Matisyahu's Blog

  • Relaxing at home.

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    Finished the first season of Paradise and funny if there appears to be a good amount of overlap that I see with Silo and Fallout along with a few other dystopian films I’ve watched in the past. It’ll be interesting to see how it developers going into the second season how it develops particularly when he goes looking for his wife.

    Google has pushed out an updated today for Chrome which bumps the version from 138.0.7204.50 to 138.0.7204.93 (link) – it was probably released early (normally it is Tuesday US time (Wednesday NZ time)) because there is an exploit out in the wild (mitigation was made available 26/06/25) with a proper fix to fully address the issue. As for the performance, no regressions as far as I have noticed and uBlock Origin Lite/AdGuard are working smoothly so that is always a good sign that the update did what it was supposed to do.

    It appears that there is light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to water infrastructure in the Wellington region (link) along with continued discussions about the idea of having a ‘Wellington super city council’ like what exists up in Auckland. Personally what I would like to see is the setting up of provincial councils that replace the individual city councils in a particular region then central government to devolve power but keep centrally funding where appropriate (there would be 16 provincial councils in total). It is good to see that there is progress none the less after much upheaval post election where 3 Waters was scrapped in favour of ‘Local Water Done Well’.

    What I do find rather interesting is the discussion regarding localism and the National led government justifying the ‘Local Water Done Well’ by claiming they’re pro-localism but then turn around in regards to local planning, zoning etc. by directly intervening. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen some local city councils to do a horrible job when it comes to making housing more affordable and building them in a timely manner but politicians should avoid taking absolutist positions – if you believe that 3 Waters would result in a massively bloated institution that would collapse under its own weight then make that argument. If you believe that you generally support localism but sometimes the central government needs to intervene because the inability for an council to ‘get it right’ impacts too many people to ignore it the great, make that argument – reminds me of the quote from Star Wars “only a Sith deals in absolutes”, that there are exceptions to a general rule and if there is then make a robust argument as to why this or that situation fits into that exception.

    Anyway, I’m going to go for a good long walk tonight – after being lazy for a few days I need to get off the couch and burn some calories. I’ll probably just keep walking for as long as I can – I get a bit antsy if I haven’t had some exercise in a few days.

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  • A quiet day at home.

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    I went for a walk today down to the supermarket to pick up a few things and I walked back – squeezing in some exercise to make it part of ones normal every day routine rather than having to set aside time to do it. To be honest, the amount of time it takes to get down to the store, even on the days where I work from 11:30am to 8:00pm means that I can easily walk down to the supermarket and make it with plenty of time before the store closes. One of the benefits of not having a scooter is that it has forced me to be more active and get the exercise in during the day without even thinking about it which results in it becoming a normalised part of my life.

    The next update Intel will release for it’s CPU family will be Nova Lake with rumours that the APX extension, which increases the number of registers from 16 to 32, will arrive on that platform (although other reports state that Panther Lake will be the CPU that’ll APX to market) – it’ll be interesting to see how Microsoft handles that given that Intel notes that a recompile is all that is required (link) will we see Microsoft recompile Windows and create a fresh ISO that takes advantage of the APX extension. It’ll also be interesting to see whether we’ll end up seeing Zen 6 microarchitecture from AMD will include APX and AVX 10 – I could imagine it is highly desirable for that to be the case so there is some harmonisation between the two vendors given the benefits in terms of performance and power efficiency that come from the APX extension being made available. Nova Lake is scheduled to be released in early 2026 for mobile and towards the end of 2026/early 2027 for the desktop version.

    That being said, in the future I might end up having an ARM based laptop running Windows and a x86-64 desktop running Windows – I like to keep my options open. There is one thing that I am interested in setting up though which is setting up ethernet cables under the house – one for the desktop in the lounge room given that I’d sooner have a robust connection when uploading gigabytes of data to my Google Drive.

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  • Cold night, warm bed and binge watching a new series.

