Something I noticed after installing the macOS 15.5 update has been the Mail app where Apple have finally fixed up the issue regarding aliases where in the past if you added a custom domain that the email addresses wouldn’t appear in the Mail app (you had to manually add them by going into Accounts then ‘Email Addresses’ where you would manually add them) but now are pulling the information straight from the server (if you click on ‘Email Addresses’ then click on ‘Edit Email Addresses’ you are taken straight to iCloud.com rather than the old system where you were given a dialogue in the Mail app to manually add it). This bug has been a problem for quite some time and I don’t see any notes about that issue being addressed until it falls under the mysterious ‘This update includes enhancements, bug fixes, and security updates for your Mac.’ that appears to be a catch all phrase many tech companies use these days.
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Well, I’ve had a late night binge watching ‘The Handmaids Tale’, I checked the news and found that Apple had released updates along with an update for Safari 18.5 (link). Safari 18.5 release doesn’t include a lot of new features like the previous but there are a few bugs that have been fixed up and I see two bugs relating to extensions have been fixed which will hopefully result in a more reliable blocking experience. Apple has also updated their security update part of their website to include information on the security fixes included with the update (link). So far I’ve updated all my devices and they’re all working very reliably, Safari is working great (I completely cleared the cookies, cache and history so I could see what the update was like with a clean slate), there have been quite a few things updated such as the wifi driver and on iOS the modem firmware has also been updated. Oh, and the system firmware has been updated from 11881.101.1 to 11881.121.1 along with there being more user space extensions which makes me wonder whether this is the long term goal of macOS which is to push as much stuff out of kernel space as possible thus leaving only the absolutely necessary running in kernel space.
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I like to keep up to date to see what is happening with AdGuard and whether a particular issue has been fixed – the one I’ve wrote about has been the issue of AdGuard and websites that use Cloudflare verification. I’ve download and installed the latest version (Version 5.1.81) and everything is now working as it should. As much as I love uBlock Origin Lite I find that AdGuard does a better job blocking those sneaky popup windows where you click on a play button and it loads another window (the content is blocked but the fact that the window still loads is annoying). With that being said, the AdGuard developers need to communicate better – if the issue is known but the fix may take a few months to appear then just say that so then at least as an end user I get a sense that the issue has been taken onboard rather than the lack of communication being an indication of indifference to the problem I’m having. This is something I think developers in general need to take onboard – better communication.
I’ve finally caught up on ‘The Last of Us’ and Law & Order: Organized Crime while I’m slowly working through ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. There is some good content out there and these days I much prefer watching television series where ideas as developed over a whole season rather than trying to wrap everything up in a single episode. There are a few series that are coming back for another season such as Foundation and many other Apple originals.
At the moment I’m using Chrome and things are going well, I wonder whether Apple should just throw in the towel and go with Chromium to avoid the situation of Webkit constantly lagging in the areas of standards adoption, web extensions not to mention compatibility with websites. Don’t get my wrong, I admire fighting the good fight that I see with Webkit and Firefox but god knows when you’re lagging so far behind or fight tooth and nail against implementing features that would improve the experience for end users then I have to wonder what is it all for in the end. Are you maintaining your bespoke browser for a reason outside of “because we can”? What is the reasoning because it isn’t just me, as an end user, frustrated but also developers on various blogs talking about the amount of work involved with supporting Safari because of broken implementations, bugs that are reported but aren’t being fixed, third party extension developers keen to bring their extension yet either APIs are either partially implemented or if implemented they’re done in a way that is either broken or incompatible resulting in more work needing to be done than what should be necessary.
More theatrics in the world of politics – the Trump regime claiming to have come to a deal with China even though it was he who put the wheels in motion to cause the crisis only to then him to take credit for a 90 day temporary reprieve. Don’t expect the mainstream media to spend the next few days pointing out the fact that the ‘great deal’ they’re working on with South Korea never needed to happen because there was already a free trade agreement in the first place but that won’t stop Trump from claiming victory for something he never did himself. The average American? complete clueless as always and the Democrats – will they strip the presidency of the power to claim an emergency then upend the whole international order because of a bruised ego? I don’t put too much stock in the Democrats finding a backbone to do what is right not to mention the laziness of the American electorate to either turn out to vote and those who vote being clueless about what is happening in the real world. Sorry for that rant but I really had to get it off my chest – and those of us outside of the United States can only look helplessly on as we’re chained into our seats on the crazy train careening off the rails, taking us all down with the United States. I’d laugh if the consequences weren’t so serious.
