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

  • Enjoying the weekend.

    First day of my weekend – walked down to my local Dutch bakery and cafe to order an eggs bene and a bowl of caffè mocha for a late brunch (well, technically it was around 3pm between lunch and dinner) – enjoying the good weather after having a week of wild rain and wind. I walked back from the bakery and cafe so it totals around 3.2km but I’ll still go for a walk tonight – I like getting some fresh air which is good psychologically, getting the happy hormones working and feeling a lot better afterwards.

    I’m still looking at getting some time off from 9 June 2025 so I can get some rest along with following WWDC 2025 keynotes and sessions. The other development I am watching is Android 16 which has been split between the official release then a second update coming towards the end of the year. The other development towards the end of the year will be Windows 11 25H2 and Fedora 43 so there are many developments that are going to take place. As I remind people, use the best technology to do the job – you don’t owe any business loyalty, either they deliver a good or service that makes your life easier or they don’t.

    Fedora 43 will be a big change as it’ll be Wayland only with X11 something you have to opt in if you want it rather than including it as part of the base installation. As I’ve said in the past, if I were to ever move off macOS it would be to a PC running Linux (assuming Windows 11 doesn’t get its act together). I’d get a laptop with an Intel GPU but in terms of a desktop I would be tempted to build my own computer with either an AMD or Intel GPU which allows me to avoid the whole NVIDIA driver fiasco because NVIDIA choose to be anti-social and not work with Linux developers. Either include the drivers with the Linux kernel so that hardware is supported out of the box or don’t waste my time with promises but little in the way of delivery. If you want to keep up with what is happening in the world of Linux and open source the news source I like to follow is Phoronix (link).

  • First day back at work.

    Last night I started watching ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and now I am up to season 2 – I love a good binge watch while I’m waiting for new seasons to start of the other shows I like to watch. It is scary how close the narrative is to certain groups that appear to have grown powerful within the US and enabled by those who couldn’t be either bothered to vote at the last election or because the Democrat candidate was less than perfect on a pet project that they threw their vote away voting for a third party candidate who had no chance of winning.

    I’ve spent some time looking through GitHub regarding projects I follow and it appears that AdGuard developers are working on moving away from Electron – one of the changes has been regarding SafariConverterLib which was bumped up to version 3.0 (link). At the bottom of the 3.0 change log there is this glimmer of hope: “AdGuard for Safari will soon switch from Electron so the node wrapper is not required anymore.” It’ll be interesting to see whether we’ll see a shared codebase between AdGuard for iOS and macOS in much the same way that 1Blocker does the same thing.

  • Well, I learned something today.

    My internet connection was acting kind of weird today, some websites were loading slowly and I couldn’t work out why so what I decided to do is do a complete reset back to factory defaults of my router and access point so that I would do a clean setup as if it were brand new. I went through the process of setting it up again, updated the software and made only the necessary changes (DNS servers, choosing the secure DNS servers, configure wifi etc) and funny enough everything is running a lot better along with the UDM running cooler. I don’t know what I did to stuff things around but I think it is a good reminder that it is best not to fiddle with things one doesn’t quite funny understand and that the settings are setup by default there is probably good reason why they’re the default. I then ran the speed test again from my router to the internet and there was a slight uptick in download and upload speed – you live and you learn.

    Recovering after being in hospital for a few days and then resting at home I haven’t felt up to being able to go for a walk each day but I’ve made sure that I’ve kept to my calories and carbohydrates, drinking a good amount of water to keep hydrated and trying to get as much quality sleep as possible. The stress of the initial event is slowly becoming a distant memory but it was still a shock none the less but hopefully with rest and recovery I’ll feel better to get back to work.