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    A good start to my weekend I went down to Pak ‘n Save to pick up some groceries along with dinner – a butterflied tandoori chicken along with a caesar salad for dinner. At the moment I am up to episode 4 from Season 1 of Paradise (link) which has turned out to be a pretty good show so far and it appears that show itself has got plans for 3 season in total so it’ll be interesting to see how it develops. On Monday I might also start watching Black Mirror to see what it is like plus looking at a few more tv series that I’ve missed out on.

    I’ve got two profiles on Chrome, one for the gmail account and the other for the Google Workspace account – on the gmail account profile I’ve been testing AdGuard to see how it performs and I noticed there have been some big improvements such as the browser no longer hanging when visiting television streaming websites I visited where it would freeze then suddenly start working but these days it is all very much working as it should. I kind of wish that Chrome for Android would have support for extensions but rumour has it that that it is being worked on not to mention the fact that one mainly uses apps so it is of limited use but it’ll be interesting to see it happen. There is also the rolling out of having the address bar at the bottom of the screen like Safari on iOS so I am looking forward to that eventually arriving.

    One UI 8 is getting closer to release but funny enough the more I use my Samsung S25 Ultra the less I miss my iPhone. It is working well with Skinny Mobile, getting updates regularly (on the June 2025 update at the moment) along with getting great battery life. Although I do pay for YouTube Premium which gives me access to ad free YouTube and YouTube Music I still prefer paying for Pocket Casts because it gives a much better podcast experience than using YouTube Music. I also use PowerAmp for my music player because YouTube Music does a pretty lousy job performance wise when dealing with large libraries (mine is around 65GB in size) along with the fact that the navigation is bad – select ‘Artist’ but rather than then offering a list of albums it just dumps all the songs from that artist where as PowerAmp you tap on ‘Artist’ then a list of albums are provided which you then tap on the album to list all the tracks in that album – for $10 it is a fair price for something that I’ll be using for many years to come.

    I’ve been having a look at the Surface 15″ Laptop with the Qualcomm X Elite – lots of specials on at Noel Leemings and other vendors. I was going to eventually replace my S25 with a Pixel 10 but if I end up liking the S25 I might end up saving the money and instead looking at upgrading my laptop with the added bonus that the Android phone integrates with Windows as smoothly as an iPhone does with macOS – being able to answer and make phone calls, sending text messages not to mention MTP synchroising being a lot smoother and faster due to it being natively built into Windows.

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  • From the school of ‘you learn something new every day’.

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    I mentioned earlier about adding a declarative net request filter for websites that you want to allow ads on – I’ve just realised that I made it a whole lot more complex than it is meant to be but I had a good reason. Normally when you click on the extension icon in the toolbar and then click on the slide or the ‘turn off’ button that tends to be a universal setting so if you set it to ‘no filtering’ then it would apply to all websites you visit however in uBlock Origin Lite when you select ‘no filtering’ that is only specific to that particular website and that setting is saved in the develop area under filtering mode details where the website is added under the no filtering section. So after going through all that work manually creating declarative net request filters I realised I could just add the websites – I’ve since corrected the mistakes and things are working wonderfully. The added benefit of setting up the allow list properly is that the icon displays accurate information regarding whether there is filter and what has been blocked.

    I’ve been following the recent events regarding Israel, Iran and the United States – the biggest problem is the hubris of those involved convincing themselves that they have more control over the events taking place. Anyone who knows anything about history knows how quickly something can spiral out of control, where those involved have convinced themselves that they have more control over the situation than they do, that they have an understanding of the variables or as George WIlls noted regarding the neo-conservatives, convinced themselves that the power and influence of the United States is actually more powerful than it actually is in reality. Then combine that with the ego of Trump desperately looking for the approval, to either look up to a father figure or appear to be powerful so he has the illusion he has more control over the situation than he really does, then the neoconservatives probably convincing some in power that “one more war and we’ll finally be able to get out of the middle east”. Power plays and vying for influence – for all of faults that Democrats have at least they’ve never put someone like Trump in the Whitehouse and the question is whether the American people need to hit rock bottom before things change given that large parts of the world are already planning for a post-US world.

