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

  • Joe Biden steps down: My opinion on what has unfolded.

    Just before I start I should put my cards on the table regarding where I am coming from politically – I sit on the left economically and socially I’m a libertarian so for someone like me Bernie Sanders is closer to where I sit politically but that being said I’m realistic. I understand that there is a fine line between what you want vs what is possible politically so it isn’t always possible to get ones ideal candidate so one supports someone close enough to that. In the case of Joe Biden I expected him to be yet another Obama like centrist but what happened in reality is that he ended up being a lot more centre left than most people had expected – Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPS and Science Act, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act not to mention the many executive actions such as increasing the minimum wage for federal contractors (Executive Order 14026) along with many others.

    The question is with the upcoming election isn’t about disagreeing with Joe Biden’s policies because I would say the vast vast majority of Democrats and voters in general support his policies, the problem is about the ability to go out on a campaign trail and not only defend the policies but to also weave a narrative of where the democratic presidential candidate would like to take the country in the next four years. The problem is that if you have a presidential candidate who are unable to push back against the right wing BS vortex coming out of the Republicans then it won’t matter how good your record in terms of policies is if it you’re unable to articulate a robust defence when Trump and his sycophants start fire hosing their lies through the media.

    I’ve been biting my tongue but I might as well put this out there – Joe Biden should have, before the Democratic primary season started, announced that he would be a one term president, that he would like to see a new generation come through (as noted by Mitt Romney when he said he would not seek re-election for the senate), said that he would endorse Kamala Harris but also say that the Democratic party process needs to be robust so that the members of the Democratic Party are united by the presidential candidate representing the Democratic Party. With that being said, when the rumours started my guess was that if he were going to step down it would be after the Republican Party convention.

    Oh, and on a side note Republicans are throwing around threats of running off the court – clue to the clueless young Mikey Johnson, a political party is a private organisation, how and who the party chooses to run for which political position is an internal party matter along with what happens if the nominee steps down and as a result needs to be replaced. If in a party constitution says that to be the presidential candidate you have to participate in a punch up for 20 minutes and whoever is standing at the end is the nominee then the is the process the party has collectively decided to be the process – once again, meaning the state has no say in say in that process. Then again this goes into the large issue I have with politics in the United States – the State should not be running the primaries, the only thing the state should be doing is registering parties, candidates and running the general election.

    Oh, and something even more funny was the post on ‘Truth Social’ by Donald Trump (obtained from the video where the issue was discussed over at Brian Tyler Cohen (link):

    So it is the Democrats fault that you orientated all your messaging around a single person rather than policy? If you were smart you would have made your message something along the lines of “regardless of whether it is Joe Biden, Kamala Harris or anyone else, they’ll be all heading in the same direction which we believe is the wrong direction for America…” but then again that would require that the Republican Party isn’t run by the local brain trust. Once again Republicans playing the victim as they feel the consequences of the decisions they have made.

    Regarding her running mate, I personally think that someone like Pete Buttigieg or Katie Porter because the risk of taking a governor from a state where the Democrats have a thin majority may cause more problems long term. In the case of Pete Buttigieg, he’s moderate, middle of the road the ability to go onto Fox News and push back against the avalanche of BS that the right wing media outlet put out there. I also think that he represents a generational change with Kamala Harris representing generation X and Pete Buttigieg representing the millennials – the Republicans representing the past, the Democrats representing the future. Katie Porter has a great skill at breaking down complex issues, pointing out Republican nonsense for what it is etc. Both Pete Buttigieg and Katie Porter would be great for that position – let’s hope that Kamala learns from the mistake Hillary Clinton made when she chose a relatively unknown person for vice president.

    The other part is how will be how Kamala positions herself – Republicans are running on claims of a rising crime rate and how Democrats are supposedly soft on crime (see Republican references to New York and California) so Kamala could play her card as a prosecutor, that when people broke the law the held them accountable. The question is, if Kamala does lean into her prosecutor experience does the left and progressives in the Democratic Party throw a temper tantrum and walk off in a fit, “I’m not going to vote for Kamala the Cop” as if some how threatening not to vote is going to magically change everything just to meet their unrealistic demands. What I hope is that the left and progressives aren’t short sighted and learnt from the 2016 fiasco where the same people claimed that fear about a conservative majority picked by the Federalist Society overturning Roe vs Wade was a scare campaign by the liberal elite – funny how those who claimed it was a ‘scare campaign’ suddenly disappeared off Twitter when Roe vs Wade was actually overturned.