    This week I had a bit extra pay come through so I’ve been able to treat myself to a few things I’ve been holding off from buying I’ve ordered online – one of the items I’ve had to get it to delivered to my YouShop address which will send it through to me in New Zealand from the US. If I am going to use YouShop then it begs to question whether I should get all my other orders sent to YouShop then bundle it together into a single order and send it through to New Zealand so then I take advantage of the free shipping in the US and the betting shipping rates that YouShop offer (due to NZ Post having a relationship with DHL). On a good side, we’ve got a free trade agreement with China and our tariffs are next to non-existent so the only thing I need to worry about is paying GST when it arrives (which I’m more than happy to do).

  • Feeling a little better, had a good night sleep.

    I’m feeling a little bit better and I finally had a night of uninterrupted sleep which has enabled me to catch up on 4 days of waking up every couple of hours and rushing to the bathroom in pain. I’m still deciding whether I need an extra day to recover because I don’t want to go back to work too early only to find that I’ve put my recovery back even further. I’ve done that in the past where I had a really bad chest infection (this occurred pre-COVID), wanted to get back to work only to find that the stress of work made it worse resulting in me having more time off as a result.

    The weather has been crazy for the last couple of days – heavy rain and a lot of wind, temperatures and dropping, we’re getting closer to winter. Hopefully this year the winter will be mild which will keep my power bill from going through the roof. Normally when I was working in my previous jobs I would go to work so the amount of time I had my heater on wasn’t for very long at night but the job I am at now I can work from home which has pros and cons. The pros mean that I am not having to travel into Wellington, dealing with ‘train replacements’ when the powers that be decide to do maintenance (why do they do the maintenance on the weekend when people go into Wellington for the pubs and night clubs? god only knows) where as the cons being that during winter it means that I have the heater on during the day although I have to admit I am lucky in that my house has good insulation in the floors, walls and ceiling not to mention double glazed windows which result in the heat being retained for longer along with the fact that I move my heater into the room I am using and close off doors to rooms that I am not in as to avoid more of the house than I need to.

    The developers over at uBlock Lite (MV3 extension) are working on support for Safari however there is a lot of functionality that is missing which Apple needs to add (link). If you click on some of the links they take you to the bug report on Webkit which advises that it has been acknowledged and added to Apple’s own internal bug database. What I am hoping that is that we’ll see some more actions as we get closer to WWDC but having had a look at the WEGC discussion it appears that the work involves not only implementing features but also making major structural changes to the Webkit implementations that those features rely on. Hopefully WWDC doesn’t turn into a giant AI hype fest at the expense of ignoring fundamental components such as Webkit which impact so many applications that depend on it (not to mention that the web browser is generally the first thing that an end user opens when they turn on their computer given how ‘cloud centric’ so many things are these days).

  • So long PPPoE, hello DHCP.

    It has been a month since it was announced that Spark would start offering DHCP connectivity for fibre customers but it would be a gradual roll out – I received confirmation today that Skinny customers can now switch over from PPPoE to DHCP. I wasn’t expecting much of a change but I was in for a bit of a surprise. For starters there was a speed increase when it came to downloads – I haven’t got the original test but it was run from the UDM router itself with a top throughput of 500Mbps however I switched over to DHCP, rebooted my router and got the following result:

    That was running the test directly on the router itself to avoid any variables that are unaccounted for. I’m located down in Wellington and the test server is located in Auckland. It has been a few hours and I haven’t received ‘high latency’ messages in the UniFi Dashboard which is a big improvement than the regular high latency messages I’d get every day. Although I have moved from PPPoE over to DHCP I have kept the Cloudflare DNS settings because I’ve had a bad run of DNS issues in the past using my internet service provider’s own DNS server and although it is resolved now it is a whole lot easier just sticking with Cloudflare because it has been working reliably for months.

  • The cost of Republican Party/Trump tariffs.

    There is a great video that has been uploaded by Gamers Nexus that goes into detail regarding the impact of tariffs on the technology industry:

    It is worth watching it from start to finish because it goes into details of the costings regarding bringing a product to market and the impact of tariffs. As I’ve said in the past, there are a small number of large companies that make massive profit margins and there are many smaller companies that are barely eking out a profit and the impact of these tariffs will wipe out many of these small to medium sized businesses.