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Finished work on Sunday for the week, took the bus down to the store to pick up some groceries and then walked part of the way back (my arms got too tired to keep on carrying the grocery bags), I had a late dinner and then I went for a 10.5km walk which enabled me to unwind (making it a total of 11.5km that I have walked). Woke up today, still a bit stiff from the long walk but feeling a whole lot better knowing I got some exercise but I’ll be focusing on getting out of the house on my day off so that I can get some sun and fresh air. On a side note, I finally cleaned my fridge after ignoring it for a while – it wasn’t horrible by any stretch of the imagination but it need some freshening up.
I’ve tried the latest uBlock Origin Lite on Safari (stable version that comes with macOS 15.4.1) and unfortunately there are still many bugs in Safari that cause problems when compared to how smoothly uBlock Origin Lite works on Chrome. I’m looking forward to hopefully seeing that maybe these issues will be addressed with Safari 19 (bundled with macOS 16) – that Apple are holding back from pushing out disruptive changes in favour of making them available in the next major release. I’m not hopeful given that Apple has allowed Safari marketshare slip over the years to the point that Chrome now has 66.94% of the browser market on macOS. I know plenty of people, both old and young, who go out of their way to install Chrome because websites that work fine on Chrome break on Safari (NZ Post’s YouShop being a good example).
Rumour has it that Apple will be releasing update for their platforms this week – it’s Monday in New Zealand but Sunday in the US so it may not be until Tuesday New Zealand time before we see it emerge (although it may not get released until later on in the week depending on whether there have been regressions in the release candidate they made available last week).
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Well, I’ve got Chrome installed with the latest version of uBlock Origin Lite – it appears to the shock of almost no one that Chrome developers are adding functionality that extension developers need while over in the land of Safari there appears to be a reluctance to close that functionality gap not only when it comes to implementing MV3 APIs but also standards based on what I see here (link). I kind of regret jumping ship back to the world of Apple given the lack of any serious progress. What I am hoping is that we’ll see something being announced in WWDC regarding Safari 19, that the functionality gap will close but something tells me that it’ll be the bare minimum rather than what should be happening which is for Apple to recognise the web browser is the run time engine of the 21st century and the minimum effort – even on their own platform, macOS, Chrome is the browser of choice which is a lot to say given that it requires the end user to go out of the way to download it given how defaults tend to have a way of gaining and holding onto marketshare because “well, it’s there so I may well use it”. Maybe at this point Apple should give just up and go all in with Chromium so that as an end user I don’t end up with an web browser that is continuously behind the 8th ball.
I’ve installed ublock Origin Lite and it has gone from strength to strength where as Ad Guard still haven’t fixed up the issue where pages that use Cloudflare keep hanging (the issue doesn’t occur on Ad Guard for Safari for some reason). I couldn’t imagine myself using Windows though given the horror stories I keep hearing from Windows users not to mention the fact that I use it every day at work – a constant reminder why I am a Mac user and made that switch over 25 years ago when I was living in Australia (my first Mac being an eMac). Oh, and I wouldn’t want to touch Office 365 for Business with a 40 foot barge pole – for all the issues I have with Google the situation is a whole lot worse with Office 365 given how Microsoft appear to be hell bent on making basic tasks such as emailing from an alias more difficult than it needs to be.
I’ll head off to bed, get some good sleep and hopefully all will be well in the world when I wake up. Oh, and I went for an 8km walk tonight – I needed some fresh air after being shut in all day.
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I’ve ordered some stuff over the last week and the first order has arrived at YouShop in the US so I logged in and provided them with the information they require. One of the other items have shipped and I’ve got one more yet to ship – in total it’ll be three items to be sent to the remailer and then I’ll get them sent to New Zealand. I’ve also bought some clothes from Dickies – when they’re half the price then one might as well get them given how long lasting they are.
Today I went into work and put through my leave for my birthday and the beginning of June – unfortunately both of them were declined by ‘work force management’. I talked to my boss about it and he is looking into it – hopefully I can get a break since I tend to like a break around the middle of the year for the WWDC then a break at the end of the year around Christmas time.
It’ll be interesting to see what Apple has in store for web extensions because the developers over on uBlock Origin Lite have released a beta build for Safari (link) – it still has a few bugs along with the fact that there are features missing from Safari that Apple haven’t implemented yet or are buggy (link). I hope that we’ll see Apple get to the point where the big content blockers can start sharing their Chrome MV3 extensions with Safari which will result in faster improvements rather than Safari having to have a special build which uses Apple’s own API rather than declarative net request.
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A busy couple of days where I finally got my act sorted out and bought those items of clothing I saw online but had been procrastinating over whether to go ahead with the purchase along with ordering a Delongi kettle and toaster from Noel Leeming which was on special:
Which will mean that I’ll finally be able to have some hot drinks at home along with being able to toast some bread rather than at the moment where I have to put the oven on. Regarding my air fryer and a few other items, I’m going to put some shelves in my pantry on the left side which at the moment is just a space – I’ll put my air fryer, soda stream in there or maybe I’ll look at getting a set of shelves I can have on the counter but either way I need to find a way to get things better organised.
