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

  • A good power walk tonight and back to work on Wednesday.

    I went for a lvery long walk tonight – 17.4km (it took 2.55 hours to complete so if I round it up to 3hours then my speed of walking is 5.8kmph). I don’t know how many calories were burnt but given that I’ve indulged a bit on my break and on my birthday I needed to get back to my routine and burn those kilos off. My goal is to get below 100kg by the end of the year so if I keep focusing on calorie control and exercise then hopefully I’ll get to that point before the end of the year. Tomorrow I’ll do a 11.6km walk and do that each day for the rest of the week although I may do a slightly longer walk on Sunday night if I feel the need.

    Chrome version 138 will be released tomorrow (link). It’ll be interesting to see how it performs – I use it on both my work PC that my employer provides along with it on my MacBook Air and Mac Studio. I am interested in Mimestream (a mail client for macOS that works with Gmail using the native Gmail API rather than IMAP) but I’m waiting on the developer to add Task, Calendering and Contacts integration (so essentially it ends up being like Outlook). I guess it is a chicken and egg scenario, if you don’t subscribe to their software then they don’t have the funds to make the investment to build those features but then that would involve subscribing to a piece of software in the hope that said feature is actually eventually delivered.

  • Productive weekend so far.

    Went and had brunch at the local cafe with the family – eggs bene with extra poached eggs along with a bowel of mochaccino. After enjoying that nice start to the day I popped down to the mall to get my drivers licence redone however I find it difficult to use those eye testing gizmos at the Vehicle Testing centre so I then popped over to Spec Savers to book in for an appointment to test my eyes – worse case scenario I may need to get some glasses because possible next year I may look at getting a scooter but just as a run about where I live but no long trips into Wellington.

    After getting all that sorted I then went back with mum to get the issue with her email sorted out. Currently using the email address provided by the ISP many years ago but I’d like to get her off her ISP email address and instead using either her iCloud, Microsoft or GMail account – not fussed which one but getting away from the ISP provided one would make life so much easier for all concerned and will also mean if at a later date she wishes to move to a cheaper ISP it’ll also mean saving $5 per month that she is currently paying to keep her ISP email address active. I think the best decision is to go with Microsoft given that she already pays for Office 365 so may as well make use of it (I use Google Workspace because of its integration with Android and working well on macOS).

    Mum is looking at getting a new television that’ll include YouTube and what I’m going to do is buy the family YouTube Premium so then mum, my sister etc. can benefit from the subscription. Once you’ve gone ad free on YouTube the idea of going back to watching ads is torture – trust me, I know first hand having to watch YouTube videos at work and having to deal with the ads constantly popping up at the most inappropriate time. I’ve said that the best thing we can do is wait for her to come back from her trip around Europe then buy the television along with upgrading her computer at the same time – we’ll probably end up going for Samsung or maybe I end up giving mum my Apple TV which has the added benefit of being easy to navigate.

    I’m going ot be holding onto my Samsung S25, it isn’t the ideal phone but I’ll see what the Pixel 10 has instore along with Nothing Phone 3 which will also have 7 years worth of updates. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. Chrome is working well and the experience has been pretty good as so far as websites working as expected along with uBlock Origin Lite going from strength to strength. I have held out hope that maybe uBlock Origin Lite will eventually ‘get there’ when it came to Safari support but when there are so many issues that need fixing in Safari and the reluctance by Apple developers to fix the issues, I think I’ll end up just getting frustrated if I stayed with Safari rather than throwing in the towel and going with Chrome instead.

  • One more day to go.

    uBlock Origin Lite for Chrome has been updated to 2025.619.2143 however the ‘Allow List’ has been removed so if you do wish to add a list of websites that you want to exclude from having content blocking to it then you’ll need to open up the settings in uBlock Origin Lite, put a tick next to ‘Developer Mode’, click on ‘Develop’, then select ‘Custom DNR rules’ from the drop down menu the copy and paste the following int into the box:

    ---
action:
  type: allowAllRequests
condition:
  urlFilter: *
  requestDomains:
    - <domain>
  resourceTypes:
    - main_frame
    - sub_frame
priority: 1
id: 1
---

    Replace <domain> with the domain, you can just have a long list one after the other if you wish (that is what I did). I’m unsure whether it makes a difference in terms of performance but all the domains I’ve added have worked as expected – I guess it is only a major issue if I wanted to have specific settings for each individual domain but since they’re all being treated the same I’ll throw it all in one filter setting. It took a while to find the syntax that would work – Google’s AI search didn’t really help given that it conflated unrelated articles together which appears to be something I see quite often (I report the issue but it is doubtful that the problem will be fixed given how I’ve reported other issues in the past with no corrects being made many years later.