  • One heck of a night. A week in review.

    Tomorrow (I started writing this blog post on Thursday) is Friday or what would be for most people ‘hump day’, the middle of my week then two days more afterwards then I have Monday and Tuesday off for my weekend. Law & Order: Organised Crime Season 5 has started up again – reminds me very much of Bosch in that the season tends to focus on a single narrative that is stretched over a whole season or if there is a second narrative it intertwines itself with the main narrative.

    Well, Friday arrived I had some horrible discomfort so I rang up the Health Line (link) because I didn’t want to jump to conclusions only to find out that It was something that would sort it out if I drank some water, relaxed. After explaining the symptoms the operator thought it would be best to go to the hospital who then called an ambulance on my behalf since I had no way to get to the hospital. They ran some tests and probed me ending with positive news being that it wasn’t something serious but caught up on some sleep and monitored me to ensure everything was ok. I had no way to get home so mum picked me up and I spent a good amount of Saturday sleeping. It’s now Sunday and I’m still recovering – feeling a bit better than on Saturday but one can’t expect to have the issue resolved in around 24 hours.

    An interesting thing happened over the last 5 days which was some upgrades being done by my internet service provider along with Ubiquiti pushing out an update for my UDM router and so far I haven’t see the high latency message appear in the Unifi control panel so maybe a combination of the internet service provider upgrade along with my software update has addressed the issue. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when my internet service provider moves to offering DHCP and see how well it performs when compared to PPPoE. From what I understand it has been rolled out for Spark customers but it’ll eventually rolled out to Skinny customers – Skinny being Spark’s ‘all the thrills, none of the frills’ internet service provider they use as a ‘price fighter’ (those who are price sensitive and aren’t interested in the add ons that Spark offer with their own plans). At the moment there is UniFiOS 4.2.9 in the ‘Early Access’ programme which includes quite a few improvements since 4.1.22 (the current release) – it’ll be interesting to see what the experience will be like Skinny makes the switch to DHCP.

    How are things going with my iPhone 16 Pro Max on Skinny Mobile? going pretty well – slightly better performance and coverage thanks to the newer modem, fast and responsive and the battery life is pretty good. Had the circumstances been different and I had my old iPhone 15 Pro Max would I have upgraded? probably not, we’re now at a point where upgrade cycles at now 3-5 years as the smart phone market has matured in much the same way that the computer industry has matured and with that most of the focus I see is about software and cloud services – integrating the two together and then selling paid for services aka the holy grail of any business is the reoccurring revenue stream of subscriptions. It’ll be interesting to see how the Apple modem performs once it makes its way to their flag ship smartphones (and other devices). From what has been reported regarding the C1, the modem has good coverage particularly on the edge of coverage area which is a big improvement over the Intel modem that had a bit of a reputation not performing the best in such a scenario. I have a feeling that what we saw with the C1 is Apple wanting to nail down the basics (aka good coverage) before optimising around performance. Another thing to keep in mind is that there is also Apple working on their own wifi and bluetooth chips as well – when you make put everything onto the same silicon then it gives you a lot more flexibility when it comes to managing performance and battery life where you control the whole widget and understand how everything works (not to mention the optimising the hardware and software for each other).

  • A busy day off but a lot accomplished.

    As much as I like to relax on my day off I also want to get things done that I can’t or don’t get done during the week when I’m working. The first thing I did today was doing a clean install of all the Apple devices (including my iPhone 16 Pro Max where I did a DFU restore before setting it up for the first time), a pre-winter cleaning and the one thing I found interesting was an issue on my Mac Studio. I created a bootable usb drive following the instructions which created a macOS 15.4 bootable installer which worked perfectly fine on my MacBook Air but when I did a clean install on my Mac Studio it rebooted and then asked me to select a bootable drive, I selected the built in drive but it came back saying it wasn’t bootable. I then did a network recovery and it wasn’t until afterwards that I found that the recovery version offered was 15.4.1.

