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

  • Grocery shopping and back to work on Wednesday.

    Headed down to the local Pak ‘n Save and did my fortnightly grocery shopping and I was quite surprised at the number of people down at the store, a lot more than I expected. Normally when people come back from the Christmas and New Years break there is a bit of an upsurge in spending to restock the pantry and getting ready for kids to go back to school at the end of January/beginning of February or it could simply be because the weather is so good there are more people having BBQs for dinner. I’ve organised by meals for the next couple of weeks and rather than doing what I used to do which was not eating at work then coming home to have something for dinner at around 8:30-9:00pm. The problem with such a plan? the tendency to overeat because by that time I was really hungry and there was also the issue of snacking on the free snacks at work which didn’t help. A good meal routine will ensure that I don’t find myself snacking between meals or overeating because I had breakfast at around 10am then wait hours before having dinner.

    The other good thing I did today when shopping was getting healthy snacks so that if I do feel a big peckish I have some carrot sticks, marinated mussels and some low carb snack balls. Part of changing my relationship with food is being able to have things in the pantry rather than going on a strict ‘only hve the bare essentials in the house’ because in reality such an approach never works. Why does it never work? because if I don’t have them in the house then I’ll simply buy them but don’t bring them home or a snack at work etc. so the underlying problem still remains. I one is serious about wanting to change ones relationship with food then it needs to be faced head on and that is what I’m going to focus on. I also think that a healthier diet will also help with stress and anxiety as well – something that i knew way back when I was at university but ignored later on in life.

  • Could we get some perspective please?

    Oh the wailing and gnashing of teeth by ‘Tik Tokers’, the crying, the lamentations, the over the top histrionics when users of the Tik Tok app find that US users have been blocked and behaving as if it came out of nowhere (it has since come back online in the US resulting in another round of videos being uploaded as if a loved one who died had come back to life). Where on earth have these people been? the bill was passed on 24 April 2024 and there were people talking about how they bought a new car days before ban came into effect? people complaining about how their lavish lifestyle of $10,000 per month (as one TIk Tok user talked about on a recent video) even though they had 8-9 months to prepare for this day – to pay down debt, downsize ones lifestyle and basically prepare for a future without Tik Tok. I’m sorry but I have very limited bandwidth at the moment to sympathise for those who didn’t plan ahead, who thought their ‘influencer’ (or as I say ‘efluencer’) gravy train would keep going on forever. As others have said on YouTube, stardom on the internet is fickle, one minute you’re the talk of the internet and the next minute people are wondering who you are.

    I am looking at scooters, internal combustion engine as well as electric, but what I want to lose the weight first which then opens up more options due to many scooters having a limit on the amount of weight that can be carried. I’m also in no hurry because within six months when winter starts I’ll prefer taking the train to avoid the horrible whether not to mention the crazies on the road and during that time a greater of variety of scooters will make an appearance. There are a few that I am interested in, I am also interested in seeing whether I have to sit my learners again if I go for a learners motorcycle licence or whether it is just a matter of getting the safe handling certificate and they treat the learners drivers licence as the equivilent. The benefit of moving to a learners motorcycle licence is the ability to get a 100-150cc scooter (the limit on a learners motorcycle licence is 250cc).

  • A cabinet shuffle isn’t going to fix the problem.

    I have to prefix this by stating that I have a laundry list of issues with Labour at the last election (I voted Greens for my party vote and Chris Hipkins for my local MP (we have MMP in New Zealand)) but holy heck the train wreck that is unfolding with this current coalition government that make the left wing in New Zealand look like they’ve got their act together (link). As I’ve said in the past, I think that Shane Reti was setup to fail – how on earth can you expect the minister of health to overhaul the health care system if you don’t give them the resources to do it? oh, and as for the actual increase – that was to cover the back payment due to issues with the holidays act (which is currently being fixed up – I have my own rant on the whole holiday pay thing but that’ll be a seperate blog post entirely). I really do feel for Shane because the impression I got was a guy trying to do the right thing but hamstrung by the minister of finance (aka known by those online as ‘Nikki No Boats’).

    What I do hope is that Labour has a plan this year – I can understand the impossible situation Christ Hipkins was put in at the last election but hopefully with 3 years under their belt there is the ability to control the narrative early on rather than having to spend a considerable amount of time tidying in the mess from the last leader then launching a new vision for where they would like to take New Zealand. It is a long shot because it is very rare that a government is thrown out after one term but anything could happen especially if the current government keep stoking culture wars in an attempt to pander to their voter base whose voting percentage are in the single digits. The big question when it comes to next election is whether young people turn out to vote to push back against the tide of reactionary politics – I’d love to be proven wrong and young people turn out to vote but if the past is anything to go by I’m not particularly confident.

