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

  • Some things I have noticed recently.

    As much as I like using Chrome it is so buggy when its to the spell checker – text boxes where it doesn’t work then suddenly a minute later on the same website the text box magically has spell checking. Don’t get my started on a misspelled word that is phonetically close to what it should be but apparently Chrome isn’t smart enough to pick up on it but Google the search engine can. It reminds me of a YouTube video – “how can they be made by the same company?” Yes, that is a question I ask every day which is why I have uninstalled it and reclaimed back a bit of space. I’m looking forward to Safari 18.1 that is bundled with macOS 15.1 because based on the beta notes for Safari 18.1 for older platforms, they’ve made quite a few fixes which is a good sign that they’re continuing the drive to close the gap between Safari and it’s competitors.

    New Zealanders who ‘felt bored’ and ‘wanted a change’ are now finding out the hard way that low taxes and low regulation have a high cost (link). Gee, who would have thunk it, when you cut services to the bone to pay for tax cuts and handouts to landlords that the wheels end up coming off. This is what happens when politicians play to your prejudices and you vote out of fear and anger rather than having a solid understanding of the policies being proposed.

    I really do wish that AdGuard would provide a native version of their software for macOS – I’d be happy even for a Catalyst paid for version (I’ve already bought AdGuard for iOS) to replace the existing Electron based app that they have for macOS.

    Wellington appears to be the queerest city in New Zealand (link) – I’m doing my part.

  • End of another week.

    End of another week, I’m gradually getting back into the groove of being in the office 3 days a week and at home 2 days a week – a change from 2 days at work and 3 days at home. I have to admit the one good thing about going into the office are the free snacks and drink as well as being able to pick up some top notch savoury scones and/or muffins before work. Reminds me when I used to work in Wellington years ago where I would pick up a large mochachino along with some savoury scones.

    I’ve updated Chrome and AdGuard to the latest version – AdGuard is improving with each new release with version 5.0.113 being released recently (for some reason it hasn’t been updated on their github page). It’ll be interesting to see how things improve as TSWebExtension v2.3.0-alpha.0 and TSUrlFilter v3.1.0-alpha.4 libraries mature over time which will translate to improve content blocking.

    Back to politics, it is interesting to see that the people who voted for the current government are now finding out that elections have consequences – public transport spending has been cut, increased spending on roads and there is greater focus on making use of PPPs and tolls for new roads (there has been a reaction in a heavily National Party area – it is almost as though people don’t see the link between who they vote for, what their policies are and the impact of those policies). That doesn’t even touch on the number of people who didn’t turn out to vote – throwing a temper tantrum because Labour squandered 6 years but some how thinking that if they sit this election out and no vote it will some how send a message even though they (the vote) are going to be more negatively impacted by a National lead government.

    Intel has launched their Lunar Lake super efficient SoC with all the videos I’ve watched so far appears to beat Apple silicon in specific benchmarks but I can’t help but get the feeling this performance may be improved in the future based on what one saw with the Zen 5 SoCs (AMD SoCs getting a boost due to Windows receiving optimisations as part of the update that’ll be made available soon). It’ll be interesting to also see is the role that ‘Envisioning a Simplified Intel Architecture for the Future’ (link) will play in the future given that the specification was recently updated in June 2024 and the recent simplification of their CPU architecture by getting rid of hyper threading (also known as SMT) which may open the door to seeing further simplification of the architecture which will allow more efficient power usage.

  • Enjoyed the weekend, back to work on Wednesday.

    AdGuard have released their final version of their AdGuard 5.x series for MV3 (latest version is 5.0.97 at the time of writing (link)). I gave it a try on Chrome (along with the ‘User Rules’ that I currently use on AdGuard for Safari) and it is performing well but I would say that as they roll out their javascript libraries that the extension make use of to provide advanced content blocking functionality. The one thing I do make use of on Chrome is blocking prefetching and other optimisations that can cause problems with content blocking but so far things have been good. As I’ve noted in previous posts, I would say that over time that any sort of loss of functionality will be addressed as developers become more familiar with the MV3 framework as well as the WECG agree on adding more functionality to fill in the functionality gaps that are missing when compared to MV2.