    It is interesting how Nothing Phone 3a has come to New Zealand via 2 Degrees Mobile which will make the Pixel 10 launch be particularly interesting to see whether it comes to New Zealand in some official capacity or whether I’ll go through Mighty Ape (which is owned by Kogan). Now that roaming is officially supported in New Zealand (funny enough for VoLTE Spark has noted that the Pixel 9 is supported on the Spark network – indication sometime in the future they maybe the Google launch network?) meaning when 3G is turned off that VoLTE will work, it’ll be interesting to see how things go. OpenMTP does a pretty good job for synchronisation but long term if I eventually move to Linux then I’ll get the benefit of all the work the libmtp project does along with how things are improving when it comes to hardware support I could imagine myself maybe in the next couple of years running Fedora on a Dell laptop and a Dell desktop (or one I assembled myself).

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  • Two more days to go.

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    Went to the work get together to catch up with work mates, share a few drinks and to round off the line there was a free dinner so I hung around for a couple of hours then on the way to the bus stop I picked up a few things then caught the bus home. It was a bit of a shock to the system waking up at 8:30am although I had a chat with my boss about making a 1:30pm start a regular event which would mean working 5 days a week at the same start time rather than having it bounce between 11:30am starts and 1:30pm starts but if there is a change that’ll have to get approved by the powers that be so I’ll need to wait for the outcome.

    It’s been a bit of a cold night tonight, got the heater going and at the moment I’m heating up some mushroom soup to warm me up on a cold night. I think it is going to be a cold couple of months before things start to warm up but I’m happy that I put some money aside because in the past I’ve tried to cut corners when it came to keeping warm and it came back to bite me in the backside with getting sick more often which is something I’d sooner avoid this winter. On the good side, the double glazed windows along with the good insulation in the floors and ceiling allow the retaining of warmth a lot better than most houses in New Zealand so I’m fortunate to be in the position that I am in.

    The more I use Chrome the more I am accustomed to things ‘just working’ which funny enough used to be the tag line for going with Apple – to go with an Apple product mean it ‘just worked’ but given the experiences I’ve had with Safari and Mail (to name a few) it has gone from from an positive interpretation of ‘just works’ to now a negative interpretation of ‘just works’. There have been many issues fixed with Safari but it still very much trails behind Firefox and Chrome when it comes to implementing MV3 fully (see the functionality matrix found on Mozilla developer documentation comparing browser implementations) and I’m not hopeful that we’ll see those issues resolved in a timely manner based on past decisions Apple makes regarding prioritising other areas over making a meaningful effort to get their extension framework up to date and in compliance with MV3.

    I’ve decided to give the Google Public DNS a try to see if there is any difference. Before making the move I was using Cloudflare because of a DNS issue I was having with my internet service provider so rather than having to deal with that drama again in the future I decided to go with Cloudflare for my DNS provider along with secure DNS provider as well which can be selected within the Ubiquiti control panel.

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  • Early start on Friday.

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    Normally on Friday I start at 1:30pm but I’ll be starting at 9:00am because I’ve got an event to attend that the social club has organised for the night down at the local pub/restaurant. I had a good walk after work today, 11.6km at a brisk pace at around the same length of time as last night – although I sometimes try to put it off I know that after coming back I feel so much better that I had done it. I think feeling good after going for a walk is due in part with the fact that I’ve set a goal for myself and I am sticking to that goal thus I feel like I’ve accomplished something, that feeling of achievement as each day I work out I get closer to my goal of being below 100kg by the end of the year.

