Matisyahu's Blog

  • Another day, another pay.

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    Finished work tonight and went for a 11km walk – decided to take the scenic route rather than the usual loop I normally take. One of the downsides of losing weight is that you feel the cold a lot more – I wore my hoodie to keep my warm and when I came back my legs and feet were sore but it was rewarding because I know that I’m feeling better knowing I did some exercise.

    Out of curiosity after getting home I tried on a black vest that I couldn’t fit before – it appears that, as I’ve mentioned in the past, weight loss is a bit like Greek dance in that it starts off slow then gradually speeds up. When rains I take a night off but when there is good weather I like to take advantage of that good weather as much as possible. The 7 day forecast from the Metservice has fine weather so I’ll make up for the few days I couldn’t get some exercise.

    The parcel didn’t arrive on Wednesday but then again there have been storms and a sudden increase in the number of parcels being sent around New Zealand – it appears it is taking around an extra day. Hopefully tomorrow the alarm on my computer will go off, I was lucky on Wednesday that I woke up and was able to clock in on time

    I’ve been looking at some clothes, I’ve got plenty of hoodies and casual clothing but I really do need some more formal/professional clothing. Thank goodness it is possible to buy clothes from overseas – sure I have to pay GST when it arrives but I’m all good given that if it were available in New Zealand I’d be paying it anyway. When I make the purchase, which will probably towards the end of this year, beginning of next, I’ll upload some photos to you can seen the ensemble I’ll create.

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  • Hopefully my order will arrive tomorrow.

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    I don’t know what on earth has happened with NZ Post but holy heck the quality has gone down hill within a matter of months. I remember in the past you could order something on Friday, get shipped out on Friday night, take the over night truck down to Wellington and then have it delivered on Monday. That was the norm but here I am, ordered a few items on early Friday morning (around 2am), I get confirmation of the product shipping later that day and it’ll be Wednesday (based on the estimated delivery date). Yeah, I understand there are delays down to Christchurch based on their website but I don’t live in Christchurch – if it is impacting all shipments out of Auckland then just say that. What do hope is that it arrives on my door step tomorrow before work so then I can spend time setting it up.

    On a good side I was able to sell the iPhone along with Apple TV 4K – money is in the bank and working away at paying things down. The person who bought it came around and we had a chat, the reason I was moving was because I find iCloud limiting and the ‘Hide My Email’ generated email addresses aren’t particular professional when wanting to provide them to places that request an email. Add to that the fact that I prefer using Chrome with uBlock Origin Lite not to mention I find that Google Workspace apps such as GMail as more reliable than using the built in mail app where it is a crapshoot whether the aliases I have setup on iCloud appear in Apple Mail (9/10 they never turn up or I have issues with the send server not sending because for some reason the smtp server disappears in Apple Mail even though I hadn’t touched a thing).

    I didn’t go for a walk tonight because it was raining but on a good side I kept my calories/carbs in balance today so it isn’t much of a major issue. One of the things I have worked on working on having a balanced diet because I am reminded of the old saying “you cannot outrun a bad diet” – going for a walk every night is an ‘icing on the cake’ but ultimately weight loss comes down to what you eat each day. On a good side, after doing it for around 3-4 months I look back at how much money I wasted on take aways being delivered or junk food but how I am not only healthier I also have more money in my pocket to be able to buy the things I want rather than always struggling, living from payday to payday but never having anything tangible to show for it.

    I’ll eventually work my way through some of the clothes I have – some of them are looking pretty worse for wear having been in my wardrobe for a while, some are just gone out of style and not my thing. I tend to dress pretty conservatively primarily because I prefer to buy clothing that I can keep for a long time without it going out of style.

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  • Watching and waiting for the fall out of US trade and foreign policy.

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    I’ve been watching the news regarding Trump’s tariff announcement and once again I ask – how the hell did the US get to the situation where so much power is concentrated in the hands of one man? both parties have allowed more and more power to consolidate in the hands of one person and then act surprised when, after having a run of responsible presidents, that the populace decide to vote for someone like Trump resulting in what we see today. It reminds me of what a conservative commentator said regarding the Patriot Act and how much power it gives one person – as the commentator says, you may get a good run of responsible presidents but you don’t write legislation on the assumption that you’ll always have a responsible person in the White House.

