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

  • macOS 14 released and reducing expenses.

    macOS 14 has been released today and I’ve done a clean install on both my MacBook Air and Mac Studio – so far things are very stable, Safari is performing well, AdGuard Safari Extension is working, over all the experience is a lot smoother than previous releases which goes back to a post I made too long ago that the work being done on Vision OS in terms of reducing the latency in regards to responsiveness of the UI probably has resulted in a lot of under the hood technology being shared between the platforms resulting in macOS becoming more responsive as a result. For a more exhaustive review Arstechnica has a great article that goes into a lot more detail than I could ever do (link).

    Well, part of my ‘getting my finances sorted out’ has been cutting back on all the nonessential spending – do I like Chrome? sure, but spending NZD$21.60 for a Google Workspace account make sense? I’ve cancelled YouTube Premium – do I enjoy having an ad free service? sure but when I can save NZD$17.99 then I’ll take the savings. Long story short, like many at the moment, the focus is on belt tightening and reducing debt but hopefully won’t be something that is permanent when things get back to normal.

  • My dependency on Google Chrome.

    I’ve talked about Safari and Webextensions API in the past but never really went into good detail as to the current situation of Safari and why it lags behind Firefox and Chrome when it comes to the functionality that web extension developers need to make their extensions work. At the moment there is the Webextensions API group which is made up of Apple, Google, Mozilla, Microsoft along with several high profile extension developers such as AdGuard, who contribute to regular meetings about standardising the MV3 Webextensions API standard. My impression of what is taking place is that much of Webextension API is being rethought from the ground up with a greater focus security and privacy in mind not to mention improving in interoperability so it is then possible to write an extension according to the standard then have it run on different browsers without any headaches.

    In the case of where Safari sits, Chrome and Firefox have the added luxury of the pre-MV3 legacy APIs that are still included as part of the browser where as it appears Safari is implementing MV3 but without any of the legacy that Chrome and Firefox have. What is the net result? many of the features that exist in Firefox and Chrome don’t exist in Safari – for example, at the moment there is a discussion about standardising how does one standardise cosmetic rules, should it be part of the declarative network request or should it be seperate API in its own right? (link) So there is a process that it’ll go through so that all the stakeholders involved can, at the end of an exhaustive process, will come up with something that they can all live with, is standardised which will then Apple engineers something stable that they can implement knowing that any work being done isn’t going be thrown out if one tried to write code while the standard is still being developed.

    But for me, I can’t use Safari because I need to be able to use uBlock Origin so the choices I have left are either Chrome or Firefox but unfortunately due to the nature of the internet some websites don’t work smoothly with Firefox. Long story short, I would love to use Safari but until MV3 is fully standardised and implemented on Safari then unfortunately the experience content blocking experience is going to continue lagging behind what can be achieved on Firefox and Chrome. For those wondering, the content blockers in Safari either fail to fully block ads or if they block popups the window is still created but a message appears in the browser that the connection was blocked which kind of undermines the whole idea of having a content blocker if the window ends opening regardless of whether it says inside the window – be it content or a message that says the connection has been blocked.

    I’m looking forward to the release of the Pixel 8 because it will now officially support carriers in New Zealand – VoLTE, 5G, VoWiFi and much more. It’ll be interesting to see whether Google expands support officially to New Zealand in terms of selling it either directly or through a reseller such as one of the three major carriers but either way I’m happy to buy it through a retailer like Mighty Ape, PB Tech or buying it off Amazon from the US then getting it delivered via YouShop (a NZ Post remailing service).

    It is interesting to see the number of articles spelling the doom and gloom regarding Google and how ‘they’re late to the game’ when it comes to AI (or any laundry list of things the tech talking heads wish to throw at the wall) while they ignore that Google is going through the same teething pains that Microsoft went through before they eventually transitioned into the form they are today. While in the case of Microsoft it was embracing the cloud and having it permeate every aspect of their product line up, Google on the other hand is pushing to expand it’s ‘paid for’ services, it’s move into Podcasts where they’ll probably start to offer a ‘paid service’ that end users can subscribe to podcasts with Google handling the payment processing etc. Advertising is quite profitable but it comes with a whole lot of headaches particularly in the regulatory space around privacy when compared to selling a good or a service.