    I’m also giving uBlock Origin Lite ago – AdGuard has it’s strengths in terms of customer rules and other power user orientated tweaking but uBlock Origin Lite’s benefit is that it is aimed as a ‘set and forget for those who just want something that works out of the box with minimum fuss and bother. It’ll be interesting to see how the two evolve as the MV3 platform evolves. I keep track of the WECG public meeting notes over on their Google Docs

    It appears that there is trouble in paradise with the decision to scrap the new ferries is coming back to bite the coalition government in the backside – expect to see the usual PPP nonsense or as I like to call it “Greece style accounting” where politicians play jiggery-pokery with accounting so it gives the illusion that they’ve made something appear out of nothing. It is also an example of what happens when the previous government failed to push back against the nonsense the National Party were putting out but then again the National Party were able to use other failings of the Labour led government as a way to justify their opposition to the new ferries. As I’ve said in the past, if they spread the cost of $3 billion over 20 years it would work out to be $200 million per year which is still cheaper than the tax break that landlords got – not only are we seeing the government fuel the speculation housing bubble with the middle class would be landed gentry but now watch productivity fall through the floor as New Zealanders experience an unreliable link between the two islands.

    Back to work on Wednesday, I am going into the office 3 days a week (it used to be 2 days a week) – for me the decision to go to work 3 days a week in an office is due to mental health reasons, to get out of the home, to mix and mingle, socialise and have my finger on the pulse of what is happening at work. Although I am generally a person who is happy with being by myself I do like to occasionally check into to find out what is happening – being kept in the loop rather than having the experience of something appearing out of nowhere and then finding out that I missed out on being a given a heads up because I wasn’t there to get the information first hand.

  • Upgrading macOS, iOS and tvOS.

    Well, I decided not to get up early today and instead sleep in until 11am – woke up, had a relaxing brunch and then checked out to see what was happening, what the masses were thinking of the new platforms given that I avoided the public beta versions due to preferring to keep a stable computing environment. All the devices I did a clean install – I adopted the rule many years ago that when installing a major release to always do a clean install so that if there are issues then you’ve taken out the variable that could contribute to issues appearing that might not otherwise appear on a clean install.

    Safari 18 has a good number of improvements as outlined in an article on Webkit (link) shows that Apple is working hard on closing the gap between Safari/Webkit and the competition. One thing to keep in mind is their continuous benchmarking to ensure that new feature or functionality being added does not result in a decrease in performance. My experience so far with Safari 18 has been pretty good – I’ve got AdGuard extension installed there are no issues however there appears to be an incompatibility issue with the Authenticator Safari Extension which crashes the Authenticator app itself so I’ve disabled it until they get it fixed.

    One of the bugs they have fixed up is in the ‘System Information’ in the Extensions area where they’ve fixed it up so that information about extensions are shown rather than throwing an error message as with the case of macOS 14. What I also find interesting is an increase in the number of user space drivers that make use of the DriveKit framework, the use of FSKit to run exFAT and FAT support in user space rather than as a kernel extension and greater user of I/O Kit. All of that feeds into the larger goal of closing off the kernel to third parties so that only the absolute core essentials are running in kernel space while pushing everything that doesn’t need to run in kernel space to be pushed out into user space.

    I’ve noticed that it is slightly more snappy in terms of responsiveness, everything feels more optimised, lower CPU utilisation when playing back videos, booting up was a bit faster, etc. so I think that is the evolution of under the hood changes along with improvements with the Clang and LLVM compiler resulting in more optimised code that runs better on Apple’s ARM based processors. It’ll be interested to see how long Apple will be supporting Intel based Macs.