    The other thing that frustrates me is when someone complains about something but ultimately they’re the source of the very thing they’re complaining about. Hearing US politicians complain about ‘currency manipulation’ yet who has an official policy called ‘the strong dollar policy’? last time I checked China didn’t force the US to adopt such a policy – that is a policy that they themselves decided to adopt. No one forced the US to tie healthcare to employment and force their businesses to pay for the healthcare of their employees thus imposing a huge cost burden on the back of businesses – something businesses in countries that have single payer healthcare and drug price negotiations don’t have to deal with. No one forced the US to adopt the system of unemployment insurance (or as we call it in New Zealand – “unemployment benefit”) to adopt a state by state system that taxed businesses payroll and then when a business has to lay off workers that their payroll tax is jacked up to add insult to injury. No one forced the US to create a multilayer mess of bureaucracy rather than having one set of regulations at the federal level – it is the US citizens who have convinced themselves layers of bureaucracy is actually ‘democracy close to the people’ rather than decision that balkanised the country resulting in a race to the bottom as each region competes to attract businesses and retain them (with the working class carrying the brunt of the consequences that come from such a policy in the form of public services being cut).

    You made policy choices and now you’re dealing with the consequences that come from those policy choices – China or whatever the bogyman of the moment happens to be isn’t the cause of the ‘decline of the US’ that you’re trying to blame on someone else but yourself. Rather than looking outside of the US for the source of your problems the effort would be better spent purchasing a mirror and having a look at what is reflected back. As I’ve said in the past, decline of the US is either going to happen one of two ways: 1) A respectable exit from the world stage while acknowledging new powers are emerging and that the US is interested in not viewing those new emerging powers as enemies but potential friends and allies or 2) Will try to hold onto relevance by fighting on the way down in the belief that those glory days of the past can be revived, by talking about an ahistorical rose tinted retelling of a nation’s past that only they (as the strong man) can revive (see Trump). I was hoping that it would be the option (1) but it appears when you have a largely ignorant population it isn’t surprising that (2) was chosen by a population sucked into the promises made by one man claiming to be the only one that can fix it (but never asking the obvious follow up question that if it were so easy then why wasn’t it ‘fixed’ sooner?).

  • Recovering over the past few days.

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    I’ve been sick for the past few days – making sure I get plenty of fresh air, rest, drinking lots of water to keep hydrated. I took a day off from going for a walk at night due to it raining on and off – I didn’t want to get stuck in a downpour only to find that the cold has made me even sicker. It is probably just a combination of stress regarding the upcoming blood test on 14 April where I’ll get to see whether all the work over the last 3 months have paid off with better health statistics. I guess I need to learn how to deal with stress a lot better and recognise that getting worked up doesn’t really change the outcome – do the best you can and then deal with what ever the fallout is.

    There is a love/hate relationship between Arlo and myself, specifically their website and how it says it has sent an email to my email address but nothing arrives, when I try to ring their 0800 number in New Zealand the line goes silent then I get hung up on but if I then try to use the online chat I get told to sod off because I don’t have a subscription. I then posted a reply on their forum which was about as good as a pocket on the old proverbial singlet so in the end I setup a new Arlo account, reset my security system, re-established it with my new Arlo account and called it a day. On a side note, it appears that if you have set up your Arlo devices using Homekit it can cause problems if you don’t reset the hub and set it up again for Google Home – I found that I had set it up on Google Home then suddenly it disappeared from the app with the notification saying that I had removed it, which I hadn’t. Funny enough, I tried to log into my old Arlo account and it suddenly worked – I deleted the account since I have a new one, I’ve also made sure that I’ve included an extra way to login just incase I don’t receive an email or a text message.