    Lots of changes coming with Chrome 138 which will be released next week, if you want to see what is coming up in future Chrome releases you can check out the roadmap over here (link) – I’m going to keep giving Safari a try as well as keeping up to date with what Google is doing with Chrome.

  • Work, software updates and walking to the shops.

    I had work today which wasn’t so bad – the morning was quiet but in the evening it started to get a bit busy but it’ll be interesting to see whether it is busy tomorrow with the Matariki public holiday result in a quiet day because families are going away to take advantage of the three day weekend. Maybe we need to go back to the old days of stores closed on the weekends – make Matariki weekend into a time where all the stores are closed and people actually have to do something other than spend money they don’t have on something they’ll lose interest in 5 minutes after buying it.

    1Blocker released an update (Version 6.1.4 (1014)) and so far things are working very well – I have offered my feedback to uBlock Origin Lite – I’m unsure how beneficial the feedback is but I guess you can insert “I’m doing my part” meme here. I’ll keep using 1Blocker since it uses the native content blocking API however if the bugs in Apple’s implementation of DNR get fixed then I’m open to giving uBlock Origin Lite a try (at the moment Safari Technology Preview 221 and Safari 19 (included with the developer betas of macOS, iOS etc) have some of the DNR implementation bugs fixed). It’ll be interesting to see whether AdGuard follows the uBlock Origin Lite lead and make their MV3 extension available on macOS rather than having a special build for Safari – hopefully if that is the case then it may translate to updates being released in a more prompt fashion.

    I went for a walk down to the store which is around 8km in total to pick up some stuff I forgot to – I really needed some dental floss along with some other teeth caring things. I brush my teeth every night but I really need to spend some extra time doing some detailed cleaning primarily because after I had my scooter accident I couldn’t use my hands so I wasn’t able to brush my teeth for close to a month as a result. It isn’t bad or anything but there does need some detail cleaning so I’ll fill up my time when I get bored by staring into the mirror and making sure each tooth is in tip top shape. Although I go for a walk every night I also try to fit exercise into my daily routine so that it becomes part of my life rather than something that I have to set aside time for.

    I had a look at some of the videos on YouTube of people using iOS 26 in reduced transparency mode and you know, I have to admit, I was wrong. I though iOS 26 would be a horror show but as others have pointed out that this is the first developer preview so a lot can change based on feedback Apple receives and word case case scenario there is always reduced transparency available (which I use on macOS and iOS). I’ve seen some commentators bring up Windows Vista while others have bought up Mac OS X when it was lunched with the ‘lickable’ interface but I have to admit I was never a fan of the whole transparency look – I quite liked the Windows XP beta (pre-Luna) and macOS X 1.0 Server. I’m hoping that they’ll gradually tone it down – developers will provide feedback and hopefully Apple will realise that some of the UI elements may look great for presentations but would be horrible for day to day use.

    On a side note, I noted that with my life style change I cannot longer eat chips or any deep fried fast food – I find them too greasy to the point of being unpleasant. I went out for my birthday and ordered fish ‘n chips but I couldn’t get over how greasy they were and then I ordered them again believing maybe it was just prepared badly. Another thing I noticed is that bags of chips (crisps) are also very greasy tasting – so bad that I ended up throwing out the remaining of the bag because it was that unpleasant. I guess if there is a silver lining it is the fact that it is easy to resist unhealthy food when the food doesn’t taste very nice to begin with. I guess when you’re eating health 95% of the time and you eat something unhealthy your body goes “good lord! what the hell was that?!”.

    I’m probably going to look at writing up a blog post about the Iran/Israel situation along with a bit of commentary about other contemporary matters but it is still very much a ‘work in progress’ – I go for a walk each night, come home, right down in OmniOutliner some of the ideas that popped in my head then sit down and try to bring together random ideas into a coherent blog post.

  • A late start but not too busy.

    One of the perks of working at home is not having to fight the traffic and the crowds getting in and out of work – along with being able to have a quiet environment without interruptions. The downside? having to have the heater on where as if I were the office I would get the heat for free but then again the cost of going in and out vs the amount of electricity I use to heating kind of balances out in the end.

    I’ve ordered a switch today (5 x 2.5Gbps per port) I’ll attach up my cloud key and security camera hub since they don’t really need the full bandwidth. What I’m looking at doing is setting up an NAS because it doesn’t make much sense me paying for cloud storage when I never use it when I am out – in fact I would find it more useful having a NAS at home, rip all my DVDs to it and play them on my television, laptop, desktop or my mobile phone. I’m looking at an Asustore which is why I need to freeze up a 2.5Gbps port on my gateway so then I can get maximum throughput when copying files to and from my various devices. I am tempted though to run an ethernet cable under the house to my office since that is the main computer I store all my music, videos etc. on so if I am going to upload it to my NAS device I’d like it fast and reliable.

