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

  • Start of the weekend.

    Finished work on Sunday for the week, took the bus down to the store to pick up some groceries and then walked part of the way back (my arms got too tired to keep on carrying the grocery bags), I had a late dinner and then I went for a 10.5km walk which enabled me to unwind (making it a total of 11.5km that I have walked). Woke up today, still a bit stiff from the long walk but feeling a whole lot better knowing I got some exercise but I’ll be focusing on getting out of the house on my day off so that I can get some sun and fresh air. On a side note, I finally cleaned my fridge after ignoring it for a while – it wasn’t horrible by any stretch of the imagination but it need some freshening up.

    I’ve tried the latest uBlock Origin Lite on Safari (stable version that comes with macOS 15.4.1) and unfortunately there are still many bugs in Safari that cause problems when compared to how smoothly uBlock Origin Lite works on Chrome. I’m looking forward to hopefully seeing that maybe these issues will be addressed with Safari 19 (bundled with macOS 16) – that Apple are holding back from pushing out disruptive changes in favour of making them available in the next major release. I’m not hopeful given that Apple has allowed Safari marketshare slip over the years to the point that Chrome now has 66.94% of the browser market on macOS. I know plenty of people, both old and young, who go out of their way to install Chrome because websites that work fine on Chrome break on Safari (NZ Post’s YouShop being a good example).

    Rumour has it that Apple will be releasing update for their platforms this week – it’s Monday in New Zealand but Sunday in the US so it may not be until Tuesday New Zealand time before we see it emerge (although it may not get released until later on in the week depending on whether there have been regressions in the release candidate they made available last week).

  • One more day to go.

    Well, I’ve got Chrome installed with the latest version of uBlock Origin Lite – it appears to the shock of almost no one that Chrome developers are adding functionality that extension developers need while over in the land of Safari there appears to be a reluctance to close that functionality gap not only when it comes to implementing MV3 APIs but also standards based on what I see here (link). I kind of regret jumping ship back to the world of Apple given the lack of any serious progress. What I am hoping is that we’ll see something being announced in WWDC regarding Safari 19, that the functionality gap will close but something tells me that it’ll be the bare minimum rather than what should be happening which is for Apple to recognise the web browser is the run time engine of the 21st century and the minimum effort – even on their own platform, macOS, Chrome is the browser of choice which is a lot to say given that it requires the end user to go out of the way to download it given how defaults tend to have a way of gaining and holding onto marketshare because “well, it’s there so I may well use it”. Maybe at this point Apple should give just up and go all in with Chromium so that as an end user I don’t end up with an web browser that is continuously behind the 8th ball.

    I’ve installed ublock Origin Lite and it has gone from strength to strength where as Ad Guard still haven’t fixed up the issue where pages that use Cloudflare keep hanging (the issue doesn’t occur on Ad Guard for Safari for some reason). I couldn’t imagine myself using Windows though given the horror stories I keep hearing from Windows users not to mention the fact that I use it every day at work – a constant reminder why I am a Mac user and made that switch over 25 years ago when I was living in Australia (my first Mac being an eMac). Oh, and I wouldn’t want to touch Office 365 for Business with a 40 foot barge pole – for all the issues I have with Google the situation is a whole lot worse with Office 365 given how Microsoft appear to be hell bent on making basic tasks such as emailing from an alias more difficult than it needs to be.

    I’ll head off to bed, get some good sleep and hopefully all will be well in the world when I wake up. Oh, and I went for an 8km walk tonight – I needed some fresh air after being shut in all day.

  • Heading into the weekend.

    I’ve ordered some stuff over the last week and the first order has arrived at YouShop in the US so I logged in and provided them with the information they require. One of the other items have shipped and I’ve got one more yet to ship – in total it’ll be three items to be sent to the remailer and then I’ll get them sent to New Zealand. I’ve also bought some clothes from Dickies – when they’re half the price then one might as well get them given how long lasting they are.

    Today I went into work and put through my leave for my birthday and the beginning of June – unfortunately both of them were declined by ‘work force management’. I talked to my boss about it and he is looking into it – hopefully I can get a break since I tend to like a break around the middle of the year for the WWDC then a break at the end of the year around Christmas time.

    It’ll be interesting to see what Apple has in store for web extensions because the developers over on uBlock Origin Lite have released a beta build for Safari (link) – it still has a few bugs along with the fact that there are features missing from Safari that Apple haven’t implemented yet or are buggy (link). I hope that we’ll see Apple get to the point where the big content blockers can start sharing their Chrome MV3 extensions with Safari which will result in faster improvements rather than Safari having to have a special build which uses Apple’s own API rather than declarative net request.

  • Back to work on Wednesday.

    A busy couple of days where I finally got my act sorted out and bought those items of clothing I saw online but had been procrastinating over whether to go ahead with the purchase along with ordering a Delongi kettle and toaster from Noel Leeming which was on special:

    Which will mean that I’ll finally be able to have some hot drinks at home along with being able to toast some bread rather than at the moment where I have to put the oven on. Regarding my air fryer and a few other items, I’m going to put some shelves in my pantry on the left side which at the moment is just a space – I’ll put my air fryer, soda stream in there or maybe I’ll look at getting a set of shelves I can have on the counter but either way I need to find a way to get things better organised.

    Tonight I went for a 10km walk and it was good to get out to enjoy some fresh air – there was a small amount of drizzle and according to the Met Service for the next couple of days it should be fine however on Friday there will be some rain but I’ll be all good if I can get some exercise in then have a rest on Friday.

  • 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.