    I just realised something just then when looking at the nutrition labels where I wonder why the number of portions didn’t match the weight of the product – for example, I was having a look at some “Turks Free Range Chicken Nibbles Sriracha & Chilli” which come in a 1kg bag but on the bag it says that there are 5 servings of 125g per serving which works out to be 625g so where did the 375g go to? well, silly me I just noticed the note at the bottom of the nutrition information on the website: “All values above are averages, Average serve size: 125 grams, Based on edible portions only”. So the 1kg is the total weight including the bones and cartilage. I guess it is one of those things you don’t notice if you’re just simply chowing down on food rather than being conscious about what one is consuming. On a side note, it appears the salads I bought have a best before date of 28/01/25 so what I’m going to do on either Monday or Tuesday is that I’ll head down to the supermarket and pick up some salmon, chicken etc. to go with the salad so then I have food ready at home for the rest of the week so by the time Monday or Tuesday rolls around next week I’l head down to the supermarket again to top up the groceries once again.

    It’s going to be a long uphill slog – putting on weight is very easy but losing it isn’t so easy. Just thinking about what I used to eat and how many calories, for example a large margarita pizza has 1336 calories and 213.6g of carbohydrates (not to mention the amount of sodium, fat etc) but even if I go for a thin base it still works out to be 880 calories and 88g of carbohydrates. The worse part, even if I were to have a couple of pieces of pizza with a salad to keep the calories under control, I would still end up feeling hungry afterwards because of the insulin spike from eating that many carbs and the lack of protein. Compare that to a salad and half a butterflied tandoori chicken the number of calories is just under half and the number of carbs is around 25g not to mention 45g of protein that will keep me feeling full for longer.

  • Github is a great resource.

    I’ve been relaxing and reading through Github to see what my favourite projects are up to – WECG discussion minutes are always a good read especially if you have an interest in the development of the Declarative Net Request API. It’ll be interesting to see what will happen between now and June 2025 when enterprise support for MV2 will be deprecated and then eventually removed given there is functionality that is still missing (as noted on a previous blog post) along with many others which make me wonder whether the extra 6 months is about tying up lose ends (assuming they don’t push the deprecation back to the end of 2025 or maybe June 2026).

    The reason why I bring it up it because there tends to be scuttlebutt regarding tech companies not being ‘open’ when in reality you can find a lot of information on what a company is doing based on the developer mailing lists, notes on github and blog entries on projects such as Webkit or the progress of a given standard implementation. For example, I was reading through a bug report on Webkit and a conversation over on the github for web standards about implementing a given standard and it appears that Apple can implement it but it requires a whole lot of other stuff that needs to be done before the standard is implemented. For the average user it may not be interesting but for a web developer or a nosy person like myself it provides context why a given feature hasn’t appeared yet and what sort of time line there is to getting it implemented.

    One project that is interesting is the libc project over on LLVM (link) which is implementing libc in the same way in which libc++ is implemented in terms of it fitting into the LLVM philosophy. Google started the project – Google heavily uses LLVM components in their products, from Chrome through to Android and everything in between, but it’ll be interesting to see whether Apple eventually adopts it as well in much the same way that Apple adopted LLVM libc++. It is going to be a long uphill slog but if Apple were able to get libc++ implemented at the speed it did then I’m sure Google can do that too.

    Regarding dinner tonight, I had some thinly sliced lamb rumps with some Balsamic Mint Sauce (link) along with a ‘Mexican salad’ on the side. The great thing about keeping off the carbs has been the fact that I don’t get the insulin spike followed by the crash then feeling hungry afterwards. I went to the supermarket and picked up a weeks worth of salads – their best before date is 25 January so that means that’ll be good until Friday but in the meantime I’ll be looking at buying some smoked Salmon – a salad and salmon without having to cook anything is a whole lot easier to deal with after a day at work (finish work at 8pm, get home by 9pm) I’m not motivated to do anything more than the least amount humanly possibly.

    I think that is part of the reason I tended to indulge in fast food because it is easier to order than to cook after a long day at work but if I make having a meal at home as easy as ordering then I’ll be less inclined to order fast food. I’ll have a look at a few other options along since salmon such as smoked chicken breast. The funny part about all this is the fact that it’ll end up saving me money in the process – eating healthier and saving money are always a good combination. As for winter, I’ll probably look at steamed vegetables, cooked chicken breast in the oven or maybe a Silver Fern Farms venison or lamb rump. Eventually it’ll become a lifestyle that I won’t even need to consciously think about although my treat that I’m not going to give up is a Pepsi Max, that is my little indulgence.