  • macOS 13.6 update released.

    Woke up this morning before heading off to work and Apple has released macOS 13.6 just a few days before they release macOS 14.0 to the world. Installed it on my Mac Studio along with Google also releasing an update which updated Chrome from 117.0.5938.88 to 117.0.5938.92 – no noticeable difference although apparently there have been some optimisations but I guess those will be only noticeable on websites that take advantage of the web apis that were optimised. One thing I did notice is that it fixed up the issue of YouTube Shots comment fly out not working so maybe it was an intended consequence of the upgrade or YouTube realised someone broke something and fixed up but either way I’m happy.

    With the cost of living spiking across board and how difficult it is to make ends meeting (particularly if one has debt from a time when it was easy to keep up with payments) one thing to always remember, if you’re struggling to pay bills, loan/mortgage with the bank etc. remember to always talk to the business before it turns into a giant mess because most of the time the business would sooner arrangement payment than get no money at all. I had a chat with my bank and got things sorted out which has taken a whole lot of stress off my shoulders. I’m unsure of the situation overseas but in New Zealand the banks have what is known as a ‘duty of care’ – end of the day the bank just want their money and if it takes a little bit longer they would sooner that than getting nothing at all if a customer has to go through a bankruptcy process.

    My boss has given me the ok for having 27 and 28 September off from work – I get to enjoy the day of doing a clean install of macOS 14 on both of my computers. Yeah, I know, I should be able to do an upgrade but like a lot for things ‘in theory’, it should work but many times there are issues that crop up which don’t occur on a clean install so I’d rather avoid the drama straight off the bat.

    At the moment I’m still thinking about the iPhone 15 Pro Max but I want to get myself in a good financial shape before taking on any new obligations. The other benefit of waiting rather than being an early adopter is that any new product will include bugs that’ll need to get fixed with software updates so by the time one does buy one a few months later (3-4 months later) most of the annoyances have been addressed. I have to admit, I love the Apple ecosystem and look forward to getting back into it completely.

  • Good bye MTP, hello SMB.

    Being at the end of my tether I have decided to throw in the towel and give up on MTP in favour of setting up an SMB server on my Mac and simply download to my Android phone over the network. The process of copying around 45GB of files has reduced from over 24 hours along with persisting disconnecting to now it’s transferring it at around 10MBs (so far it is around hal way through).

    Oh, and in a fit of optimism I posted the following on the YouTube Music feedback:

    1) When I choose the artist I would like a list of the albums then click on the albums to get a list of tracks rather than having a massive list of all the tracks from every album.

    2) Either the ability to choose for YouTube Music not to re-encode my music when I upload it and/or the ability to upload a flac file larger than 300MB so that one avoids the reduction in quality due to a loss to loss conversion.

    I’m not hopeful that anything will come of it but I might as well throw in my five cents worth but at least I can say I tried something because YouTube Music has a lot of potential but the people who are running it can’t seem to get their act together.

  • The recent Apple event.

    Unfortunately I didn’t get to watch the event live (it is really early on Wednesday and I wasn’t going to get up at 5 am to watch it) but I was able to give the presentation a quick browse through picking up the key points that were raised. For me, the biggest ‘feature’ (if you can call it that) is the move to USB-C and the increase transfer speeds for the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max because it supports the USB 3 protocol (vs the non-Pro which uses the USB 2 protocol – which IMHO isn’t too bad given that even at 480Mbps I don’t see it being an issue for the majority of those who purchase the non-Pro model).

