Matisyahu's Blog

Today was a busy day. I had a wonderful sleep last night after having a bit of a shocker of a sleep from Sunday night – 5 hours of sleep vs a solid 10 hours of sleep. I woke up this morning with the sound of mum telling me that we had dinner tonight and wanted to know whether I wanted to go grocery shopping – I decided I needed to pick up a few bits and pieces along with buying a new pair of running shoes because my old ones are complete had it but keeping in mind that I’ve walked over 2800km since the beginning of the year with those shoes not to mention wearing them out quicker due to my heavier weight at the beginning of the year.

After getting the phone call from mum I then got a phone call from Microsoft to get the 2FA sorted out and this time I didn’t trust Microsoft Authenticator but instead I not only set it up on Google Authenticator but also set it up on my browser extension and then backed up the file so that if I had to manually recreate it I wouldn’t be locked out again along with adding my phone number to the account as alternative back up along with an email address. Yeah, I’m making sure that it doesn’t go pear shaped this time by ensuring that all my bases are covered.

Now that I have gotten my Microsoft 365 account sorted out the big question is whether I should move from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 for not just email but cloud storage etc. which would become my main account for everything stored in the cloud and then having my outlook.com one for when I want to setup Phone Link to my laptop (and in the future my desktop) and use my gmail.com email address for my phone and Google TV device.

Tonight I gave it a try and what a mess it is – Microsoft truly make something, that should be relatively easy to configure, into a complete nightmare. It is amazing how easy Google make setting up Workspace – a few clicks and everything is working. In the case of Microsoft, I signed in, bought a product, assigned it to the user, opened up outlook.com and it complained about a licence not being assigned, so I tried again, I then set up my administrator to the onmicrosoft.com domain, unassigned the licece, then created a new user then assigned the licence to that – exact same error message again. Life is too short to have to deal with the incompetence of a multibillion dollar organisation who cannot seem to get things working smoothly so why I should I rase my blood pressure and getting frustrated when I can stick with what I know works.

Today was fairly busy but the last 4 hours or so were nice because I was dealing with emails and other non-phone related tasks then around an hour before finishing it started pouring down with rain along with a health dose of wind. I decided because of that change in the weather I would have a night at home and I decided to treat myself to a chicken kiev along with some steamed vegetables on the side which was a nice way to get warmed up.

I still haven’t heard back from Microsoft and it has been three days – I’ll give it until Monday or Tuesday and then make contact with them but I understand that it is easy to be overwhelmed with emails based on what it is like at work.

It’s getting late so I’m going to head off to bed – hopefully things will run as smoothly on Saturday as they did on Friday.

If you’ve been following recent news regarding a Windows update that was released for the month of August there were claims that it ‘bricked’ their SSD (even though it doesn’t fit the definition of ‘bricked’ given that simply turning it off and back on again addresses it) or their computer crashed. Here is the problem, correlation doesn’t equal causation, we don’t know what drivers they use, what modifications to the system they’ve made, whether they have any kernel level drivers such as easy anti-cheat that cause all manner of problems etc. nor do we know the chipset, the NAND brand because you may have an SSD vendor with a single controller but flash chips provided by multiple suppliers. The below video touches on the problem when people try to equate “this is the last thing I did so therefore it is caused by that”.

It reminds me of when I worked in the hospitality industry and hearing a customer claim that they got sick and say that the last thing they at was from our establishment. The problem is that it can take up to 24 hours (or more in some cases) for food related illnesses to kick in – in other words it could be something you ate at breakfast or lunch or even the late night snack before you went to bed or the midnight snack when you got up and had a bad case of the munchies.

There are people reporting based on reports based on reports which go all the way back to some random tweet from X. It reminds me of the ‘Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)’ where anti-vaxxers will make references back to it but what they ignore is the fact that anyone can report anything they want even if there is no cause and effect. For example, a person is vaccinated and the next day they have constipation then report it to the reporting system. Any evidence to demonstrate cause and effect? hope, it is the equivalent of someone scribbling an opinion on a toilet cubical wall.

This whole situation reminds me of the iOS 17.5 bug that was reported where there was an element of truth but it grew into something well beyond what actually happened (link) because an individual posted to Reddit claiming that he had reset his phone and that the photos came back. The problem? the guy lied, later admitted that he only removed his account but hadn’t done a full phone reset, then he deleted his original post and the follow up post. The net result of that spreading of misinformation and disinformation? weeks of speculation and even to this day people bring up this debunked claim – it is almost as though lies seemingly live forever even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. What are the chances that when the issue is gotten to the bottom of that we’ll see Microsoft vindicated and we find out that it’ll be something as silly as people not updating their SSD firmware or a kernel driver that was causing the problem the whole time.