    Oh, and to add more craziness to the mix, Republicans had a melt down because Mike Pence said something very normal (link) regarding Joe Biden deciding not to run for a second term. It truly is amazing how, with the display of shear lunacy that there are ‘undecided voters’ when the Republicans have lost the plot entirely. Expect the Kamala Harris to drive the right wing crazier now that there is a young articulate candidate at the top of the ticket who push back on Republican nonsense without fumbling it.

  • Let’s give them all a go.

    I thought I might as well give Chrome a try with the whole move to MV3 over the next year – I’ve posted a few toots over on my Mastodon account however I thought it would be better to thrash it out on my blog so I doesn’t come across as some sort of adlib style stream of consciousness. Basically what I wanted to see is whether the functionality gap between MV2 and MV3 based content blockers is as bad as some claim (including myself) or whether it may not be as perfect as say the MV2 extensions but the benefits that come with the move to MV3 far out weight the limitations imposed on developers.

    The first one I gave a try was the MV3 version of AdGuard (link) which at the time of this blog was version 5.0.2 but keeping it mind it was still in beta with two of the components it relies on, TSWebExtension and TSUrlFilter, being in alpha so there is probably a lot of work yet to be done. Even though it is in beta I thought it would best to see how well it does at this early stage. I installed it, enabled all the same filters that I have enabled on AdGuard for Safari then copied and pasted over my ‘User Filters’ where I have a list of blocked and allowed domains (I use ‘User Filters’ instead of the allow list).

    I tested it with a few websites, one website which asked for ones date of birth (it’s an alcohol related website) the whole page was black and no dialogue, when I disable the content blocker I approved the t’s and c’s, enabled it but now the page wouldn’t render properly. Another website I tried is a video sharing site, you chooe the show, episode then click on a button to continue but when you click the button a new window loads but the ad that was meant to be in the window is blocked – it’s nice that the ad was blocked but what would have been even better would be for the window never to have been opened – this is something that I have noticed on block uBlock Origin Lite as well as AdGuard MV3. As noted, this is till a beta, still work in development with alpha development components so it could be just a matter of fixing that and everything works.

    I then tried uBlock Origin Lite – I had tried the extension a while ago but at the stage I don’t think I could find a way to add websites to an allow list so in the end I gave up. The one I installed today was the version 2024.7.3.674 – there is a new version over on the project’s github page (link) however it hasn’t made it’s way through to Chrome extensions store. I installed it, opened it up, enabled all the filters (except for the language/regional ones), added the websites to the allow list, then visiting the same websites. As mentioned in the previous paragraph it doesn’t stop a new window from being created but it does stop the ad from being shown in it – it’s a minor inconvenience but it would be nice if it could be resolved either by the extension developer if it is something they can do or the folks over at the WECG by providing a API which would empower developers to do so.

    I’ve sideloaded uBlock Origin Lite 2024.7.17.853 because it wasn’t available in the Chrome store – it appears that there is an update pushed out every 10 days so it probably makes sense in the future just to side load the extension rather than waiting the long time it takes for Google to rattle its dags and make it available. I’ve run the extension through a content blocker (link) which results in both getting 99% – the last 1% I wonder have to do with a quirk in the test rather than a failure but whatever the case maybe uBlock Origin Lite is pretty solid.

    Edit: It appears that it takes 24-48 hours for the extension to appear in the store – I’ve upgraded to the store version and everything is going well.

    A bit of a side note: There are rumours that at the Samsung developer conference on 3 October 2025 that One UI 7.0 will be announced which will be based on Android 15. Over on Twitter @iceuniverse notes the following:

    So it’ll be interesting to see what the Samsung S25 series delivers next year in around February 2025 and how it compares to the Pixel 9 range.

  • Why I have chosen to use Firefox instead of Safari and Chrome.

    I’ve been running Firefox for quite some time and part of that journey has been subscribing to the Firefox subreddit on Reddit – reading through many of the posts one of the posts bought up an interesting question regarding non-Google related reasons why you have chosen Firefox over the alternatives. Funny enough for me my preference for Firefox had less to do with Google and more to do with my experience with Safari and it’s limited extensions framework resulting in even some of the best content blockers doing a less than stellar job when compared to what can be run on Firefox. In the process of making the extensions framework more secure (claim made by Google who sparked off the whole MV3 development) the result has crippled the ability for extension developers to have low level access to the browser which enabled MV2 based content blockers to be more effective than MV3 based content blockers.