    Spark is gradually updating the way in which their fibre connection is dealt with – at the moment for Spark (and their sub brands such as Skinny and BigPipe) there is the use of PPPoE (on Spark it uses VLAN tagging of 10) however they’re gradually moving to DHCP. They’re first rolling it out to Spark customers then it’ll be rolled out to Skinny and BigPipe customers. I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up seeing this as the start of an eventual IPv6 roll out maybe in the future but then again due to Spark having the legacy of being a former state owned enterprise that was privatised over 30 years ago they still have a lot of IPv4 addresses so the sort of urgency isn’t as great than is with the case of smaller players who are fast to adopt IPv6. I’m hoping that once it becomes available for Skinny customers it will result in an improvement in the latency spikes that I’ve seen pop up in the last few weeks – some have already notice a modest improvement with the shift on the forum that I frequent (I’ll stick to using Google Public DNS).

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  • Things are looking good. A few extra thoughts at the end.

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    Just a bit of context before I start, I sold off my Pixel 9 Pro XL 256GB (which was painful but necessary thing to do) along with a few other pieces to pay off in full my iPhone 15 Pro Max 256GB I had on one of those interest free purchase plans through One NZ. I’ve since fully paid that off and now cancelled my plan and now, with the bonus I received from work, decided that I love the Pixel 9 Pro XL too much so I decided to buy a Pixel 9 Pro XL 512GB version (along with a few other things). Regarding the iPhone 15 Pro Max 256GB, I’ll sell that locally and recoup some of the money so the total cost isn’t going to be very high in the grand scheme of things (I live a pretty cheap existence lol).

    Well, I’ve loaded Chrome 135 on my MacBook Air along with uBlock Origin Lite and things are looking pretty good so far and the performance has improved greatly even in a few released since I last used it – I’m unsure whether it is Chrome or the combination of the 15.4 update combined with a new release of Chrome but what ever the case maybe the experience is pretty good. I have to admit, I have flirted with the idea of moving to a Windows computer but given the horrendous nature of Windows particularly when it comes to high dpi support, something macOS got sorted out many years ago, I’d sooner stick with Apple for my computers, Android for my phone and Google Workspace for my cloud service provider (for the same price of iCloud+ 2TB I can get Google Workspace with 2TB, 30 alises and more).

    I’ve got Pocket Casts now setup with all my subscriptions all lined up – yeah, I could use YouTube Music for my podcasts but I have found the interface rather messy, slow and unintuitive when compared to Pocket Casts. It is the one thing that it is disappointing about Google was their decision to replace Google Podcasts with YouTube Music given that Google Podcasts was a pretty simple app but it did the job with minimum fuss, it wasn’t an app trying to be everything to everyone but rather making sure the basics are done well with minimum bloat.

    On a side note, not quite related to the above but technology related. I noted in a prior blog post where I talked about politicians who read the wrong conclusions from the election – the wrong conclusion read was the idea that there was a cultural shift to the right resulting in politicians and business leaders convincing themselves that the centre has moved to the right and as such they need to move to where the new centre is. This is where the whole roll back of DEI, Mark Zuckerberg making changes to the Facebook platform and so on – convinced that the cultural zeitgeist had changed and they need to change with it. Then add on top of that many of the technology companies also bid on government contracts – given the nature of the current administration it is understandable that many of the technology organisations interesting in bidding on government contracts have decided to ‘trim the sails’ and try to get in the good books of the new administration (with many probably hoping that things ‘get back to normal’ in 4 years time assuming saner heads prevail and the whole Trumpism is an aberration rather than a permanent shift in politics).

    Just another side note: There have been a lot of reports about the ‘Daily Wire’ downsizing with speculation regarding their financial position. I have no information regarding their financial position but it has been well know that they’ve been propped up by millionaires and billionaires for 10 years so it wouldn’t be surprising that after 10 years that maybe their backers are demanding a return on investment or at the very least for their business to be in a position that they don’t require regular rounds of funding to keep the lights on. There is also the other reality which is the fact that the number ‘anti-woke’ consumers are very few and far between, they make a lot of noise on the internet but don’t let the noise fool you into believing there is a large number of people behind that noise. It always reminds me of how right wing media will hype something up in a hope that the hype will translate what ever they’re covering into something bigger but all too often it is ‘fake it till you make it’ for example, on Fox News they’ll claim something has ‘gone viral’ when their pro-Trump song has something like 348K views which, IMHO, isn’t viral even by the most generous interpretation of that term. That doesn’t even touch on right wing think tanks and political action committees buying up right wing books to boost their sales numbers and raise the book’s profile – making it appear that right wing ideas are more popular than they really are by trying to draw a link between sales numbers and translating that to the number of people interested in right wing ideas.