Btw, it isn’t as though Apple is immune to it – years ago there was an extension a vendor included which relied on private APIs (something you should never do because there is no guarantee that compatibility won’t be broken in the future or not cause issues in the future) which resulted in the macOS having to have a built in check to remove the app before the install went ahead. Many ‘tech YouTubers’ live up the old adage “enough knowledge to be dangerous but not enough to be useful” where they’ll have that toxic combination of arrogance and ignorance thus giving their audience the appearance of knowing what they’re talking about but in reality they’re as clueless as their audience with the exception that they know a few tech sounding words they drop in a sentence that make it appear as though they know what they’re talking about.

I tend to live by the basic rule – if something is setup a certain way and the only way to change it is to go poking around in the inner workings of the system then it is clear that those who developed the system didn’t intend on someone like me to fiddle with it. When you fiddle with something that the developer hadn’t intended then you may get lucky that there are no negative consequences but then again it may bite you in the backside at a later date.

Today was a quiet and uneventful day at work – nothing out of the usual, just the same customer queries along with the odd laugh. It appears that things have calmed down after having an initial flurry of action that have come about due to some changes. It’ll be interesting to see everything works out long term for the businesses bottom line with an increase in customers and whether those customers are retained for the long term because we continue to improve our product offerings.

I decided to give 1Password another try and I ran in the same issue that I had before when it came to handling the login details for Android applications not to mention the overly complex and convoluted process of logging in (a username, password and 2FA via email or SMS is too difficult?). Then there is the issue regarding of the 1Password app where I set it up to open based on the pin that I’ve setup for my phone but it kept on asking for the password – long story short, I gave up and deleted the account once again. I have a basic rule of thumb – if it requires me to put more effort into getting something to work than what I was using before then I’ll stick to what I was using before.

If you’ve been following the drama on the internet for the last few weeks there has been some comotion made about a report written by Taylor Lorenz regarding an entity named Chorus. What I thought was an interesting point made by Parkrose Permaculture that was made was how the whole situation was handled by those involved. If someone writes an article then the worst possible way to respond to to it would be to lash out and attack the writer rather than the content of the article. If there are inaccuracies then say something like “..it appears that Taylor has gotten the wrong end of the stick and that is is partially our fault because we did a bad job explaining what we were trying to do…” then using it as an opportunity to explain the ins and outs of what your organisation is all about. Long story short, if the first response is to simply attack rather than seeing it as an opportunity to provide clarification or an opportunity to revisit policies that maybe correctly reported on but given the feedback it may require changes to better reflect the organisation’s goals.

I’ve finally go the whole Microsoft 365 fiasco sorted with the subscription cancelled however I am waiting on a reply to the email I sent on Wednesday to get the account deleted since I can no longer access it. Maybe in the future I may give Microsoft 365 a third chance but at the moment I think I’m going to stick with Google Workspace given that the price is reasonable and it is easy to setup without too much drama not to mention the fact that the integration between Google Workspace and Android is a lot better than Microsoft 365 and Android but that isn’t surprising given that Google developed Android (it is rather disappointing that Microsoft gave up on the idea of having a Microsoft branded Android but instead decided to team up with Samsung instead). I guess I also bear some responsibility because I put too much trust in the Microsoft Authenticator app when I should have just stuck with a text message with Google Authenticator as a backup along with my gmail account as another back up. Oh well, maybe once I get this sorted out I’ll see what my options are. If I don’t hear back by next week I’ll phone them up and get it sorted over the phone but I’d rather avoid having to go through that maze of prompts the support line gives you resulting in immense frustration.

In more positive news, I’ve setup Authenticator (link) extension on Chrome – if you export all the 2FA in the Google Authenticator as a QR code, take a screenshot then upload it to Google Photos then capture the QR code by the extension to import it. Long story short it allows you to have 2FA without having to grab your phone every time you want to login. I have to admit, I may give 1Password or maybe Bitwarden a try later on in the year but at the moment I’m still mulling over the idea of getting a desktop.

On a side note, I am really enjoying the Surface Laptop 7 with the ARM processor – very fast and responsive and although the UI consistency could be better it is a far cry from the negative experience I had with Windows 10 and previous releases. I guess I’m at a point in my life where I’m no longer nitpicking over the minutia and focusing more on ‘does it do the job’ rather than ‘does it look nice’ and it appears that Microsoft has done a good job since the launch of Windows 11 to incrementally move the platform forward rather than massive leaps forward that cause a lot of disruption and things breaking in the process. I guess we’ll see how things work out when September’s patch Tuesday is released along with the release of Windows 11 25H2 is made available in around October/November this year. As noted in a previous post, I think that 26H2 is where a lot more of the disruptive changes will occur and in the process Microsoft will support 25H2 probably until 27H2 at which point 26H2 base will be mature and adopted by the vast majority of end users given the monthly refinements that they’ll make available.