    For me it isn’t an anti-Google play given that I love using Google services such as Workspace, Android, ChromeOS and many other features. For me, it comes down to Google crippling their browser and me deciding that Chrome no longer suits my needs. The great thing with Google is that unlike Microsoft I don’t have any issues using any of their services with Firefox – I’m not given a warning in the case of Microsoft Skype that by using Firefox that I’m going to be given an inferior experience because I don’t want to use a Chromium based browser or Safari. The impression I get with Google vs Microsoft is that Google doesn’t care how you access their services as long as you’re accessing them where as with Microsoft they’re still holding onto hold habits.

    The recent posts on the subreddit seem to be all focused around Privacy-Preserving Attribution (PPA) (link) where people are whipping themselves into a frenzy as if it were the end of the world wile ignoring that Apple also has something similar (link) and Google’s on going attempt to walk a tight rope between providing useful information to advertisers while preserving anonymity. All of these solutions working towards a replacement for third party cookies whose support are either have been phased out or being phased out. What do I think? I think that the three major web browsers need to come together and agree on a single way of tackling this issue rather than each of them doing their own thing – it appears that the tech dude bros are doomed to repeat past mistakes by failing to learn from history.

  • End of the first week back then bad news.

    Well, I came back from overseas, had a week off sick then went back to work but spent time replying to customer emails rather than taking phone calls – I really needed that extra week of recovery because goodness knows what I caught took a lot out of me. I don’t think it was COVID but something else – what the something else is I don’t know but it was nasty (the plane from Bisbane to Wellington was horrible, I was running a temperature, coughing, then eventually I fell asleep which allowed me to at least have a rest – when I eventually got home I slept something like 15+ hours, woke up, drank some water then went back to sleep again – so many hours of sleep making up for lost time I guess).

    On Sunday I was messaged by mum that Nana has not eaten or taken a good amount of fluids and that they were doing end of life care. Today (Tuesday) my sister informed me that nana died at 2pm – if there is a saving grace at least it wasn’t a drawn out experience that occured with dad being a hospice with cancer. I’ll be taking 3 days bereavement leave – I’ll try to keep updating my blog but as you can expect there are other priorities at the moment.

  • Firefox 128.0 release candidate, update of uploading photos, random thoughts.

    A couple of days before the official release of Firefox 128 I wanted to give it a try to see how much it has improved over 127.0.2 – what surprised me was the improvement in performance in both rendering pages as well as retrieving pages (both latency/responsiveness and speed of the download). It appears that each release developers are really focusing in on addressing performance issues – yes, even those performance issues that appear on macOS are being addressed too rather than my past experience many years ago where such issues were dismissed with a hand wave and a “yeah, yeah, sure, we’ll get to it…”.

    Related to the Firefox 128.0 – at the moment I have an iPhone 15 Pro Max however I am looking at what is happening in the world of Android still, particularly the Pixel 9 Pro. Although the iPhone has the edge in terms of the Apple ecosystem the downside is the lack of a truly native Firefox on iOS that includes extension support. It it is the one strength that Android has going for it – the fact that you can install software through the Play Store that that Apple doesn’t allow, for example, browsers that use their own web engine rather than being forced to use the Webkit engine that Apple provides as part of iOS.

    I’ve been following the election the United Kingdom I saw people complaining about how Sir Keir Starmer is ‘boring’ and ’50 shades of beige’ because they’ve completely ignored what happened when ever there was a Labour leader who showed the smallest amount of personality – the media outlets in the UK ripped them to threads. Anyone remember the UK media attack Edward Miliband like vultures over how he ate a bacon butty sandwich? I’m not surprised that Labour didn’t make massive announcements, big promises, grand visions given how the Tory aligned press will attack them.

    It appears that Sir Keir has done what I expected – one of the first things he did was dispatch the Foreign Secretary David Lammy to Europe. If Sir Keir wishes to achieve the goal of boosting British economic growth then that will require his government to repair the relationship with the United Kingdom’s largest trading partner which has been damaged by not only Brexit but the decision by the previous Tory government who decided to break from European standards which had a cascading effect in term of trade – both importing and exporting. If they bring the United Kingdom back into alignment and start building up from there then I could see things getting better – the European Union don’t want to be undermined and if it means that the United Kingdom get back into alignment with European Union standards then you may see dividends being paid in the form of increased growth which will allow them to deal with fixing up NHS, infrastructure etc. etc.

