adding support for it out of the box. The risk of Microsoft not stepping up to support this would mean ceding more ground to Linux and away from using Microsoft services if they don’t make Windows 11 available. If you don’t control the platform then it makes it easy for consumers to migrate from your other services or never use your services in the first place – see what happened when Microsoft gave up on smart phones and gave up trying to make their consumer facing services like search competitive with Google.

  • A bit chilly tonight.

    Today I received a text message from my doctor regarding a routine blood test – I assume as a follow up to the previous two HbA1c tests to see that everything is going well. I received the message today so I followed up with the medical centre and they advisd me that it wasn’t majorly urgent but just a routine check to ensure everything is going well. What I’ll do is next week (or maybe the week after) pop into the testing place but this week I’ll be focusing on getting my sleeping and exercise schedule back into some sort of order along with sorting out out a meal schedule each day so then I have some sort of predictability (which is something I prefer). The new work schedule is 1:30pm to 10:00pm 5 days a week but there is plenty of time after finishing to go for a walk for a couple of hours however I am tempted to maybe get up at around maybe 11:30am then go for a quick one hour walk before work then at night after work I go for another walk so then I’m squeezing in a little bit more exercise along with the fact that a walk in the fresh air before work will wake me up so then I’m wide awake and ready for a day of fun and excitement.

    Patch Tuesday is coming up soon and there are a few features being made available (link) and Windows 11 25H2 is in development with a goal of providing anticheat, end point detection and antivirus vendors a way to provide their services without having access to the kernel along with the administrator protection being worked on. Given how Microsoft has taken a much more conservative approach to announcing new features I wouldn’t be surprised that a list of changes in Windows 11 25H2 won’t appear until maybe a month or two before it is stabilised and the developers are confident that what they’ve being worked on is ready for the general public to use.

    Ubiquiti has released via its early release channel UniFi Gateways 4.2.3 – I haven’t given a test since I need the gateway as rock solid as possible since I work from home. There is also UniFi OS for the cloudkey which is sitting at 4.3.x which has some neat stuff in store when it comes to filtering traffic such as content blocking (aka ad blocking). Will be interesting to see how well it performs but for me I tend to prefer having an extension because it allows me greater control over which websites I allow through vs the websites I leave content blocking on for because the website is that obnoxious. At one stage I was looking at the idea of getting an NAS device but decided that even if I did get it I would still want it backed up to the cloud so in the end it wasn’t going to end up replacing it but rather add another device to my network so I’ve decided just to stick to using Google Cloud.

    I’ve been reading some more documentation about upcoming changes that Intel has instore for their future CPU designs with APX being a bit one (expands the number of general purpose registers from 16 to 32) with the benefits can be found outlined in this document (link). For me the big choice is whether for my laptop I get a Microsoft Surface, ASUS or a Dell but when it comes to the desktop do I build my own or do I just get something off the shelf from Dell. Personally I’m leaning towards an AMD self build along with an ASUS laptop but then again if I do go Intel then I’ll prefer either getting and AMD GPU or Intel GPU unless nVidia is going to offer something absolutely awesome.

  • Start of the weekend.

    After a week of fun and excitement at work I finished at 10pm tonight, went for a walk down to the convenient store to pick up a sandwich but it was closed but I needed a walk anyway so it wasn’t a wasted outing. I finally got all the washing sorted out and it is now hanging on the clothes horse inside along with the dehumidifier running so that it doesn’t my house damp (the heat from my heater in my bedroom floats through the house which also helps dry the clothes a little bit faster when combined with the work the dehumidifier is doing).

    On a good side uBlock Origin Lite 2025.703.1440 has been released – haven’t noticed any regressions but I’m comparing it to the beta release of AdGuard 5.2.25. uBlock Origin Lite is still being beta tested on Safari however I don’t imagine a stable version being released before macOS 26 stable version is released given that there are bugs in Safari that are fixed in the next release. Personally I’m sticking with Chrome – the Workspace integration, things are going well with my Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra which has really grown on me and I can see why people like the Samsung ecosystem with the Samsung TV acting as a SmartThings hub.

    One of the things I really loath about social media and video sharing sites are the number of people who declare something or someone is “doomed! doomed! doomed I tell you! they’re doomed” – claims that China is going to collapse in x number of days, that a particular company is dying, that a given product is dying etc. Exaggerated claims propped up by people watching it because it re-enforces an existing bias for or against a given organisation, product etc. which is then made worse because the algorithm picks up that said content is popular and suddenly appears in the feeds of more people.

    This is the one reason I cannot stand the ‘tech dude bros’ on YouTube who convince themselves that they’re some sort of van guard, a member of a group whose opinions are the only ones that are valid and that they have the final say even though their track record is one of getting it wrong over and over and over again. They’re right up there with a particular YouTuber who starts off their video by saying that they’re going to ignore all the drama while ignoring the fact that they are the drama – they are the ones making unsubstantiated claims, whipping up conspiracy theories and rumours while simultaneously acting as though they were the ‘adult in the room’.

    On some more positive news, Microsoft appears to be giving it another go in terms of getting things out of the kernel that ideally shouldn’t be there (link). It’s funny how back in the Windows Vista days there was an attempt to achieve something similar only to find that there were threads of being sued left, right and centre (link) only for this to come back to bite businesses and end users in the backside as one can see with the Crowdstrike fiasco not to mention the on going ‘anticheat’ problems that regularly cause gamers to complain forums about frequent kernel panics (aka BSODs). Hopefully we’ll see that along with ‘Administrator protection’ which will hopefully provide greater security and reliability to Windows 11.

  • One more post before I head off to sleep.

    Daily writing prompt
    What is your favorite genre of music?
    View all responses

    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:

  • End of the week, start of another weekend.

    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.

  • Heading off to sleep.

    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.