    I’ve picked up a few new tv series that I am starting to watch: ‘The Good Wife’ and ‘Paradise’ are starting on my playlist – looking forward to seeing some new titles come back but I guess they tend to be during the northern hemisphere winter when people are at home stuck inside on a cold evening where as during summer most people are enjoying the god weather.

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  • End of another successful day.

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    End of another day – the day at work was pretty much drama free which is the way I like it and then afterwards I went for an 11.6km walk which took around 1 hour and 57 minutes. Before I leave hope I set my timer so that when I come back I have record of how long it has taken – I like to ensure that when I do work out that I’m maintaining a decent pace. Am I tempted to get a smart watch? sure but at the moment I don’t think I’d have much utility beyond keep tracking of my pace which I can achieve with the current setup.

    I replied to an email using Mail for macOS using iCloud and I am reminded once again why I moved to Google Workspace – the email couldn’t be sent, it asks me to select the outbound server, I click try again then the same issue happens, I then try the connection doctor and it comes back saying it can connect to the SMTP and IMAP servers without any issues, I then click try again then the email suddenly goes. I kind of wonder whether Apple has give up improving iCloud or whether it is kept around because “well, it’s expected that we provide it” but none of the sort of passion you see regarding their other products are bought to the development of iCloud (eg fixing reliability issues that I and many others have experienced or experiencing on a regular basis). The funny thing is that the issue never occurs on iOS or iPadOS so have Apple given up on putting some serious development efforts into macOS? Maybe Apple has unified their Mail app so that there is a single Mail app with the same code base that runs on those three platforms but I don’t hold out much hope.

    Still working a post about the recent events regarding Iran, Israel and the United States but it is becoming a ‘grand unified theory of everything’ as I go deeper into it and reflect on what is happening the scope of the post keeps expanding. I’m working on it but I can’t give an exact time on what it’ll be done. I’m hoping that maybe by the end of the week at the earliest but knowing my luck I’ll probably want to have a look over it so it maybe longer.

    Chrome 138 was released today – funny enough it appeared on my Ultra S25 which is a clear indicator to me that there are some pretty important security fixes because most of the time it takes maybe a few days up to a week for it to be available as an update in Play Store for me. On the desktop I’ve updated my work computer’s installation along with updating my personal MacBook Air and Mac Studio – I’ve noticed a slight improvement in performance, I have noticed there has also been an update to uBlock Origin Lite but it is waiting for approval in the Chrome extensions store (for some strange reason Microsoft appear to approve uBlock Origin Lite quicker on their own extension store than Google does on their extension store). Apart from the change which got rid of the ‘Allow Website’ list (unblocking websites is now done via adding a DNR entry in ‘Developer Mode’) things have been going well – working just as reliably as before.

  • A good power walk tonight and back to work on Wednesday.

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    I went for a lvery long walk tonight – 17.4km (it took 2.55 hours to complete so if I round it up to 3hours then my speed of walking is 5.8kmph). I don’t know how many calories were burnt but given that I’ve indulged a bit on my break and on my birthday I needed to get back to my routine and burn those kilos off. My goal is to get below 100kg by the end of the year so if I keep focusing on calorie control and exercise then hopefully I’ll get to that point before the end of the year. Tomorrow I’ll do a 11.6km walk and do that each day for the rest of the week although I may do a slightly longer walk on Sunday night if I feel the need.

    Chrome version 138 will be released tomorrow (link). It’ll be interesting to see how it performs – I use it on both my work PC that my employer provides along with it on my MacBook Air and Mac Studio. I am interested in Mimestream (a mail client for macOS that works with Gmail using the native Gmail API rather than IMAP) but I’m waiting on the developer to add Task, Calendering and Contacts integration (so essentially it ends up being like Outlook). I guess it is a chicken and egg scenario, if you don’t subscribe to their software then they don’t have the funds to make the investment to build those features but then that would involve subscribing to a piece of software in the hope that said feature is actually eventually delivered.

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  • Productive weekend so far.