  • Improvements maybe on their way.

    I was reading through the latest minutes from the WECG where ‘Issue 744: Proposal: A DNR rule type to intercept top-document navigation’ (link) was discussed – long story short, at the moment if you click on a play button on some video sharing websites it’ll also open up a window but in the window it’ll have a message saying the request has been blocked. In an ideal scenario (as seen on MV2) the window shouldn’t open – I’m unsure how AdGuard gets around it (I have a feeling it’s through the use of Javascript based libraries) but uBlock Origin Lite is a pure DNR based blocker which doesn’t use such libraries and thus depends on DNR to do the sort of blocking that was available on MV2 but not MV3 hence the functionality request. I’m looking forward to eventually seeing a design drawn up and then implemented. I think long term DNR and other components of the MV3 framework will become more feature rich

    I tried on a few things that used to not fit me – I don’t have scales at my house but that being said I tend to find that trying clothes on that used too not fit me but are now fitting me a lot better or almost there to fitting me again is a great encouragement that I am on the right track. I think part of the progress is going to be centred around having a better relationship with food – seeing it as ‘fuel for the body’ rather than the unhealthy relationship where food is used as a coping mechanism when I’m stressed, have anxiety, using it as a reward or simply doing it as something to do. It is something that I need to work through but ultimately if the relationship between myself and food isn’t fixed then all the world getting myself healthy is undermined by falling back into behaviours because I never addressed the root cause.

    This is why I’m blogging more often these days – finding a healthy outlet to express myself through rather than bottling it all up and it coming out in unproductive ways. Hopefully within a few months things will be looking even better.

  • Feeling a little bit better.

    Still got a sore throat and coughing but I feel a whole lot better than I did a few days ago – the last time I had this I ended up pushing through with the end result being that it took longer to recover vs had I just taken the time off from work and relaxed it would have been resolved a lot sooner. I went for a power walk tonight, around 6 km, which took 1 hour and 10 minutes which burnt a few calories and got some fresh air to help with breathing. The change in lifestyle I’m focusing on isn’t predicated on the idea of regular exercise but losing weight through calorie control but with that being said a bit of exercise each day allows me to unwind and clear my head so it is easier to go to sleep.

    I wasn’t expecting it but Google is now bundling Gemini Advanced with Google Workspace (link). A few months ago I speculated that Google would include Gemini as part of Workspace but I didn’t expect that they would included advanced, that Google would offer the mid range one but still charge for the advanced version but it appears that they really want to make the fact that Gemini is included out of the box as a point of differentiation. I don’t use it for anything complex other than asking questions like “What is DKIM authentication?” then getting an answer straight away. For those sorts of questions I haven’t had any issues of incorrect information being provided.

  • Still feeling lousy, taking time off from work.

    I woke up this morning with a splitting headache and sore throat (resulting in a croaky voice and difficulty speaking without eventually needing to cough heavily) so I thought it would be best to have today off to recover. After waking up, I then checked to see whether Google had released an update for Chrome which they did where Chrome was updated to version 132.0.6834.84 and along with the update there was also an update from AdGuard to version 5.0.183 – I haven’t noticed any regressions for either Chrome or AdGuard so things are working well.

    I’ve given Firefox another try (the most up to date version being 134.0.1) – I really do want to give it a try but I tried to add my credit card to my autofill synchronisation on my phone but I found that it couldn’t be added so then I checked on Firefox on my laptop to see if I can manually add it but there is no way to do that. Unrelated to that issue, there is also the other feature that I love which is ‘Google Lens’ which allows you to copy text out of an image or select text in an image then translate it which I use on a regular basis. Firefox developers really need to deal with these shortcomings.

    Am I going to make a bug report? I gave up trying to do that when over 15-20 years ago I reported memory leaks resulting in the browser being hopelessly inefficient (yeah, I know it is a long time ago but if I have a bad experience I’m less inclined to give an organisation a second chance). Long story short, the bug report was ignored by Firefox developers then it was closed off with no one interested in fixing it – it wasn’t until years later when they started losing their market share that the developers finally admitted there was a problem and finally started fixing these memory leaks. Long story short, if I am going to spend time reporting an issue then only having it to be ignored then I’m not going to waste my time reporting the issues I have then having to wait 10 years until Firefox market share hits rounding error numbers for something to happen.

  • Back to work on Wednesday.