    Arstechnica has put up a lengthy review of macOS 15 (link) which goes into a lot more detail than I have – yeah, I could write something up myself but Arstechnica does a lot better job at getting into the nitty gritty details that make for an interesting ready.

  • Better late than never.

    Firefox 130 has been released (link) and everything is going well – responsive, uBlock Origin extension working wonderfully (looking forward to the release of uBlock Origin which appears to be packed with lots of bug fixes and enhancements). For me I’m not really interested in chatbots but my focus is mainly on standards compliance to ensure smooth interoperability along with extensions that aren’t crippled in any sort of way. What I do hope is that as web browsers improve interoperability and standards compliance that it will translate to web developers writing for the standard rather than picking Chrome as their browser of choice and if it fails to work on Firefox or Safari then who cares.

    Looking forward to the Apple event on 10 September (9 September US time) – there are rumours that Apple are going to announce the release date of macOS and iOS to be repeated at the same time but part of me is sceptical of that rumour based on how they made their platform upgrade available in the past. Although I keep saying to myself, “Oh, I’ll wait for the x.1 version to be release before upgrading” but I have feeling I’ll jump straight into the new platform – being able to try the new Safari to see how the improvements will translate to improved performance.

    Edit: The Apple event has been and Apple have confirmed that their new platforms will be released 17 September 2024 (16 September 2024 US time) (link) (link) and the updated phones will entice those with older iPhones but I don’t see anyone with a recent iPhone upgrading unless they’ve got money burning a hole in their pocket. As others have noted, we’ve hit peak iPhone, growth has slowed with people keeping their phones for longer. It’ll be interesting to see whether Apple will expand their services – the benefit of services they tend to have high margins and are a nice reoccurring revenue stream.

    I’ve been following New Zealand politics this week and it is amazing how so many in the media cannot see the whole ‘Treaty Principles’ for what it is – this is bill that they’ll keep pushing out each election to get the terminally online culture warriors to keep voting for the Act Party. This year will be the writing up the bill but it won’t get passed (National and NZ First only promised to support it through it’s first reading then sending it to select committee), the next election they’ll run on it in a hope that it’ll win voters over from New Zealand First to Act – each election they’ll trot it out to win the votes but eventually it’ll lead no where but it’ll mean that National will only have to deal with Act rather than both New Zealand First and Act which is why National is all good with it being in the coalition agreement because ultimately in the long run they benefit from it too. Keeping in mind that is all speculation on my part – I could be (and most likely) am 100% wrong with my analysis in attributing some sort of over arching plan when there may be a simple and straight forward explaination.

    It’s a couple of weeks away from the Google TV Streamer from being made available at third party resellers – you can preorder it from Amazon but I’m going to wait to see what the reviewers end up saying because so far the YouTubers that have covered it have gone into it in a very limited way. The part that I am interested in is how it’ll be used as a home hub which makes use of Matter and Threads to glue everything together – something that Apple has done a really good job at with their own Apple TV acting as a home hub. It’ll be interesting to see what the changes are with Android TV 14 and whether the release of a set top box with decent specifications will result in support long term for newer versions of Android TV rather than perpetually stuck on older versions of Android TV.

  • Back to work tomorrow.

    Well, I see that AdGuard Safari Extension was updated in the last couple of days from 1.11.18 to 1.11.19 – the update includes updating the scriptlets library to 1.11.16 which adds new features and fixes existing bugs (link). I’ve still kept my custom user filters that I use rather than relying on the allow list which doesn’t always work reliably (websites broken such as YouTube even though the allow list should disable content blocking) – everything is working as it should although I am looking forward to the much rumoured move away from it being an electron application to it being native – maybe they’re going to make use of catalyst and make their iOS one available on macOS.