    Although I have a Nothing Phone 1, I much prefer the Apple ecosystem so I’ll be looking at moving to the iPhone 15 Pro Max in the next month or so – I may even buy it as an early ‘end of the year holiday’ present for myself where I’ll go for the 256GB model. I’ll avoid doing the whole 12/24/36 months interest free deals because they’re such a nuisance if one tries to make additional payments. Oh, and I’ll also get a nice leather wallet case from Snake Hive too – learned my mistake a few years ago via a cracked screen which cost a small fortune to fix. With that being said, given the tight financial conditions, I’m going to hold off from any dreams at the moment and focus on getting my financial house in order – dreams are good but being on a stable financial footing is even better.

    Side note: I’ve gone back to the old Reddit design and now I can see why people prefer it over the new design – originally I thought people liked it because either a) they never like anything new or b) being contrarian – going against the prevailing orthodoxy. I always assumed the slow opening of tabs wanting to open posts in new tabs was the result of Safari being slow but the moment I moved to the old Reddit design everything was so much faster. From loading pages, to loading posts in new tabs (which I do when viewing photos so I can quickly flick through them) not to mention the fact that it uses a whole lot les memory and isn’t buggy (recent fiasco was changing my email address to my iCloud ‘hide my email’ and found the new design either wouldn’t work or if it did work the link sent was broken – when I did it through the old website everything worked).

    Regarding the memory message that comes up when using Safari, at first I was blaming Apple but now I blame the website for failing to build an efficient website that doesn’t guzzle down memory like I guzzle down Pepsi Max. Problems that I attribute to the browser I have found have more to do with the website being buggy and using Chrome on Google websites is no guarantee that the experience won’t be buggy either – see my recent post about YouTube shorts skipping the next video if you click on ‘Don’t recommend this channel’. I hope that a combination of what the Webcompat project are doing combined with web developers brining their websites inline with Webcompat should address those issues – at least that is what I hope.

  • Always read beyond the announcement.

    I’m always sceptical when I hear politicians talking about ‘cutting back end staff’ and ‘putting more money into front end staff’ because in sounds great in theory as so long as you don’t think about it too deeply for more than 5 minutes. I find it interesting how ‘back end staff’ is being used as some sort of derogatory descriptor while they ignore that someone has to do the paper work to keep things moving – if they get rid of large amounts of backend staff then are they replacing them with new processes along with a larger investment into technology? If that is their focus then I don’t see anything budgeted for such a large investment in technology nor do I see any mention of having to also get a report conducted regarding what risks need to be considered particularly in the area of privacy and security.

    The latest announcement (well, it was latest at the time of me writing this blog post) was in regards to National’s plans for Kāinga Ora (link) where they talk about how things can be done better but never any specifics. In the past they gave details of any changes and argue the case of why those changes would make a difference but at this point it is pretty much “trust me bro” with no specifics. As for what I would do, I’ll quote what I posted on Reddit in regards to dealing with affordable housing:

    “If the govt were serious they would re-establish the ministry of works, nationalise all those building businesses that are about to hit the wall, employ the builders, plumbers etc. (along with developing a long term apprenticeship scheme) to focus on building thousands of social housing so that HNZ becomes the primary provider of rental accomodation. Long term the goal should be for a house to cost no more than 25% of a single persons after tax income per week (if a couple and both are working) or 12.5% if only one person is working – imagine paying $125 per week for rent vs $500-$600 as many do today – that would have a much bigger impact for those who are struggling than the pittance saved by removing GST on grocery items (I’d love to see how they classify what is a grocery item – expect it to be as entertaining as the debate over whether Jaffa cakes are cakes or biscuits).”

    We’ve seen in the past when National/ACT have tried to run the government on a soft drink budget and then the next government having to come in to clean up the mess and make massive investments to address the degraded services. I’m still disappointed that Labour appears to be lumbering along offering nothing in the way of a long term vision and how the policies the announce fit into that vision but rather their constant cycle of incremental tweaks with no coherent narrative to explain how they all tie in together.

  • Nothing OS 2.0.2 released for Nothing Phone 1.