I had a good day to day, finished work at 10pm and went for my nightly walk. Last week I was a bit lazy and didn’t go for my walk each night because…well..lets me honest, I didn’t feel like it but I decided that this week I needed to get back into my routine of going for a walk each night along with getting my food plan back on track again after having a bit if indulgence of some treats I don’t normally have. Last night I went for a 17.4km walk and tonight I went for a 11.6km walk – both of them leaving me a little sore afterwards but by the end of the week I’ll be feeling better. I also had a look at my running shoes and it looks like I’m going to have to buy myself a new pair very soon given how much I’ve walked over the last 8-9 months.

Chrome 140 was released and things are going smoothly – it is slightly faster, no regressions and no compatibility issues with uBlock Origin Lite. Edge 140 will probably be released either towards the end of this week or on patch Tuesday (or in the case of New Zealand it being patch Wednesday). I have a theory that 25H2 will have fewer features because the big focus is going to be 26H2 because based on what has been seen it appears that every 2 years Microsoft makes a jump forward, for example 22H2 and 23H3 had the same base then 24H2 moved to a new base which continued to 25H2 with 26H2 appearing to jump to a new base which makes me wonder whether we’ll see 26H2 bring about mainstream ARM basd desktops along with a wider variety of ARM based laptops being made available.

The weekend went fast but I’m back to work on Wednesday for all the fun and excitement that it entails. There is a new Chrome release on Wednesday, version 140 (link), which includes a decent number of problems along with uBlock Origin Lite 2025.831.1814 now available in the Chrome and Edge extension stores and on Mac and iOS in their respective app stores. As I’ve said in the past, I was sceptical that MV3 content blockers would be as good as they were under MV2 but I’ve been happily proven wrong with each new release of uBlock Origin Lite.

Windows 11 is gradually growing on me but I’m still procrastinating when it comes to the desktop. Next week on my day off I’m going to sand down my desk then restain it as well as looking at getting a tub chair for my desk because the current chair, although ok, isn’t really all that comfortable when sitting for long periods of time. The leather one I have at the moment is ok but I’m wondering what the cost is of getting it repaired although long term I think I’m going to have to replace it – something I should have learned was how leather can be a bit of a nuisance when it comes to furniture.

Yesterday I went down to my local computer outlet to help mum purchase a few much needed items and while I was down there I had a look at what was on offer in the way of customer built computer. I was having a look at the Dell desktop as outlined in a previous post but the problem is that the Intel CPUs are very much lagging behind what AMD is putting out. Why do I care about the gap? because my concern is about system of legivity – buy a computer and keep it for many years which is the same reason why I ensured my sister bought a AMD Zen 5 based laptop and the computer mum has (from Beelink) makes use of the latest AMD processor based on the Zen 5 platform.

What I am looking at is a customer built on with an AMD CPU and AMD graphics card in a minimalist case and what I have found is that it is a lot better value for money than what I’d buy from a big name vendor like Dell which is funny given that years ago it used to be the opposite (the reason for the big name computer assemblers being cheaper was the economies of scale advantage they had over smaller New Zealand based computer assemblers).

Just on a side note regarding Windows on ARM, one thing to keep in mind is when talking about the slow adoption is the fact that when Windows came to ARM in the form of Windows RT the requirement was that the applications had to be sold through the store and that they had to be re-written using the WinRT framework thus leaving millions of lines code having to be ported not to mention the fact that the resources required were unlikely to be offset with future sales. Then when they did make Windows 10 available for ARM which allowed win32 applications to be easily ported then the other problem being the lack of competitive hardware. Fast forward to June 2024 when the first serious ARM based laptop was shipped in the form of the Surface Laptop 7 which made use of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite which was based on Oryon architecture.

Fast forward a year we’re starting to see big names like Adobe take Windows on ARM seriously because they understand that if Apple’s market share grows because of it’s own ARM offer due to it’s efficiency advantage over x86 then it puts their own business dependent on a single platform. Expect more software companies to follow with the first group being those who are offering multiplatform applications and then eventually everyone else. It isn’t going to happen overnight but I think that eventually, especially once nVidia step into the market with their own solution, that will definitely see a spike particularly when it comes to software titles that make use of the CUDA framework. I also wonder to what extent are we going to see Sony and Microsoft adopt ARM based processors because from what I understand AMD still has an ARM licence with rumours of them working on ARM based cores in the background so we could see either AMD or nVidia ARM based SoCs become mainstream for games consoles and game handhelds.