    Long story short the previous macOS installed on my Mac Studio was 15.4.1 so it appears that the 15.4.1 appears to have also updated the firmware which meant an older version of macOS couldn’t be loaded on the device hence the drive being not bootable. Makes me wonder whether part of the security fix was related to the M1 because my MacBook Air M2 had no issues restoring 15.4. I do a clean install off a usb bootable for two reasons, 1) it is quicker 2) in the past I have sometimes found what is available for the internet recovery lags behind (it appears that isn’t the case in this situation – maybe the security vulnerability forced Apple to update what is available for recovery).

    How did it go in the end? it all worked out in the end and everything is running smoothly – Safari is working well with the 1Blocker extension which has done a great job replacing AdGuard for Safari (the lack of updates for the last 4-5 months for Safari along with the lack of following up on the bug I reported 2 months ago hasn’t been acknowledge by the developers). Yes, I am back to iPhone, Safari and Apple TV but that is another discussion entirely but what I can say for the TLDR version – the iPhone 16 Pro Max is wonderful.

    Today (Tuesday) I’ve cleaned my place from top to bottom, weeding the garden and tidying up outside around the house as well. One of the benefits of losing weight has been a big boost in energy – it is amazing how I tried to normalise the lack of energy by trying to convince myself “oh, this is perfectly normal” when in reality it wasn’t normal and more importantly was an indication of an underlying issue that needed to be addressed.

    On Monday I also tried an experiment, as I noted on a previous post I talked about diet soft drinks and carb cravings but then I read and watched some videos and I suddenly realised that maybe I got it all wrong. Around 3 months ago I had a HbA1c blood test and it came back saying that my blood sugar was too high and the link that I made in my brain was that even if I kept off sugary foods that I kept getting cravings for high carb food so I drew a correlation but I didn’t look into it further wondering whether there was a causal link between the two. The reason why is I assumed that that the spike in blood sugar wasn’t due to savoury food I was eating my sweet food but even when I cut sweet food out of my diet I still kept craving carbs. The problem is that I failed to understand the bigger problem which was the fact that my blood sugar was high because I was eating not only too many calories but too many carbs and I was flooding my body with fuel which was spiking my blood sugar which then made me more hungry.

    What was my theory? now that my blood sugar has come down I have found that I no longer have that ravenous hunger then if I consume diet soft drink it shouldn’t have an impact on my appetite. There is only one way to check whether my theory is correct is to run an experiment and see what the results are. Well, yesterday I bought a 600ml of Diet Coke (and 2 x 1.5L of Pepsi Max to see if there is a difference between the effects of one compared to the other) when I went shopping, I drank it and nothing happened so I waited and waited, went to sleep (which funny enough, I was expecting to be up going to the toilet but it appears that high blood sugar also results in higher rates of having to go to the toilet). Today I had a cup of Pepsi Max and the same results – no change in appetite.

    It appears I was believing there was a causal link when I was ignorant of the larger issue which was high blood sugar and that was because I thought high blood sugar was due to eating too much sweet food when in reality it was the high number of carbs I was eating (and sweet food, along with other types of food I was eating were high in carbs) and the sedentary. As soon as I cut the carbs down to a minimum and focused on eating protein, fresh fruits and vegetables along with exercise I started losing weight and getting it all under control my appetite also was under control. My appetite is also dealt with my controlling carbs and calories – a meal with too many carbs will make me feel hungry but if I eat a meal with the same amount of calories (sometimes less) but hardly carbs along with a decent amount of protein I feel full and satisfied for a along time.

    Getting healthier is a journey and in that journey I admit I have made some really silly mistakes along with drawing conclusion where there was no causal link but life is about making mistakes, learning from them and then becoming a better person because you’ve had the experience and learning first hand how to avoid the situation in future.