    Just watching a clip from Jack Tame’s Q+A show:

    I find it interesting how there is so much talk about the ‘nice to haves’ but never go into detail what they mean – for example during the council budget process in Auckland there was a debate about whether the council should continue funding the local Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB), are libraries considered nice to have? I guess this is going to be one of those situations where people proclaim “they need to stop wasting money” only to end up getting a copy of the council budget and realise that the ‘waste’ that can be found is close to a rounding error when one considers the size of the budget. Once again we have the National Party led government believing that engaging in bellicose rhetoric is an example of leadership in much the same way that the former health minister believed that yelling at the healthcare system “be more efficient’ will magically result in more being done with less.

    There was a recent transportation announcement and they used the same ‘back to basics’ rhetoric when it came to roading – cutting spending for biking, walking and public transport while implying that such investments are liberal indulgences rather than ‘serious transportation infrastructure’. The petrol tax isn’t just about paying for the infrastructure it is also there (along with carbon tax) to pay the cost of offsetting the negative externalities of vehicles on the road – the planning around public transport, biking and walking is the attempt to offset negative externalities including meeting our climate change goals that we agreed to at the last global submit New Zealand attended.

  • Winter getting to me, powering through.

    I’ve been sick for the last couple of days then add to that the ‘winter blues’ I’m pushing myself forward – it’s difficult not to fall into slump and once in that slump trying to pull oneself out of it. We’ve had some crappy weather and it is difficult to keep being motivated with work but I guess if I keep focused on the end of the year – time off from work, maybe early next year I might go for a holiday to Australia for a couple of days, that’ll keep me focused on something to I am motivated to keep moving forward.

    Just reading an article over on Bloomberg (link) When I saw Apple getting into original content I was sceptical regarding the cost vs the amount of money they would bring in directly through subscriptions and indirectly in the form other sales along side subscriptions. I think the big mistake is their failure to buy out TimeWarnerDiscovery (or whatever it is called today) when they had the chance then fold the whole thing into Apple television and bump up the price. They would have gained a massive back catalogue of content including classic movies through to cartoons not to mention the chance of turning CNN around so that the domestic version of CNN would resemble that of their international service aka a serious news channel rather than indulging in something resembling a yelling match.

    I’m giving Chrome a go along side Firefox and in my experience so far, uBlock Origin Lite is pretty good when compared to AdGuard which still allows things through that uBlock Origin does a good job stopping – yeah, I could submit a bug report but most of the time it’s like the comic of the suggestion box that is actually just a shredder. I’d be more than happy to pay for an updated and improved AdGuard Safari Extension in much the same way I’ve already bought AdGuard for iOS – AdGuard that addressed the issues I have along with being native code rather than running as an Electron application would make me more than happy to pay for it.

    I’ve been following the WECG meeting minutes recently a request for functionality to be added to the scripting API (link) that was put forward by one of the uBlock origin developers – what I hope is that the WECG take on board this (and other requests by content blocking developers) rather than the usual “do the bare minimum and hope the developer gives up” approach that so many involved in the WECG take (see Apple and their half hearted attempt to implement the Webextensions API to bring Safari into compatibility with Firefox and Chrome (just look at the compatibility matrix for the scripting API (link)) or just the general disinterest in actually supporting improvements based on the the minutes written where the Apple appear to want to be doing something other than being at the meeting).

  • And people wonder why there is a low level of trust in the media.

    Ok, I was watching the Sunday (18 August US time) episode of Meet the Press and what frustrates me was the way in which the issue of ‘banning price gouging’ was being reported – drawing the conclusion that ‘banning price gouging’ equals price controls even though nothing is mentioned regarding price controls. It also completely ignores the fact that 39 out of the 50 states have ‘anti-price gouging’ laws on the books that have been made use of during times of natural disasters. Not to long ago a state prosecuted retailers (the name of the state escapes me since it was a few years ago) engaging in price gouging before a natural disaster as people were stocking up on bottled water, food that could be stored without refridgeration etc.

