Matisyahu's Blog

Tomorrow (I started writing this blog post on Thursday) is Friday or what would be for most people ‘hump day’, the middle of my week then two days more afterwards then I have Monday and Tuesday off for my weekend. Law & Order: Organised Crime Season 5 has started up again – reminds me very much of Bosch in that the season tends to focus on a single narrative that is stretched over a whole season or if there is a second narrative it intertwines itself with the main narrative.

Well, Friday arrived I had some horrible discomfort so I rang up the Health Line (link) because I didn’t want to jump to conclusions only to find out that It was something that would sort it out if I drank some water, relaxed. After explaining the symptoms the operator thought it would be best to go to the hospital who then called an ambulance on my behalf since I had no way to get to the hospital. They ran some tests and probed me ending with positive news being that it wasn’t something serious but caught up on some sleep and monitored me to ensure everything was ok. I had no way to get home so mum picked me up and I spent a good amount of Saturday sleeping. It’s now Sunday and I’m still recovering – feeling a bit better than on Saturday but one can’t expect to have the issue resolved in around 24 hours.

An interesting thing happened over the last 5 days which was some upgrades being done by my internet service provider along with Ubiquiti pushing out an update for my UDM router and so far I haven’t see the high latency message appear in the Unifi control panel so maybe a combination of the internet service provider upgrade along with my software update has addressed the issue. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when my internet service provider moves to offering DHCP and see how well it performs when compared to PPPoE. From what I understand it has been rolled out for Spark customers but it’ll eventually rolled out to Skinny customers – Skinny being Spark’s ‘all the thrills, none of the frills’ internet service provider they use as a ‘price fighter’ (those who are price sensitive and aren’t interested in the add ons that Spark offer with their own plans). At the moment there is UniFiOS 4.2.9 in the ‘Early Access’ programme which includes quite a few improvements since 4.1.22 (the current release) – it’ll be interesting to see what the experience will be like Skinny makes the switch to DHCP.

How are things going with my iPhone 16 Pro Max on Skinny Mobile? going pretty well – slightly better performance and coverage thanks to the newer modem, fast and responsive and the battery life is pretty good. Had the circumstances been different and I had my old iPhone 15 Pro Max would I have upgraded? probably not, we’re now at a point where upgrade cycles at now 3-5 years as the smart phone market has matured in much the same way that the computer industry has matured and with that most of the focus I see is about software and cloud services – integrating the two together and then selling paid for services aka the holy grail of any business is the reoccurring revenue stream of subscriptions. It’ll be interesting to see how the Apple modem performs once it makes its way to their flag ship smartphones (and other devices). From what has been reported regarding the C1, the modem has good coverage particularly on the edge of coverage area which is a big improvement over the Intel modem that had a bit of a reputation not performing the best in such a scenario. I have a feeling that what we saw with the C1 is Apple wanting to nail down the basics (aka good coverage) before optimising around performance. Another thing to keep in mind is that there is also Apple working on their own wifi and bluetooth chips as well – when you make put everything onto the same silicon then it gives you a lot more flexibility when it comes to managing performance and battery life where you control the whole widget and understand how everything works (not to mention the optimising the hardware and software for each other).

As much as I like to relax on my day off I also want to get things done that I can’t or don’t get done during the week when I’m working. The first thing I did today was doing a clean install of all the Apple devices (including my iPhone 16 Pro Max where I did a DFU restore before setting it up for the first time), a pre-winter cleaning and the one thing I found interesting was an issue on my Mac Studio. I created a bootable usb drive following the instructions which created a macOS 15.4 bootable installer which worked perfectly fine on my MacBook Air but when I did a clean install on my Mac Studio it rebooted and then asked me to select a bootable drive, I selected the built in drive but it came back saying it wasn’t bootable. I then did a network recovery and it wasn’t until afterwards that I found that the recovery version offered was 15.4.1.

Long story short the previous macOS installed on my Mac Studio was 15.4.1 so it appears that the 15.4.1 appears to have also updated the firmware which meant an older version of macOS couldn’t be loaded on the device hence the drive being not bootable. Makes me wonder whether part of the security fix was related to the M1 because my MacBook Air M2 had no issues restoring 15.4. I do a clean install off a usb bootable for two reasons, 1) it is quicker 2) in the past I have sometimes found what is available for the internet recovery lags behind (it appears that isn’t the case in this situation – maybe the security vulnerability forced Apple to update what is available for recovery).

