Matisyahu's Blog

I started the day off with an early start with the courier coming to pick up the computer I had just sold – so much easier to get a courier to pick it up rather than trying to find some way to get down to the place where the courier company operates. After it being picked up mum shouted me a brunch where I had an eggs bene along with a bowl of moccachino which came with a couple of marshmallows. It was an enjoyable brunch and then for dinner I had am omelette with all the toppings like sundried tomato, mushrooms, chargrilled capsicum etc. which was a tasty but light meal after having a pretty filling meal at brunch.

Windows 11 25H2 appears to have jumped to 26220 (link) which was a bit surprising because I assumed that the next release would be 26200 but then again I guess we’ll need to wait until it is all finalised. There are rumours that there is a 26400 series being worked on for handheld gaming devices to make it more efficient on low powered devices which makes me wonder whether we’ll see those changes eventually merged back into the mainstream release of Windows 11 on the desktop, laptop etc. There is also the nVidia based SoC being worked on but delayed – to what extent is the delay due to Windows 11 (as rumours have been going around that maybe it is the cause for the delay although given the audience it is targeting if it was simply hardware related then why not just bundle Linux with it and then if people want Windows then they can upgrade after the release once it is ready) I’m unsure but it’ll be interesting to see what happens.

One thing to remember with the insider releases, the canary channel is at the head of the development tree where all the latest and greatest features are made available but keeping in mind there is no guarantee that those features will make their way back to the developer or beta channel. Many cases the canary channel is used as a testing ground to get a sense of whether something should be developed further based on the feedback they’re provided or whether there isn’t enough enthusiasm for it and thus isn’t developed further or the feedback provided is positive but requires more time to develop feature fully.

There appears to be one constant in life and that is the lousy reliability of synchronising over wifi – it never worked when I had a Mac and it appears with the Phone Link that has continued. On a good side, hooking up the phone via a USB-C cable to my laptop and then dragging/dropping the files to my music directory on my phone worked flawlessly. The one thing you may need to do is disable it showing up in File Explorer has I have noticed some weird behaviour but everything else it is working perfectly. Call me a bit old school but I’ve never had a cable steer me wrong – plug in, copy the files over.

Don’t me wrong, I can see the benefits of using wifi but I found that it ended up dying around half way through the synchronisation over wifi for no apparent reason but I did a drag and drop and it was copied pretty quickly. Oh, and another thing, when you plug in your phone you need to ensure that it is unlocked so that it appears in File Explorer because on Samsung phones there is a feature called ‘Block USB connections while locked” which is a built in security precaution so that if you lock your phone, someone steals it then they’re unable to access the data on the phone without having to first unlock it.

Windows 11 25H2 has been made available on the release preview channel (link) and because it is based on the same code base as Windows 11 24H2 the net result should be a smoother upgrade with a lot of the features already baked in and it is a matter of Microsoft ‘clicking the switch’ and enabling what is already baked in. One of the features is the Administrator Protection which appears to be opt in but I wouldn’t be surprised if at some date they make it a mandatory requirement at some stage in the future since it all falls inline with Microsoft’s focus dealing with security and reliability.

When it comes to the reliability part of the equation there is work to create a framework for security software companies that currently reliable on kernel modules which can cause problems as we saw with the recent CrowdStrike. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same framework will be used by the likes of Easy Anti-Cheat and other such software since both employ the same sort of monitoring but for different purposes. Hopefully what it should mean is that only but the bare essentials are run in kernel space which should make the whole system a lot more reliable. I guess I’m lucky in that I don’t have any software that relies on such functionality so I avoid many of the issues that people talk about online.

Today was uneventful at work although the last couple of hours were pretty busy dealing with customer enquiries and one particular customer who thought if they argued their case that I could some how do the impossible. With that being said, I finished the day off and went for a small walk – kept a record of my calorie intake so that I hit a deficit and the walk is an icing on the cake. Something weird I noticed when I started my walk was a small fire in a tree out the front of a persons house, I tried knocking on their door but I got no response so I ran back home, filled up a bucket with water and put it out and when I came back from my walk I rang up the non-emergency line to report the incident. I’m unsure whether it was an overreaction but I thought it would be best to give the police a heads up because I thought it was kind of weird.

So far I’m enjoying my Surface laptop but the one thing I noticed was the silly default power management default settings out of the box. In the Settings app under power management the defaults are set to, while plugged in, the screen turns off after 5 minutes and the the computer suspends after 5 minutes. This is rather silly particularly if you’re synchronising your music to your phone with the end result being every time you go off to let the computer complete the synchronisation the computer is put to sleep because for some reason the computer doesn’t pick up that transferring fills is activity. Long story short I’ve set it so that the screen turns off after 30 minutes but the computer never turns off – if I want to turn it off I’ll close my lid and let it go to sleep.