    To those complaining that you should ‘let the market work’ – why? if there is a limited amount of something there is another option, limit the number that one can buy of a given product to ensure that there is enough for everyone. Go into the local supermarket in New Zealand and it isn’t uncommon for a supermarket to run a special on soft drink but then limit it to 6 bottles per person or another example would be the shortage of potatoes which flowed through to a shortage of oven fries – again, the supermarket limits it to maybe 2 bags per customer.

    Side note: Dear marketing people, what you call ‘cold outreach campaigns’ is spam so stop trying to dress it up as if you were doing something respectable.

    Side note 2: Maybe he was onto something.

  • Giving Chrome another go.

    I’ve decided to give Chrome another go to see how MV3 fares when compared to MV2 in Firefox and the bespoke content blocking API that Apple uses in Safari (they are adding declarative net request but still trails in functionality when compared to the implementation on Chrome or Firefox). I have to prefix this by stating that I don’t expect content blockers to be 100% perfect but as but long as the visual pollution is kept to a minimum then I’m happy to take a win when I get one. What I hope is that we’ll see the declarative net request be developed further – part of that hope is on the basis that Google probably wanted to get the move over and done with so once they’re over that big shift it is possible to make tweaks afterwards to improve things in much the same way that when the ACA (Affordable Care Act) was passed it wasn’t perfect but has improved as tweaks and changes have been made. What I can say in defence of MV3 and the declarative net request – it is very fast, very light weight and you definitely notice the difference when using a MV3 extension on Chrome and I do hope that as they improve the DNR along with other APIs that the performance will remain.

    The launch of the Google TV Streamer has gotten me pretty excited about the future of the Android TV platform particularly when one considers it is now a full fledged matter/threads hub for ones myriad of gizmos one has around the house. It is one of the things that has disappointed me is Google convincing themselves that the reason why they had a low uptake of the first Chromecast with Google TV was due to price – lets get one thing straight, US$99.95 is a bargain and it isn’t as though you’re buying a new Google TV Streamer every year so assuming you keep it for 4 years then that works out to be $25 per year or around 45 cents per week. The reason why Chromecast with Google TV sales were underwhelming is that it took you too long to make it available outside of the US and then to add insult to injury you launched something that was woefully under powered – a slow SoC, hardly any memory and anemic storage not to mention the lack of regular software updates when compared to the monthly updates the Pixel phone range received.

    I’m having a look at getting some new security cameraes for my place because at the moment I have some Arlo cameras but the problem is that I need to keep an eye on their power and recharging batteries. What I’d prefer to do would be to replace those cameras with ones that can be powered/networked using PoE which avoids having to worry about recharging batteries. I am tempted to get the Google Nest given how it all integrates together – it’s a bit on the pricy side but the benefit is that everything integrates together well not to mention the ability to hook it up to power with 10 metre cables that can be bought from the Google Store online.

  • Weekends go so quickly.

    Weekends go so quickly – I wish I had a three day weekend because the first day off one is recovering from work which only leaves one day to actually do something. I’m still deciding whether I should go into the office or work from home – if I go into work I’ll have to take my scooter because the train is currently being replaced with a bus service but the problem with that is that they never arrive on time meaning it is more thank likely I’ll end up at work late.

    I’ve just had a quick browse of the Mozilla downloads section and it appears that Firefox 129.0 is present before the official release tomorrow (7 August NZ time) – I’ve updated to it and everything is working great. Every release so far has resulted in an improvement in speed and responsiveness. There appears to be regular benchmarks being done on multiple platforms to narrow down performance regressions as well as comparisons with other leading browsers to see where improvements can be made (link).

    There has been an interesting development in the Google DOJ case (link) resulting in concerns about how it will impact Firefox. I think what you’re going to see is that there will won’t be upfront payments but browser vendors will receive money from Google each time a user makes use of Google except it won’t be on the basis of whether it is setup as the the default search engine. The other thing to keep in mind is that Google makes open source community contributions (money and man power) so what you may see are regular donations to the Mozilla Foundation to maintain good public relations of being a positive open source citizen.