    Regarding the photos, I am still working on that but on a good side I am feeling a whole lot better than I did at the beginning of the week. The big question is whether I use something like Google Photo or Apple’s iCloud to upload and share the photos or do I open up an Instagram account then link to that once I’ve uploaded all the photos. Just a heads up, none of the photos have me in them – I don’t like taking photos of myself with the focus being in the location in the photo.

    Edit: I decided to change the theme of my blog back to something subdued – it was a theme I had used a while ago so I thought I might as well move back to it. A nice, simple, minimalist design.

  • Still recovering.

    Still recovering from travel – still got a nasty virus resulting in a lot of coughing etc. but I’m working through it, resting at home and ordering groceries online to avoid the miserable cold outside. It is the one thing I can’t stand about travelling – almost every time I eand up catching something resulting in a week of misery afterwards.

    I’m working through the photos but in total I have over a thousand photos that are spread between those taken by a digital camera and those taken by the camera on my iPhone 15 Pro Max. Gradually working through it while also trying to recover – it really does it out of you trying to recover.

  • Firefox 127.0.2 and macOS: Working well

    I’ve installed Firefox 127.0.2 along with uBlock Origin and so far things are going pretty good – as much as the ‘all Apple’ ecosystems nice I can’t help but get frustrated by the crippled experience with the new extension model that is being pushed upon users over the next year with Chrome at the head of that change. At the moment the only real alternative to the current direction that Chromium and Webkit browsers are taking is to embrace Firefox. Do I think that it’ll make a huge difference to the market share of Firefox? well, it comes down to the percentage of users who depend upon extensions, the ‘technological vanguard’ if you will, the sort of early adopters who adopted Firefox early, who jumped on Chrome early, whether they make the first move and maybe bring along the tech enthusiast crowd (people who aren’t necessarily technically inclined but are interested in technology).

    I don’t see Firefox market share ever getting back to where it was pre-Chrome but I could see them maybe (at least on the desktop) getting to 15-20% (which would be around 13-14 points higher than where they are based on the numbers over on Stat counter (link)). If they eventually get to 20-25% (me being super optimistic) then I could imagine it would force the big platforms to maintain compatibility with Firefox – for all the criticisms that people may have of Google, I don’t see Google being like Microsoft and forcing people to use Chrome because at the end of the day if you’re using Google services then why would it matter whether it is being accessed via Webkit, Firefox or Chrome.

    Side note: At the moment I’m still recovering however I will be going to the doctors on either Monday or Tuesday to find out what is wrong and whether they can prescribe something – I’ve emailed them with all the details because I’ve lost my voice but I’m going to have to ring them up tomorrow when I wake up if I don’t see an email response to the email I sent I’ll phone them up and try with the croaky voice I have at the moment.

    Side note to the side note: It would be nice if Apple was forced to open up iOS to allow the Firefox web engine to run on iOS outside of the European Union. That being said, the Pixel 9 is going to be released within the next couple of months so it’ll be interesting to see what Google has in store in terms of hardware. It is also interesting that the first batches of Bluetooth tags that are compatible with the Google service are now shipping. I guess it is a bit like Microsoft – when you don’t do everything yourself and depend on third parties. I guess for a lot of silicon valley with the downsizing bought on by higher interest rates, and growth slowing, that the sort of pet projects or products that couldn’t be justified are being reassessed – don’t expect earth shattering new features coming out but rather the consolidation of products, a simplification of back end maintenance by consolidating on a core set of technologies while focusing on fit and finish. The WWDC keynote this year gave a good insight – it isn’t about novelty technologies but delivering on AI in a meaningful way for end users outside what are neat demos but are entirely useless for the average person.

  • I’ve arrived back in New Zealand and recovering.

    I should have posted it yesterday when I did arrive back in New Zealand but I was so exhausted after almost 32 hours of non stop travel (including the waiting at London, Dubai and Brisbane). I did sleep on the plane but the sleep was horrible with the constant waking up, the uncomfortable chair (I was in business class which softened the worst parts of travelling but honestly if there was a train that went through the earth and took 4 days to get there and I was staying in a Caledonian Sleeper room (link) then I’d sooner for the train option).