How did it go in the end? it all worked out in the end and everything is running smoothly – Safari is working well with the 1Blocker extension which has done a great job replacing AdGuard for Safari (the lack of updates for the last 4-5 months for Safari along with the lack of following up on the bug I reported 2 months ago hasn’t been acknowledge by the developers). Yes, I am back to iPhone, Safari and Apple TV but that is another discussion entirely but what I can say for the TLDR version – the iPhone 16 Pro Max is wonderful.

Today (Tuesday) I’ve cleaned my place from top to bottom, weeding the garden and tidying up outside around the house as well. One of the benefits of losing weight has been a big boost in energy – it is amazing how I tried to normalise the lack of energy by trying to convince myself “oh, this is perfectly normal” when in reality it wasn’t normal and more importantly was an indication of an underlying issue that needed to be addressed.

On Monday I also tried an experiment, as I noted on a previous post I talked about diet soft drinks and carb cravings but then I read and watched some videos and I suddenly realised that maybe I got it all wrong. Around 3 months ago I had a HbA1c blood test and it came back saying that my blood sugar was too high and the link that I made in my brain was that even if I kept off sugary foods that I kept getting cravings for high carb food so I drew a correlation but I didn’t look into it further wondering whether there was a causal link between the two. The reason why is I assumed that that the spike in blood sugar wasn’t due to savoury food I was eating my sweet food but even when I cut sweet food out of my diet I still kept craving carbs. The problem is that I failed to understand the bigger problem which was the fact that my blood sugar was high because I was eating not only too many calories but too many carbs and I was flooding my body with fuel which was spiking my blood sugar which then made me more hungry.

What was my theory? now that my blood sugar has come down I have found that I no longer have that ravenous hunger then if I consume diet soft drink it shouldn’t have an impact on my appetite. There is only one way to check whether my theory is correct is to run an experiment and see what the results are. Well, yesterday I bought a 600ml of Diet Coke (and 2 x 1.5L of Pepsi Max to see if there is a difference between the effects of one compared to the other) when I went shopping, I drank it and nothing happened so I waited and waited, went to sleep (which funny enough, I was expecting to be up going to the toilet but it appears that high blood sugar also results in higher rates of having to go to the toilet). Today I had a cup of Pepsi Max and the same results – no change in appetite.

It appears I was believing there was a causal link when I was ignorant of the larger issue which was high blood sugar and that was because I thought high blood sugar was due to eating too much sweet food when in reality it was the high number of carbs I was eating (and sweet food, along with other types of food I was eating were high in carbs) and the sedentary. As soon as I cut the carbs down to a minimum and focused on eating protein, fresh fruits and vegetables along with exercise I started losing weight and getting it all under control my appetite also was under control. My appetite is also dealt with my controlling carbs and calories – a meal with too many carbs will make me feel hungry but if I eat a meal with the same amount of calories (sometimes less) but hardly carbs along with a decent amount of protein I feel full and satisfied for a along time.

Getting healthier is a journey and in that journey I admit I have made some really silly mistakes along with drawing conclusion where there was no causal link but life is about making mistakes, learning from them and then becoming a better person because you’ve had the experience and learning first hand how to avoid the situation in future.

Quite a busy week so far in the technology industry – Google released Android 16 beta 4 (link) and it appears that the kernel version has also been updated (not a major version update) and I’ve read reports regarding the Pixel 9 Pro XL showing performance improvements. The expected release is around the middle of the year but I’m in no hurry to upgrade but from what I have heard the days of the big leaps forward have come to an end and the focus is on evolutionary and under the hood improvements, refining the platform so that the features that exist work a lot better. A summary of the Android 16 features can be found on this page (link) and many of those improvements have been back ported to Android 12 such as the improvement to the Android Runtime (ART) along with a switch to 16KB page size.

The switch to 16KB page size brings the following benefits (link)

Switching to 16KB page sizes on Android offers performance benefits by reducing fragmentation, improving memory allocation efficiency, and potentially leading to faster app launch times and improved system boot times. This approach allows for smoother user experiences, particularly for large applications.

There is also scheduled is a second update to Android 16, the platform itself (the APIs) are stabilised but additional features will be made available. It’ll be interesting to see what is bought to the table.

WWDC 2025 is set for June 9-13, 2025 so I am looking at how much leave I have available and if I do have sufficient leave I’ll take the week off so I can enjoy keeping up with the latest sessions that Apple will make available online. Although I do watch the keynote I much prefer the ‘Platforms State of the Union’ where it is still a high level overview but it is more geared towards the technically inclined who want to know more about the under the hood changes.

On a side note, I dived down a rabbit hole of learning about Chrome, the underlying technology called Skia and the work being done called Graphite which has a backend called Dawn which will make use of DirectX 11 and 12. Long story short there is a lot of behind the scenes work that goes on when it comes to developing Chrome and it is quite the adventure looking into what will appear in the future. The benefit of such a development will mean every part of Chrome (including the UI of the application itself) will make use of Dawn and the DirectX 11 and 12 on Windows not to mention Metal on macOS which should translate to a better overall experience in terms of responsiveness, font rendering quality etc.