I’m looking at getting a Dell Tower Plus with the following specs:

And paired up with a Dell UltraSharp 32 4K Thunderbolt Hub Monitor – U3225QE which is good drop in replacement for the Apple Studio monitor that came with the Mac Studio (which I’ve since sold as well). With grunty specs like that I’ll get back into some gaming, video and audio work as well. I’m still making a decision to either get that or a Beelink GTR9 Pro AMD Ryzen™ AI Max+ 395 which looks better value and I’ll match it up with a monitor, keyboard and mouse bought from my local retailer. I’ve fired off an email and hopefully I’ll find out what 35 days means – 35 days from the announcement or 35 days from the time I place the order. Worst case scenario if I am mucked around I’ll go with Dell – they may not be exciting but they’re reliable.

It has been a rollercoaster for the last couple of days, sickness, my Microsoft account locking me out because the Microsoft Authenticator stopped working then having to contact Microsoft to try to get it all sorted – combine that with feeling like crap and having time off from work, yeah, it takes a toll. Long story short, I’m happy that I’ve finally been able to get it all sorted in the end and the big mistake I made was giving Microsoft a second chance after learning the hard way a couple of years ago when I made use of the Office 365 Business plan they had. Long story short, I finally got in contact with someone at Microsoft, cancelled the Microsoft 365 Exchange Online Plan 2, set the DNS settings up to point to Google Workspace and I’ve got back with the tried and true service that has never steered me wrong. I also cleaned up the 2FA for all my other accounts just to avoid this sort of issue in future but so far I’m pretty happy with the outcome of moving from a Mac to a Microsoft Surface Laptop (with an ARM processor).

Here are some unpacking photos of the laptop – quite a chunky box it came in and when you pick up the laptop it definitely feels substantial.

I’ve set it up and it is linked against my Outlook.com account but like Apple iCloud it is only used for buying applications – nothing is stored and I have uninstalled OneDrive and instead installed Google Drive (which is now ARM64 native). Although I gave Microsoft Edge a try I decided that for the sake of my sanity that I’ll stick with Chrome due to the better integration with Android and the password manager doesn’t appear to have the same quirks that I found with Microsoft Edge wanting to duplicate entries for both the website and the app in the password manager.

An Outlook.com account is also required for the Phone Link (I’m assuming that the cloud sits are an intermediary between the computer and phone rather than manually setting up the phone to work with a specific computer vs just having all the devices logged in and Microsoft acting as a traffic cop) for someone like me one of the biggest strengths from Apple was the ecosystem of hour easily everything works together and Microsoft has successfully delivered that.

Another benefit is the ability to wirelessly copy music from your computer to the phone – gone of the days of dealing with MTP and it’s slow copy speed. Once setup it appears in File Explorer and you can drag and drop the files to the phone which makes use of the Wi-Fi network that both devices are on. I’m fairly impressed regarding how far Microsoft have come when it comes to Windows 11 given my past experience with Windows 10, 8.x, 7 and Vista always appearing to lack the sort of features that macOS had which bought their ecosystem together.

I’m going to setup my mum’s old NUC as a server and see how well it performs – it has 128GB storage and 8GB RAM but any sort of storage I’ll be using I’ll probably just hook it up via the USB port given that I’m more likely to stream music and videos rather than throwing around massive files. The monitor that came with it is completely wrecked – it is over 15 years old and worn out so what I’m going to do is drop it down to the local ewaste depot along with some other old electronic stuff so that it can be disposed off responsibly. I generally don’t like to throw out something if I can reuse it for something else or I can sell it so that someone else can find a use for it and I get a few dollars for my troubles.

For those who don’t know, I’ve been in the Apple ecosystem going right back to the days of the eMac 1Ghz that was released in 2003 and ever since I made that switch, I’ve been solidly in the Apple ecosystem however recent events and changing priorities has made be reevaluate my decision to go all in. What I have found is that over the years is Apple has slowly moved its focus away from the Mac platform and with that shift in focus has been the slow decline – particularly when it comes to Safari and how it lags behind Chrome (the website wpt.fyi does a good job keeping track of web browsers and their compliance with web standards). I basically held out for as long as possible, but the transition didn’t start all at once but rather the gateway out of the ecosystem was the decision to upgrade to a Samsung S25 Ultra which bought on a bit of anxiety because it was a departure of what I was used to.

I setup a Google Workspace account because that is what i was used to and I’ve been using it ever since I bought the Samsung S25 Ultra however after much contemplation I decided to make use of the money I inherited to replace my laptop – I decided to get the Surface Laptop 7 with the Qualcomm Elite ARM processor, 16GB RAM and 1TB storage. With that I decided to move my email over to an Exchange Online Plan 2 for my custom domain and for everything else I’m using the Microsoft 365 Home plan for my storage, Microsoft Edge synchronisation and integration between my phone and my computer. In the past I found Microsoft 365 considerably more complex than Workspace and the last time I tried using it I couldn’t get aliases working properly but I got it all setup without too much fuss and my free gmail.com email address is purely for buying stuff at the Play Store along with YouTube but the centre of my ecosystem is now Microsoft.

Part of that has also meant embracing Microsoft Edge and what I’ve noticed is that it ‘feels’ more light weight – extensions are approved faster, better integration with Microsoft services and most importantly I haven’t experienced any compatibility issues. I’ll write a bit more about the experience when i get up in the morning.