  • A productive day.

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    Working from home things were pretty good – feedback from work being positive so I’m happy with how things are progressing. We had our bonuses handed out last pay so I put that towards wiping out my overdraft that I’ve had since I was at university and if things keep going the way they are with the tight fiscal focus then I’ll be working on paying down other outstanding quickly so that eventually I want to get in a financial position where I get to enjoy all my income rather than seeing so much on bills. I’ve got some things I’d like to buy in the long term but in the immediate future the focus is on getting my finances sorted.

    Tonight I went for an 11.6km walk and I felt good afterwards although my feet are a bit sore I find that a good night sleep usually sorts that out pretty quickly. Lying in bed at the moment I feel good after having gone for a walk and ready to head off to sleep – losing weight has not only boosted my energy and I’m fitting into clothes I couldn’t fit into before, I am also having a better night sleep in terms of having a deep sleep, a quality sleep where by in the morning I wake up I feel more refreshed.

    I’m following along with the Windows 11 development and it’ll be interesting to see what 25H2 in particular the discussion regarding ‘Administrator Protection’ (link) (link) and based on what I see I don’t see a time line at the moment however given the scope of what they’re looking at trying to achieve I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up in either 25H2 as maybe a preview then releasing it in the next Windows 11. I’d assume given the scope of what they want to achieve that it may require changes under the hood so I’m going to keep an eye on the direction ahead and see how it progresses.

  • Apple updates all its platforms.

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    Apple has released updates for all its platforms today (link), I’ve updated all my devices and things are working very smoothly. The updates include a very long list of security updates (link) along with some pretty major improvements to Webkit (link) that float through to big improvements to Safari. On tvOS I’ve found that the responsiveness has improved massively where as with the previous version of tvOS I would use my remote and find that it would be unresponsive then suddenly all those times I pressed the remote suddenly come through all at once. I also found that under the previous version that the YouTube would just hand and be unresponsive then either it would wake back up or would exit back to the main Home Screen. All the issues outlined have appeared to be resolved – fast and fluid experience.

    macOS 15.4 has included quite a few under the hood changes – looking through the Extensions in System Profile it appears that almost every part of the operating system has been touched, the firmware for the wifi chip has been updated along with the 802.11 DriverKit also has been updated, FS Kit (user land file system API) has been stabilised and ready for developers to use which hopefully may result in FUSE drivers being made available on macOS in user space. Safari is pretty responsive and there aren’t any issues with the browser extensions so far. iOS has updated the modem firmware on my iPhone 15 Pro Max from 2.40.x to 2.52.3. Like macOS the overall ‘feel’ in terms of responsiveness has improved – I have no empirical evidence other than just how it ‘feels’ when using the device.

    I focus a lot of attention on Webkit primarily because these days we spend so much of our time on the internet with the web browser pretty much becoming the ‘run time engine’ for the internet in much the same way that in the past .NET and Java were a period of time seen as the future of development. Even on iOS and Android you’ll find that almost every application makes use of WebView2 or Webkit to render large parts of their app or reply on web based frameworks – a good example of that would be mobile banking apps that use a mixture of native and web based technologies. Native applications are slowly dying particularly when it comes to enterprise productivity – where I work we do everything through Office 365 through the web browser, Google’s whole portfolio is all web based, companies like Microsoft and Salesforce are either providing turn key solutions (complete products provided individually or part of a ‘suite’ of applications) or frameworks that allow businesses to build bespoke applications which are all accessed through the the web browser.

  • A delicious dinner and a relaxing walk to finish off the day.

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    I went down to the supermarket today to do some grocery shopping which will cover me for the next fortnight. I bought a some lamb rumps that I cooked up and created a tasty lamb sandwich for dinner, I also bought some chicken and fish from the frozen section – I like to keep some food in the freezer along with a collection of soups in my fridge so that meal preparation when I’m working from home is simple where as on my days off I like to be a little big elaborate and cook from scratch since I have the extra time available. After all that I went for a walk and came back to have a shower then jumped into bed to relax. Oh, and I finally found out that the dentist appointment is for 29 April – I thought I had missed it but it is all sorted so I’ve added it to my calendar to keep track of it.