    Nothing has released the Nothing OS 2.0.2 (link) and rather than waiting what I decided to do was side load it via the following instructions (link). The whole process was very smooth and when it came back up I found that it was more responsive although I did change the icon pack from the monochrome to the colourful one in part due to the icon pack not providing a full suite of icons for the apps that I use. Everything transitioned across smoothly without any problems with the kernel being rebuilt but still at 5.4.210 so I wouldn’t be surprised if some minor bug fixes along with security fixes were made given that the Android Security Patch has been updated to August 2023 (Google Play patch is still at July but those updates tend to come in the first week of the following month so I wouldn’t be surprised if we get the August update in the first week of September 2023).

    The big focus over the next few months is is the stabilisation of Android 14 with Samsung having pushed out a public beta of One UI 6 (their branded version of Android 14), there are rumours of the Pixel 8 which will be coming with Android 14 (which will probably use the latest LTS release of Linux kernel 6.1). There is still a lot of work being done at Nothing as many of those engineers who worked on the One Plus have joined Nothing (link) but I would say that when Android 14 does come to the Nothing Phone 1 that they’ll keep the same kernel version for the sake of stability.

    The Pixel 8 will be interesting to see what they have on offer but given that the Pixel range now support VoLTE and 5G in New Zealand it has become a viable phone for those who are happy to buy a phone from a non-teleco retailer. My goto place where I buy my phone from is either Mighty Ape or PB Tech unless there price is too high and it works out cheaper to buy it direct from the US then get it sent via NZ Post’s remailing service called YouShop. Rumour has it that Google will extend support for the Pixel to match what Samsung is offering which will go a long way to reducing the amount of e-waste.

  • Government debt and the National Party tax policy.

    If you’ve been following the election so far there are the usual suspects whipping the population into hysteria about how the whole system is going to collapse in on itself due to Labour’s free spending ways (link) (link) – put ‘nz increase public debt’ into Google News and see the avalanche of doom and gloom stories while ignoring that a) We’re seeing the consequences of the world ignoring climate change resulting in severe weather resulting in massive payouts on homes that have been destroyed or damaged by recent weather events b) The cost of building infrastructure caused by inflation which comes back to the lack of skilled workers and specialists not just locally but globally. Long story short, unless we deal with those issues we’re going to keep finding that it’ll be difficult to address the challenges in the future.

    The other big announcement has been National’s tax policy (link) where on the surface it would greatly benefit me – the adjustment to the IETC along with the brackets being adjusted inline with inflation which works out to be roughly around $27 per week. Sounds great? yeah, that’s until you start reading the ‘fine print’ regarding how they will cover the shortfall in revenue. I can’t exhaustively go through all of what they’ve proposed but here are a few of them:

    a) The tax on overseas operators isn’t as high as what they claim – as part of the Entain/TAB agreement TAB will have a monopoly in New Zealand in much the same way that Australians cannot bet with overseas bookies. If we take the money being spent right now on overseas bookies then all that is left is a very small number of people who bet with online casinos, poker, black jack etc. which is going to be nowhere near what National forecast.

    b) The 15% tax on foreign buyers of homes over $2 million sound great until you realise that you’ll find developers will schew their property development to the high end segment of the market which will have the highest profit margins. The idea that it won’t have an impact on housing that the domestic market is demanding is a bit laughable – no matter how good the ring fencing is there will always be some sort of unintended consequences that come as a result no matter how well the policy is designed.

    c) Cutting public transport subsidies and investment which will impact many New Zealand families who are already struggling not to mention the reduction in investment impacting the reliability and future investments that’ll make public transport more efficient in the future. I suggest people look back to the 1970s when the National Party reversed the investments the Labour government were making into mass transit – it took until 20 February 2011 for the rail line up to Waikanae to be electrified and that doesn’t even touch on the rejection of Mayor Robbie’s mass transit plan for Auckland (link) and now Auckland today are dealing with the consequences of rejecting the plan. There are costs – not just the upfront but the downstream costs, you may save $x upfront by not building something but end up paying more down the road because it hasn’t been built aka ‘penny wise but pound foolish’.

    Here is a good video regarding the whole National tax policy from ‘Big Hairy News’ (show your support by buying some merch from their store, they make some of the best local content (link)):

  • Always good to try new things.