    Went for a 10km walk tonight so that makes it three nights in a row – I want to get in the exercise just in case the weather gets a bit nasty and I’m unable to get out of the house. It feels good after going for a walk – fresh air, seeing what is happening around the neighbourhood. On Thursday I may write up a longer post about politics but I want to be in the right frame of mind when I do it rather than being tired and heading off to bed.

  • Back to work tomorrow, learnt something today.

    Well, the wheels are in motion to sort out the ‘impulse buy’ yesterday but in the process of tidying up iCloud I came across ‘Codes’ in ‘Passwords’ then it struck me that I didn’t need to sue third party authentication apps because Apple already has it built in. I feel like such a fool purchasing the authenticator app because I wanted to synchronise and integrate into iCloud but now I realised that Apple already provides that which makes life so much smoother. That has all been setup, the subscription I had has been cancelled.

    While I was on a roll I finally got my OneSmart multi-currency card sorted out – I couldn’t work out what the email address was and the other details but that has now been setup, logged in and I was able to top it up. I’m tempted to set it up as a bill payee where I transfer $50 per fortnight to it where the money is ‘out of sight, out of mind’ which will allow me to save up for presents for Christmas or maybe if there is an eventuality that needs covering then gradually I’d like it to become a habit where I increase it to maybe $100 per fortnight – getting into a good habit of savings and because I won’t see the balance on a regular basis I won’t be tempted to spend it vs if it were just another bank account I would see it regularly then get tempted to spend it.

    uBlock Origin Lite is making progress but it appears that are bugs in the mainstream build of Safari that are waiting to be fixed (the Safari Technology Preview already has many of these issues resolved) not to mention limitations such as 150,000 filters with most extension developers getting around that limitation by breaking there extension into smaller extensions with each mini-extension dealing with a filter category (it appears, or at least my understand, that DNR is based upon the the native content blocking API that they developed a few years ago). It’ll be interesting to see whether the uBlock Origin Lite developers do like what other developers do or whether Apple steps up and address the filter limit because at least in my experience so far using the latest build of Safari Technology Preview and uBlock Origin Lite, it has been pretty reliable so let’s hope that there are continued improvements.

    Just before I leave, here is a great interview. Politics is the art of the compromise, the art of persuasion – sitting on your own because you’re too pure to mingle with those who don’t 100% line up with your world view might give you a sense of moral superiority but will ultimately achieve nothing in the long run. Far too many engage in purity politics of virtue signalling and performativeness – taking positions that are so on the extreme but completely unworkable, unimplementable and no chance of building widespread support but for a small moment such individuals get to boast about how uncompromising they are (but resulting in nothing being achieved resulting in a situation that is worse than if they just went with the compromise and gain at least some ground).

  • Getting back into the groove of things.

    I finally got myself back into a good routine tonight by going for a 10km walk after having a bit of an anxiety riddled day – impulsive decision followed by hardly any sleep and then attempting to try and undo the damage of an impulsive decision. After that rollercoaster I find that a good long walk really helps me clear my mind so that I can look at the problem rationally and how to get myself out of the mess I got myself into – the solution is to pay off what is owed then close the account followed by wearing the consequences of making a really dumb impulsive decision. When will I go back to the iPhone? when the new one comes out in around September – I think I can put up with Android for 3-4 months, let’s just chalk it up to me doing my penance for the sin of being an idiot lol.

    What I’ve done is I was able to get my Skinny mobile number migrated to a new SIM card then I’ve since did a factory reset of the Samsung S25 Ultra and beecause all the carriers use the same XNZ software build I am able to move from One NZ to Skinny without any problems (funny enough I was stuck on an old version of Android software when I was on One NZ but the moment I switched to Skinny a flood of updates came through that didn’t arrive when I had the One NZ SIM card installed).

    I decided to also stick with Skinny Broadband – it would be nice to have IPv6 but it isn’t a necessity and I’m not going to go through a whole lot of drama just for something isn’t going to make a sizeable difference to my every day life. I’m sure Spark (the owner of Skinny) will get around to making it available at some point in the future but they tend to be pretty conservative (strange enough their corporate side do support IPv6) then again they are making big upgrades as part of the switch off of 3G so maybe that is part of the work being done – do a job once do it right the first time.

  • I have de-Samsung’ed my phone.