I know this is a bit late but Windows App SDK 1.8.x development series has been launched (link) – as features are added then mature we’re seeing Microsoft starting to slowly make use of them. I think long term their goal is to replacement for the classic win32 API. It’ll be interesting to see long term how they tackle the challenge of moving the platform forward, provide a reasonable level of backwards compatibility and then how they will schedule the removal of features from the operating system – all while they focus on prioritising security above all (link). The big question is whether, when faced with the choice of backwards compatibility or security whether they choose security given Microsoft’s reputation for prioritising backwards compatibility above all else – I’d like to he proven wrong but if the past is anything to go by then I wouldn’t be too confident. With all that being said, Microsoft is working on ‘Administrator protection on Windows 11’ (link) there isn’t a date set but I am hoping that we’ll see it in Windows 11 25H2 which will go a long way to securing Windows.

Tonight I went for a 10km walk after work – it’s good to get some fresh air after being stuck inside all day not to mention getting some exercise since I’ve been sitting all day. I’m going to head off to bed beecause I’ve got work on Saturday and Sunday then my weekend is Monday and Tuesday – I haven’t got anything planned for my days off but whatever it is I’ll be taking it easy.

As mentioned previously I went for a blood test on Monday and the last time I had one 3 months ago it took 3 days to come back so either one of two things – it is taking longer because they’re busy or the answer I’d much rather prefer which is ‘no news is good news’, if there was something wrong they would have gotten back to me fairly quickly.

Ubiquiti is working on an update to the Dream Machine range with 4.2.8 being worked on – currently it is in the early access phase but when the engineers are comfortable they’ll make it available as a pre-release then eventually release it. There have been a few bugs fixed up with the 4.2.x development cycle then combine that with a move by my ISP (Skinny which is owned by Spark) which will be offering DHCP along with PPPoE for connections in the next few months. From what I understand they’re rolling it out gradually, getting feedback and addressing any issues that pop up.

I went for a 10km walk tonight – the weather is getting colder but it is one of those things that as we move into winter you take advantage of the good weather beecause there will be nights when the weather is horrible and it isn’t possible to go for a walk.

Well, I went to the Awanui Labs blood testing for my A1C test however I also found that there was an urine test (I saw it on the document my doctor gave me, thought it may have been a mistake) so I guess the reason was to also check my kidney function as well. Normally it takes a few days to get a response back from the lab but I’m hoping that they’re good results or at least show some progress from my original test to where I am now. Improving health overnight won’t occur but if there is at least some progress in the numbers then it is a matter of being on the right course and just keeping on that course. It is a bit like weight loss because god knows it would be nice if it were possible to lose all the undesirable weight in a matter of a few months and then end up at around 85-90kg but alas we live in the real world and progress is always an uphill slog but once you get there you look back down from where you came from and compare it to where you are – it feels pretty good having accomplished it.

After getting all that done I dropped in at the local Dutch bakery to have some eggs bene along with a mocaccino – my treat that I have once a month mainly because I’m too lazy to make all the components and when I have tried in the past it has come off as rather half baked especially when one considers all the work that went into it. Long story short, I’d prefer to pay someone else deal with it so then I can relax and enjoy the experience. Oh, and the icing on the cake there is a good 5G connection so I can stream YouTube videos as I was having my meal. After I finished my brunch I walked back home which is around 1.6km which is a good walk after a meal. For those wondering, I had an eggs bene with smoked salmon and wilted spinach – I always like to make sure I get my greens when I can.

I’ll be heading off tonight to have dinner with mum and then on the way home I’ll pick up some groceries, then when I come back I’ll have a walk (probably just an 8km walk), have a shower then relax in bed for an early night sleep. Last night I got to sleep at around midnight and had a long night sleep where I felt quite refreshed in the morning.

I’ve been pretty happy with Chrome paticularly with the great work that has been done not only by Chrome developers adding functional to the declarative net request API to address developer concerns but also how well uBlock Origin Lite is working particularly with the added ‘zapper’ where you can select elements on a page to ‘zap’. As features are added to MV3 you’ll find that uBlock Origin Lite will provide support (the ‘classical’ uBlock Origin implements a lot of functionality that would need to be re-written from the ground up to make it compatible with MV3). If you’re wanting to keep up with the latest developments for Chrome it can be found at the Chrome roadmap which gives a good insight on what Google have planned for the upcoming releases for Chrome (link).