    Well, I gave Firefox another whirl and although there are improvements in terms of speed not to mention it is the browser recommended by uBlock Origin developer, I found that it wasn’t always smooth sailing. An example of that would be using Firefox with the web version of Skype where it works smoothly with Chrome, Edge and Safari but when it comes to Firefox it has a warning message that one will experience reduced functionality. Another issue is that of YouTube Shorts which will skip the next video if you click on the three dots then clock on ‘Don’t recommend this channel’ then on occasion when it doesn’t skip the next video it starts playing the audio for the next video.

    On a good side, MV3 is still being developed and if the continued discussion about adding more functionality to the declarative APIs are any indication I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up seeing Google kick the can down the road regarding the phasing out of support for MV2. I understand that the world has to move forward and there certainly are benefits to MV3 but at the same time I think that Google should stop mentioning dates of phasing out MV2 and simply treat MV3 as work in progress because if the meeting minutes from the Webextensions API is anything to go by there is still a tonne of work to be done particularly in the area of addressing the shortcomings of MV3 when compared to MV2 APIs that many developers rely on.

    Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, when asked regarding the desktop version of Threads (that can be accessed through a website) will be launched he noted on his Threads feed (link):

    It’s an important piece of the puzzle given that power users and corporate users rely on doing their social networking management from their laptop or desktop – there is a Threads app being developed for macOS via the use of the Catalyst framework but the last time it was mentioned the consensus from engineers in Instagram is that the app was pretty buggy. It’ll be interesting to see how Threads revolves with ActivityPub being the big feature that I think many are waiting on – the ability to following high profile people while not having to be on Threads. I think the long term we’re going to see Threads eclipse X/Twitter and as for X/Twitter being turned into a ‘super app’ – given the limited resources I am sceptical that it can be done and if it is done I simply don’t see an appetite for such a service given the numerous attempts in the past by companies with a lot more money and manpower yet when push came to shove they couldn’t deliver a ‘super app’.

  • I’ve hit peak side orders.

    I ordered a pizza online a few minutes ago and normally I’ll grab a few sides but these days I can’t help but look at the sides and sigh with boredom that there is nothing interesting on offer, the same things on offer. The other place I buy my pizza from used to have interesting pizza options such as venison or lamb pizza but it has been ages since the last time something new or innovative has come out. All ‘n all the whole take away scene is getting pretty boring – are companies deciding to play it safe because of the economic uncertainty and thus don’t want to be left with a whole heap of stock they can’t sell?

    I’m wondering whether the above example embodies the malaise that has made it’s presence known in New Zealand where everything seems rather ‘meh’ the moment – is it the winter blues of crappy weather and lack of sun or more an example of the mediocre bare minimum that is being pushed by the powers that be with the election giving voters the choice between reactionary populism, mediocre bare minimum or the reheating of old ideas that weren’t very good to begin with but are being marketed as ‘the solution’ to the challenges of today.

    I’ve tried to get involved but I can’t help but get the feeling that it is a closed club – you can be a member but you’re never really a member that is taken seriously. People wondering why young people don’t get involved but there is very much a good reason why not – the gatekeepers that patronise and exile those who have ideas that go against the prevailing orthodoxy. In the case of Labour the continued worshipping at the altar of neoliberalism while simultaneously claiming that capitalism has failed with the limit vision beyond just tinkering around the edge to make the system suck slightly less rather than making the investment into rail, public housing etc. that New Zealand sorely needs.

    Here we are in 2023 and there is still no long term plan to fully electrify and standardise the rail network, we’re still treating Housing New Zealand like a quasi welfare agency when it should be used as battering ram to decomodify housing by turning it into the primary provider of rental accommodation, to disincentivise property speculation and the development of an entrenched rentier class, along with many other much needed changes. It’s frustrating because it isn’t a though these ideas a radical or even new – we used to have these policies many decades ago which allowed New Zealand to build a thriving society which had its faults but at least was aware that ‘let the market do their thing’ isn’t the solution to solving problems when they arose.