Tonight I went for a 10km walk and it was good to get out to enjoy some fresh air – there was a small amount of drizzle and according to the Met Service for the next couple of days it should be fine however on Friday there will be some rain but I’ll be all good if I can get some exercise in then have a rest on Friday.
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First day of my weekend – walked down to my local Dutch bakery and cafe to order an eggs bene and a bowl of caffè mocha for a late brunch (well, technically it was around 3pm between lunch and dinner) – enjoying the good weather after having a week of wild rain and wind. I walked back from the bakery and cafe so it totals around 3.2km but I’ll still go for a walk tonight – I like getting some fresh air which is good psychologically, getting the happy hormones working and feeling a lot better afterwards.
I’m still looking at getting some time off from 9 June 2025 so I can get some rest along with following WWDC 2025 keynotes and sessions. The other development I am watching is Android 16 which has been split between the official release then a second update coming towards the end of the year. The other development towards the end of the year will be Windows 11 25H2 and Fedora 43 so there are many developments that are going to take place. As I remind people, use the best technology to do the job – you don’t owe any business loyalty, either they deliver a good or service that makes your life easier or they don’t.
Fedora 43 will be a big change as it’ll be Wayland only with X11 something you have to opt in if you want it rather than including it as part of the base installation. As I’ve said in the past, if I were to ever move off macOS it would be to a PC running Linux (assuming Windows 11 doesn’t get its act together). I’d get a laptop with an Intel GPU but in terms of a desktop I would be tempted to build my own computer with either an AMD or Intel GPU which allows me to avoid the whole NVIDIA driver fiasco because NVIDIA choose to be anti-social and not work with Linux developers. Either include the drivers with the Linux kernel so that hardware is supported out of the box or don’t waste my time with promises but little in the way of delivery. If you want to keep up with what is happening in the world of Linux and open source the news source I like to follow is Phoronix (link).
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Last night I started watching ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and now I am up to season 2 – I love a good binge watch while I’m waiting for new seasons to start of the other shows I like to watch. It is scary how close the narrative is to certain groups that appear to have grown powerful within the US and enabled by those who couldn’t be either bothered to vote at the last election or because the Democrat candidate was less than perfect on a pet project that they threw their vote away voting for a third party candidate who had no chance of winning.
I’ve spent some time looking through GitHub regarding projects I follow and it appears that AdGuard developers are working on moving away from Electron – one of the changes has been regarding SafariConverterLib which was bumped up to version 3.0 (link). At the bottom of the 3.0 change log there is this glimmer of hope: “AdGuard for Safari will soon switch from Electron so the node wrapper is not required anymore.” It’ll be interesting to see whether we’ll see a shared codebase between AdGuard for iOS and macOS in much the same way that 1Blocker does the same thing.
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My internet connection was acting kind of weird today, some websites were loading slowly and I couldn’t work out why so what I decided to do is do a complete reset back to factory defaults of my router and access point so that I would do a clean setup as if it were brand new. I went through the process of setting it up again, updated the software and made only the necessary changes (DNS servers, choosing the secure DNS servers, configure wifi etc) and funny enough everything is running a lot better along with the UDM running cooler. I don’t know what I did to stuff things around but I think it is a good reminder that it is best not to fiddle with things one doesn’t quite funny understand and that the settings are setup by default there is probably good reason why they’re the default. I then ran the speed test again from my router to the internet and there was a slight uptick in download and upload speed – you live and you learn.
Recovering after being in hospital for a few days and then resting at home I haven’t felt up to being able to go for a walk each day but I’ve made sure that I’ve kept to my calories and carbohydrates, drinking a good amount of water to keep hydrated and trying to get as much quality sleep as possible. The stress of the initial event is slowly becoming a distant memory but it was still a shock none the less but hopefully with rest and recovery I’ll feel better to get back to work.
This week I had a bit extra pay come through so I’ve been able to treat myself to a few things I’ve been holding off from buying I’ve ordered online – one of the items I’ve had to get it to delivered to my YouShop address which will send it through to me in New Zealand from the US. If I am going to use YouShop then it begs to question whether I should get all my other orders sent to YouShop then bundle it together into a single order and send it through to New Zealand so then I take advantage of the free shipping in the US and the betting shipping rates that YouShop offer (due to NZ Post having a relationship with DHL). On a good side, we’ve got a free trade agreement with China and our tariffs are next to non-existent so the only thing I need to worry about is paying GST when it arrives (which I’m more than happy to do).
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