    I’ve been watching an interesting video on the history of Windows ‘Longhorn’:

    It’s good to hear information about what took place from an insiders perspective (there is also an interview with Dave Cutler on Dave’s channel that goes into great detail). I think it is good to have a firm grasp of a products history vs being dragged into the sorts of online debates that occur which aren’t particularly all that productive.

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  • End of another week.

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    End of another week and enjoying my weekend off – I decided to work from home on Saturday rather than going into the office because the light in the office keeps turning off resulting in me having to jump up and down to get the sensor to turn on the light. In a normal functioning universe the building owner would put in this marvel of technology called a light switch which one would turn on when entering the area and when one leaves one turns it off – I guess it’ll be years before this marvel of technology makes its way to our office building. With all that being said, I did enjoy working from home and I had some left over coffee and combine that with the relaxed vibe I’ve got setup in my office I’m a pretty happy chap. I am looking at eventually getting myself a coffee machine of some sort so I have everything I need in my home office.

    On my usual browsing through the internet I found an interesting discussion over on Y Combinator forum regarding Windows NT lower level design and from that (like too good things) someone linked to this interesting blog post regarding low level parts of Windows (link). Quite an interesting read and does a good job undermining the whole ‘Windows sucks’ shtick that dominate the forums, predominately by people who aren’t all that informed other than having a habit of repeating what they heard because it reenforces preconceived notions they already have.

    Tonight after work I went for a 10km walk – a little longer than normal but it feels good working out after dealing with challenging customers all day particularly those who believe they’re special snowflakes and that the rules don’t apply to them. The walk allows me to clear my head and come back refreshed – rather than dealing with scenarios going through my head all night I can drift off to sleep and enjoy a restful shuteye.

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  • A nice walk tonight.

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    Finished work at 8pm tonight, watched a few YouTube videos and then went for an 8km walk – I went for an 11.6km one last night, I was pretty sore so I needed some time to recover but I still feel the need to get out of the house and get some exercise. It’s always good to get some exercise and fresh air. I got home, had a small rest then jumped into the shower – the hot water soothes my muscles and allows me to relax before getting into my pjs ready for bed.

    Bosch Legacy Season 3 has been released and although I’ve started watching episode one I am going to wait until my day off to enjoy it mainly because I don’t enjoy watch something if I am tired and my attention isn’t the best which results in me missing key parts of the narrative along with the fact that it is difficult to enjoy something when you’re tired. There are quite a few seasons that are coming back over the next year so I am looking forward to binge watching some good content.

    I’m still looking at the possibility of taking time off during WWDC so I can relax and enjoy the WWDC sessions – I watch both the keynote and the State of the Platform Union which my preference for the latter rather than the former primarily because although it is a macro level overview of where Apple is taking their platforms. The discussion tends to be more oriented around the technical aspects rather than the keynote which talk more about the consumer facing features – I see a lot of heavy lifting regarding Webkit based on what they’ve been doing in the technical previews so I am hoping that we’re going to see a bigger push to get MV3 out the door (check out the Mozilla developer documentation which keeps track of how much of MV3 each browser support).

    Just to end off this blog post, I’m kind of frustrated when people say “the rich need to pay their fair share” and inevitably someone will pop their head up to say “but they already do”. The problem is that they don’t – they may contribute as a percentage of the budget a large amount but what they get out of the system is a lot more than what they put into the system. That is the problem, they pay less into the system than what they get out of the system – they benefit from educated workers because it allows them to be more productive and thus create more value per hour of work or the fact that their business relies on a seamless supply chain that is kept running smoothly throughout the world thanks to the hegemonic power that the United States (and western allies) have in the world which ensures there are safe sea corridors for ships to transit through. That doesn’t even touch on the combination of soft power that is backed up by hard power that is exercised within the various post WWII institutions that were setup rules of trade. It is frustrating when you have people online display the toxic combination of ignorance and arrogance mixed together – convincing themselves that because they say something with confidence it automatically makes them correct.

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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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