    It was a great experience overall but over there I ended up getting a chest infection (it started in the first leg of the flight), the made worse with stress and anxiety while travelling but lucky I was able to speak to a doctor who gave me some medication which cleared it up within 5 days..or so I thought. I was cruising along with the bus feeling quite good about myself that although others were coughing on the bus that I should be all good…until I wasn’t which meant the last few days were horrible and travelling back made even worse being sick – constant coughing up phlegm etc. I’m taking a rest over the next few days but if it ain’t cleared up by Monday I’ll head to the doctors office and advise him what happened in the UK, the medication I received and whether it is the same thing I gotten again.

    Would I go for another intense one month trip again? no, I think for me I’d sooner have smaller shorter trips that are more narrowly focused where I can take my time rather than rushing between things I want – avoiding the stress of doing too much in such a small space of time. As soon as I am better I’ll upload the photos along with explanations on what happened on that day/that event.

  • Update 3: Arrived in Ireland and then left to.

    Over the last few days I’ve been travelling through Ireland then through Wales, here is the map of the tour:

    I’m currently in Chester and heading off to Cardiff tomorrow then two days in Plymouth then back to London where I’ll be flying back to New Zealand. As promised I’ll be uploading photos with more complete commentary but I’ll wait till I get home because then I can use my desktop computer which I prefer to use when writing for long periods of time not to mention I’ve got a tonne of photos (on my iPhone and digital camera) that I need to work through. On a side note, my chest infection got sorted out – a combination of stress, flights etc. but thanks to the NHS I was able to get a course of antibiotics and an inhaler which has allowed me to recover – It took a few days to take effect but it has allowed me to enjoy 3/4 of the trip without any sickness.

  • Update 2: Arrived in London and started the tour.

    The thing I left out of first update was that I was sick after arriving in Paris – unfortunately it always happens when I go for a long trip, be it by via train, road, airplane, whether it is a short journey (Wellington to Auckland) or a long one (Wellington to Sydney then to Dubai etc). I’ve been fighting through it but it isn’t something you can fix up in a rush – the body will heal when it wants to heal, there is no fast forward button to speed up that process. I’m slowly getting there but them’s the breaks or brakes – the show must go on.

    We took the Eurostar from Paris to London then from the St Pancras to where I was staying (it was a hop, skip and a jump) and lodged myself in for the night. The next day I organised a 2 day Tootbus explorer London pass which allowed me to jump on and jump off at all the major sites I wanted to see: Tate Modern, the new Shakespeare’s Globe, Battersea power station redevelopment, London Transport Museum (I was going to go to the British Museum but it was shut early due to an incident but I couldn’t find more details other than that). I had a lot of fun over those two days – if you are going to visit London – Apple Maps work great but remember to download an offline version if you’ve got roaming turn off or if you are roaming wanting to keep data use to a minimum. One thing to always remember is to make sure you leave plenty of slack in your schedule – not everything is going to go according to plan all the time so you always need to ensure that you take a seat followed deep breath then relax and just go with the flow.

    On Sunday I joined the ‘formal tour’ that I signed up for which includes accommodation, food, guides etc. because I’d sooner let someone else sort out the details required than trying to do it myself and losing my cool in the process. So I jumped on the bus at London on the way we stopped off Oxford University, then Stratford-upon-Avon to visits Shakespeares home, drove pass Anne Hathaway’s Cottage then we popped up to York now through to Edinburgh where we visited many sites.

    We then started going though the lowlands and highlands of Scotland – it is interesting learn about a distinct culture that exists. I took a tonne of photos but holy crap the accommodation was appallingly bad – when you’re a guy who is 188cm and trying to sleep in a single bed with your legs dangling off the edge of the bed, the experience overall is bad. I’m going to provide feedback to the tour operator – at the north of Scotland there is a limited range of accommodation so maybe the tour operators should team and up and establishment hotels with a decent minimum standard rather than dealing with hotel operators with a captured audience doing the least amount humanly possible. Tonight I am happy that I have a double bed all to myself so I can finally have a decent night sleep.

    Going to head out tomorrow – the Irish leg of the tour is beginning which will be particularly interesting given half my family have Irish heritage. I’m going to have a shower, crawl into bed and chill out watching some YouTube videos – thank goodness for free wifi.