    I went down to One NZ to buy a Samsung S25 Ultra with 512GB storage – after getting it setup the first thing I did was de-Samsung’ed the phone but uninstalling all the Samsung software they pre-install then installing all the Google software such as the Phone, Clock, Calendering, Contacts, GBoard etc. resulting in a debloated Samsung expereicen. I’m sure that some people may find these features useful but for me, unless you go all the way and provide an end to end cloud experience that can be used not only on the phone but desktops, laptops etc. then it is a glorified waste of time. Samsung would have an amazing device on their hands if they did their OneUI customisation and only installed Google apps.

    uBlock Origin Lite just keeps getting better and better – although I would love Google to get their act together to speed up the approval of extensions (or allow users to opt into updating filters outside of normal releases) but even with the delay things are pretty good. With that being said, as I’ve noted in the past, I thought the changes to the extension framework in the form of the declarative net request would result in a substandard experience but so far the experience has been pretty good. At first AdGuard had a slight lead over uBlock Origin Lite in that it did a better job blocking popups (clicking on a video to play it but another window opens up rather than playing the video) however uBlock Origin Lite has surpassed AdGuard particularly when it comes to website compatibility as well as not causing the browser to hang which I have found occurs on occasion with AdGuard.

    I’ve gotten in contact with my current internet service provider to see when the 30 day notice kicks in so then I can plan to move my internet over to One NZ – one provider for everything which makes life a whole lot easier with the added bonus that they support IPv6.

  • Sunday is going to be a busy day.

    Thought I may as well make a blog post before I head off to sleep – tonight has been really cold and when i mean cold I mean getting down to 0°C so I’ve been having my heater going all night. Sure, the electricity bill is going to be horrible but the alternative is getting cold then sick resulting in higher costs getting myself better again – the old story of an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. It is funny, during the summer I complain about the constant heat and then when winter comes it is dealing with the cold weather but to be honest I’d sooner deal with cold weather than hot weather because it is easier to keep warm with an extra layer of clothing along with the heater going vs. when it is hot and trying to cool down where even a fan with windows open doesn’t really do much.

    After much toing and froing I’ve decided that I’ll be moving to One NZ (formally known as Vodafone NZ) for my ISP as well as my mobile. I’ll probably head in tomorrow because it is a good excuse to get myself out of the house for the day – I start to feel like a recluse after a while even though I’m not a great socialiser I do like to get out of the house when I can. I was tempted to go with 2 Degrees but the coverage where I live isn’t as good as Spark or One NZ not to mention that 2 Degrees uses CGNAT which can cause problems when working from home so for the sake of my sanity I decided to go with the safer option with the added benefit that One NZ has IPv6 as well. Oh, and I still have my old SIM card from One NZ which means I can get things setup pretty quickly.

  • It appears I’m an expert in procrastination.

    I’m heading off to bed now but at the moment I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Google – the last time I went into the Google ecosystem I found that the home experience wasn’t all that good but I’ve also realised that the ‘having everything in the one spot’ sure sounds great until you realise that the native experience of controlling ones home applications is better than trying to control them from a single app (assuming that they all implement HomeKit/Matter). Where as HomeKit/Matter provide a common framework so that everything can be controlled the end result is a ‘lowest common denominator’ experience as multiple companies are trying to work together and standardise resulting in some devices falling outside of that – security cameras features aren’t standardised. Maybe I should just get comfortable with the fact that dealing with multiple appliances isn’t going to be as clean and straight forward as I want it and that it is something I’m going to have to accept.

    With that being said, much rather prefer the productivity of Google Workspace when compared to iCloud and Office 365. WIth iCloud it is rather limited – I understand it more of a consumer facing platform where complexity is avoided but at the same time it would be nice if Apple offered something like an iCloud Small Business which would allow more aliases for custom domains because the iCloud ‘hide my email’ with random words isn’t exactly up to scratch when you need to provide an email to someone. I’ve used Office 365 but found that the management of it wasn’t as easy when compared to Workspace – the impression I got was that Microsoft dumped all their software onto a server, called it ‘the cloud’ then went home for the day. Features that’ll work on the new Outlook app but not the Outlook.com web app (when you’re added to a mailbox which is visible in the Outlook app but not on the Outlook.com web app). Being told that aliases are supported only to find that they won’t turn up in Outlook.

    I’m still procrastinating about moving internet service providers but because I make a decision I did put some questions to a local tech focused forum to hear feedback regarding what their experience – the decision being done with careful consideration given that I work from home and want to make sure that I get the best possible experience since my employer uses AWS, Microsoft, Cloudflare along with many of the work resources residing in Australia. Hopefully after a few days I’ll get some clarification and then make a definitive decision once enough information is collated.