    Relaxing in bed and getting ready to head into the office on Wednesday – back to work after a month off recovering from my accident and time off for my grandma’s memorial service. I an tempted to work from home but given that I have been out of the office for around a month I think it is best to make an appearance – get up to date with what is happening, get a vibe check of how things are going given that Slack is pretty quiet when I was working last week from one.

    Well, that is what I was thinking but I’ve got a sore throat and coughing – it started last week on Thursday and it hasn’t cleared itself up. I’m going to text message my boss tomorrow because I think it is best that I am not in the office spreading something (assuming it is spreadable), I maybe even be lucky to do some work off the phones such as chat support but I’ll need to wait for Wednesday to get that sorted.

    My Pixel phone finally received the Play Service update to January 2025, I was worried I had done something wrong because it was stuck on November 2024 since I bought it in December 2024 but from what I read online it is just a matter of waiting. I did see reports of issues regarding the December 2024 Play Services update so maybe they held off continuing to roll it out in favour of addressing the issue in the January 2025 update. The January 2025 Android Security Update also was rolled out recently and everything is working as it should. Sure, the Pixel phone isn’t available through a carrier but it is available through Mighty Ape (now owned by Kogan) – part of me leads me to believe that Google is happy with that arrangement where the risk is taken on by the reseller and they get a loyal band of fans in New Zealand.

    For those wondering about the compatibility of Pixel 9 Pro XL in New Zealand, I with Skinny Mobile and Skinny Mobile is a sub brand of Spark which uses the Spark mobile network which has the Pixel 9 Pro XL as being fully compatible with Spark network (link) – from 5G to VoLTE and everything in between.

  • Arrived back at home.

    The memorial service was a nice experience – catching up with cousins I hadn’t seen in years along with seeing friends of the family I haven’t seen in years (the reason for not having seen them in years is because I live in Wellington and they live at the other end of the country). It was a great even, tasty food and was able to pick up a few knick-knacks for my home that mum will bring back when she drives back to Wellington.

    I went to the Auckland airport and I have to admit I was tempted to get some doughnuts but decided that I already had my treat for the day – a kebab, drink, chips and a piece of baklava. On Tuesday I’ll be back on the routine but I’m looking forward to getting back into the office on Wednesday and see how the rest of my work mates are. On Monday I popped down to the supermarket to buy some blue berries, strawberries and some salad mix – hot weather like we’ve had so far it is always nice to have something light and refreshing for dinner.

    I really do wish that ‘tech bro YouTubers’ would stop with exaggerated claims such as claiming there is a ‘huge problem’ especially when the benchmarks for the B580 given that it is clear known that to get the most out of the chip you need to enable ‘Resizable Bar’ so if you’re running an old CPU/motherboard combination you won’t get the full benefits. All of that was and is know and yet we have the same clickbait oxygen thieving tech dude bros on YouTube trying to make out that they’ve found the lost ark or something. Oh, and yes I would buy an Intel B580 or AMD GPU over getting an nVidia simply to stick it to nVidia due to their refusal to work with the open source community to make support for nVidia GPUs better (nVidia have a proprietary GPU but it breaks every time a linux kernel update is released).

  • Flying back tomorrow.

    I’ll be flying back to Wellington tomorrow but before I fly out I’ll pop into Silvia Park shopping centre to have a look around, grab something for lunch. Before I fly back I’m tempted to grab some Krispy Kreme doughnuts because we don’t have them in Wellington the only time I get doughnuts is when I am up in Auckland other than that it is something that I avoid since getting my diet back on track with a focus on healthier options. On the other hand I am worried about falling back into bad habits – the old story where it is easier each time to fall back into bad habits to eventually you’re right back to where you’re started then having to fight the uphill battle once again. I’ll think about it but I think I won’t end up getting them in the end because the temptation is good great to go back to square one again after making such progress so far.

    The one thing I learnt about social media – when someone makes a reply to your post in bad faith the best thing to do is to not engage with them, mute their account and continue on with your day. I’m happy to have a robust discussion with someone then finish the conversation knowing that we didn’t misrepresent each others positions but we agree to disagree but why spend time discussing something with someone who isn’t interested in a good faith discussion? that is part of the problem these days, people talking past each other, seeing the other person as the enemy if they don’t 100% line up exacly with what they believe, the sort of people who complain about ‘bloat’ in the funding resolution in congress while they ignore that to whip votes you’ve sometimes have to compromise, to grease the skids and get things moving. Life is about listening, negotiation, understanding where someone is coming from – not everything in life is about one person screwing over another person in an attempt to ‘get to the top’, sometimes people actually have a genuine disagreement born out of a different world view.