  • Oops, forgot to add the title.

    Quite a busy week so far in the technology industry – Google released Android 16 beta 4 (link) and it appears that the kernel version has also been updated (not a major version update) and I’ve read reports regarding the Pixel 9 Pro XL showing performance improvements. The expected release is around the middle of the year but I’m in no hurry to upgrade but from what I have heard the days of the big leaps forward have come to an end and the focus is on evolutionary and under the hood improvements, refining the platform so that the features that exist work a lot better. A summary of the Android 16 features can be found on this page (link) and many of those improvements have been back ported to Android 12 such as the improvement to the Android Runtime (ART) along with a switch to 16KB page size.

    The switch to 16KB page size brings the following benefits (link)

    Switching to 16KB page sizes on Android offers performance benefits by reducing fragmentation, improving memory allocation efficiency, and potentially leading to faster app launch times and improved system boot times. This approach allows for smoother user experiences, particularly for large applications.

    There is also scheduled is a second update to Android 16, the platform itself (the APIs) are stabilised but additional features will be made available. It’ll be interesting to see what is bought to the table.

    WWDC 2025 is set for June 9-13, 2025 so I am looking at how much leave I have available and if I do have sufficient leave I’ll take the week off so I can enjoy keeping up with the latest sessions that Apple will make available online. Although I do watch the keynote I much prefer the ‘Platforms State of the Union’ where it is still a high level overview but it is more geared towards the technically inclined who want to know more about the under the hood changes.

    On a side note, I dived down a rabbit hole of learning about Chrome, the underlying technology called Skia and the work being done called Graphite which has a backend called Dawn which will make use of DirectX 11 and 12. Long story short there is a lot of behind the scenes work that goes on when it comes to developing Chrome and it is quite the adventure looking into what will appear in the future. The benefit of such a development will mean every part of Chrome (including the UI of the application itself) will make use of Dawn and the DirectX 11 and 12 on Windows not to mention Metal on macOS which should translate to a better overall experience in terms of responsiveness, font rendering quality etc.

    I know this is a bit late but Windows App SDK 1.8.x development series has been launched (link) – as features are added then mature we’re seeing Microsoft starting to slowly make use of them. I think long term their goal is to replacement for the classic win32 API. It’ll be interesting to see long term how they tackle the challenge of moving the platform forward, provide a reasonable level of backwards compatibility and then how they will schedule the removal of features from the operating system – all while they focus on prioritising security above all (link). The big question is whether, when faced with the choice of backwards compatibility or security whether they choose security given Microsoft’s reputation for prioritising backwards compatibility above all else – I’d like to he proven wrong but if the past is anything to go by then I wouldn’t be too confident. With all that being said, Microsoft is working on ‘Administrator protection on Windows 11’ (link) there isn’t a date set but I am hoping that we’ll see it in Windows 11 25H2 which will go a long way to securing Windows.

    Tonight I went for a 10km walk after work – it’s good to get some fresh air after being stuck inside all day not to mention getting some exercise since I’ve been sitting all day. I’m going to head off to bed beecause I’ve got work on Saturday and Sunday then my weekend is Monday and Tuesday – I haven’t got anything planned for my days off but whatever it is I’ll be taking it easy.

  • I got my blood test back, good news and great news.

    On my 30 minute break from work I contacted the medical centre where my doctor operates from and organised the HbA1c blood test and urine test to check for kidney functions. The nurse at the medical centre contacted me back and informed me that my HbA1c has gone from 89 down to 41 which is a huge drop – well below the goal of getting below 50 and the icing on the cake was the urine test came back which confirmed my kidneys were functioning. The HbA1c gives me some room (link) to work on getting my weight down further to the point that if I can get it down below 40 to somewhere around 30 then that’ll put me in the ‘normal range’. This has really given me a positive lift for the day and looking forward to getting to my goal by the end of the year.