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    Went and had brunch at the local cafe with the family – eggs bene with extra poached eggs along with a bowel of mochaccino. After enjoying that nice start to the day I popped down to the mall to get my drivers licence redone however I find it difficult to use those eye testing gizmos at the Vehicle Testing centre so I then popped over to Spec Savers to book in for an appointment to test my eyes – worse case scenario I may need to get some glasses because possible next year I may look at getting a scooter but just as a run about where I live but no long trips into Wellington.

    After getting all that sorted I then went back with mum to get the issue with her email sorted out. Currently using the email address provided by the ISP many years ago but I’d like to get her off her ISP email address and instead using either her iCloud, Microsoft or GMail account – not fussed which one but getting away from the ISP provided one would make life so much easier for all concerned and will also mean if at a later date she wishes to move to a cheaper ISP it’ll also mean saving $5 per month that she is currently paying to keep her ISP email address active. I think the best decision is to go with Microsoft given that she already pays for Office 365 so may as well make use of it (I use Google Workspace because of its integration with Android and working well on macOS).

    Mum is looking at getting a new television that’ll include YouTube and what I’m going to do is buy the family YouTube Premium so then mum, my sister etc. can benefit from the subscription. Once you’ve gone ad free on YouTube the idea of going back to watching ads is torture – trust me, I know first hand having to watch YouTube videos at work and having to deal with the ads constantly popping up at the most inappropriate time. I’ve said that the best thing we can do is wait for her to come back from her trip around Europe then buy the television along with upgrading her computer at the same time – we’ll probably end up going for Samsung or maybe I end up giving mum my Apple TV which has the added benefit of being easy to navigate.

    I’m going ot be holding onto my Samsung S25, it isn’t the ideal phone but I’ll see what the Pixel 10 has instore along with Nothing Phone 3 which will also have 7 years worth of updates. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. Chrome is working well and the experience has been pretty good as so far as websites working as expected along with uBlock Origin Lite going from strength to strength. I have held out hope that maybe uBlock Origin Lite will eventually ‘get there’ when it came to Safari support but when there are so many issues that need fixing in Safari and the reluctance by Apple developers to fix the issues, I think I’ll end up just getting frustrated if I stayed with Safari rather than throwing in the towel and going with Chrome instead.

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  • One more day to go.

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    uBlock Origin Lite for Chrome has been updated to 2025.619.2143 however the ‘Allow List’ has been removed so if you do wish to add a list of websites that you want to exclude from having content blocking to it then you’ll need to open up the settings in uBlock Origin Lite, put a tick next to ‘Developer Mode’, click on ‘Develop’, then select ‘Custom DNR rules’ from the drop down menu the copy and paste the following int into the box:

    ---
action:
  type: allowAllRequests
condition:
  urlFilter: *
  requestDomains:
    - <domain>
  resourceTypes:
    - main_frame
    - sub_frame
priority: 1
id: 1
---

    Replace <domain> with the domain, you can just have a long list one after the other if you wish (that is what I did). I’m unsure whether it makes a difference in terms of performance but all the domains I’ve added have worked as expected – I guess it is only a major issue if I wanted to have specific settings for each individual domain but since they’re all being treated the same I’ll throw it all in one filter setting. It took a while to find the syntax that would work – Google’s AI search didn’t really help given that it conflated unrelated articles together which appears to be something I see quite often (I report the issue but it is doubtful that the problem will be fixed given how I’ve reported other issues in the past with no corrects being made many years later.

    Lots of changes coming with Chrome 138 which will be released next week, if you want to see what is coming up in future Chrome releases you can check out the roadmap over here (link) – I’m going to keep giving Safari a try as well as keeping up to date with what Google is doing with Chrome.

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Hello,

I’m Matisyahu

An open diary of my life as I navigate the world – the terrifying lows, the dizzying highs, the creamy middles.

“When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called ‘the People’s Stick’” – Mikhail Bakunin

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