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

  • Elections are slowly building up.

    Once again the media is in a frenzy with claims that Trump will be soon be indicted (link) but given how often Teflon Don has been able avoid being prosecuted in the past so I have rather hesitant to pop the champagne cork given past experiences. Assuming it all goes ahead and Trump is charged resulting in him leaving the GOP presidential primaries, will that result in the current candidates toning down their rhetoric in the culture war knowing that Trump and Trumpism are not a factors to worry about or will one of the candidates step into Trump’s position to be the ‘Trump candidate’. Personally, I think the sane Republicans in blue states in positions of governance who are looking on – they should wait it out, allow Trumpism to crash and burn in the election then bring the party to it’s knees so then it gives the ‘adults in the party’ the leverage to go “ok, we tried your childish thing, now it is time for the adults to take back the party” then purge the party of the freedom caucus and take greater control over who runs in which district rather than the current free for all.

    Back in New Zealand it will be interesting to see what the election will result – I’ll vote my usual combination of Labour for my local MP and Greens for my party vote (they’re as far left as one can get in terms of being a viable party with representation already in parliament). Let me start off by saying that Labour has been a huge disappointment – rather than focusing on maybe 5 key areas they tried the scattergun approach with the end result being that very little was actually achieved as a result. The other problem is the lack of a big vision of where Labour want to take the country “here is our vision, and here are the 5 policies that are going to get us there” vs what appears to be meandering along, a bit here and a bit here but not overarching coherent strategy to address the myriad of issues that need addressing. What I would like to see is the following:

    1. Full electrification of the New Zealand rail network, standardisation on 25kV and expansion of the rail network:
      a) Expand the Melling line down to the Kennedy Good Bridge
      b) Bore a tunnel for both a rail connection as well as a road connection to Wainuiomata which will open up opportunities for further development as well as improving connectivity between Wainuiomata and the Hutt Valley/Wellington.
      c) Tunnel bore a connection in Auckland from the CBD to the airport and connection to north shore. If there is money and time then replace the Auckland harbour bridge with a tunnel instead.
      d) Rebuild the long distance passenger service by upgrade the rail track ballast along with investment into depot to depot small goods movement, mixed passenger/small goods for low traffic lines etc.
      e) Invest into intercity rail in the south island particularly from the north of Christchurch to the heart of Christchurch where a good portion of the development is occurring as well as investment into light rail particularly out the airport with a focus on grade separation along with ‘cut and cover’ where required.
    2. Investment into renewables – focus on making greater use of geothermal particular through using closed loop systems where heat is transferred via a liquid being pumped through a closed loop with a low boiling point to heat water to run a turbine.
    3. Rebuild the ministry of works so that the government has the means by which large scale nation building projects can be executed without constant stopping and starting resulting in the building up of knowledge being lost as teams that completed one project are only on temporary short term contracts rather than long term stable employment where the knowledge can be built and passed down as new employees join and older employees leave or may continue on in a more casual/contractual basis.
    4. Turn Kāinga Ora into the primary provider of rental accomodation by engaging in a massive house building project – that includes replacing existing houses on large sections and subdividing them with efficient dense housing so that more houses can be provided using the existing land holdings that Kāinga Ora already own. The way to decomodify housing is to make it unenticing for it to be an investment – set Kāinga Ora rental prices based on 25% of a single persons income if they’re a couple or 12.5% if they’re a single person living by themselves (maxing out at $500 for a couple, $250 for a single person). Provide enough housing at that price it would drive landlords resulting in house prices going down not to mention the ability to stay long term in public housing results in buyers being able to be more picky. Long story short the masses would rent from Kāinga Ora, the private sector would build houses to own and what little private sector rentals remain would be to cater for niches that Kāinga Ora would cater for aka rich people wanting to lease a luxury home because they don’t want to have their money tied up in a house they’re living in temporarily.
    5. Reform the welfare system so that it encourages rather than punishes people who take the initiative and take a chance with a part time or casual job.
      a) Completely removal of the stand down period and streamline the process for those who work in seasonal jobs and may find themselves off work for short periods (I worked for a catering company that followed the university calendar resulting in breaks between terms and found I wasn’t eligible for any assistance from social welfare- the problem the business had is that they couldn’t retain staff for that very reason).
      b) Increase the level at which abatement kicks in – on a solo parents benefit you can earn up to $160 a week before tax before abatement kicks in (link) which works out to be 7 hours per week. Let’s be realistic, how many employers are going to employ someone for 7 hours a week? at minimum the abatement level needs to be doubled which would give someone a realistic chance of getting a casual/part time job when receiving the benefit.
      c) When means testing ask more questions than just “what is your pre-tax income” because in all due respects asking someone what their pre-tax income is tells you nothing about what the financial situation – the purpose of means testing is to find out how much they’re living off once tax, student loans, maybe fines payment plan etc. are taken off the income. It is also important to ask them what their outgoings are or otherwise you’ll end up in a situation of a person owning a business, running all their costs through the business then paying themselves a small stipend so it makes them eligible not just for assistance but their kids can qualify for student allowance etc. If you asked people what their core essential outgoings are such as rent, electricity, gas, petrol for the car or cost of public transport, groceries etc. then you’d seperate those who genuinely need help vs those who game the system through accounting trickery.

    I’m not hopeful that something like the above would happen but if it were to happen then it would immensely improve New Zealand by focusing on some core areas then once addressed then building on it. There was a once in a lifetime opportunity in 2016 to lay out such a bold version for New Zealand but unfortunately that opportunity has been squandered.

  • Big clean up and the coming weekend.

    It appears that thanks to an accidental leak that the next version of the Nothing Phone will be utilising the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 – although it is a generation behind the one thing to remember is that only the big vendors have access to the latest generation due to being able to buy up in bulk a large number of units. I don’t think there will be a huge difference between Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and Gen 2 other than the benchmark enthusiasts. Carl Pei has gotten the old development group back together again so hopefully we’ll see Android 14 making the way onto the Nothing Phone 1 and 2 (I’m assuming that the Nothing Phone 2 will launch before Android 14 stable is released).

    Android 14 Developer Preview 2 was released a few days ago (link) but I’d say there will be more details at the Google I/O on 10 May 2023 – it will interesting to see what happens with the big privacy push particularly around third party tracking and cookies in light of the work that Google is doing around Topics API where rather than tracking then forming a profile there is a sandboxed anonymised set of interests that developers can then use regarding what ads should be shown to a particular end user. In a perfect world Apple and Google would standardise on something that both Apple and Google can live with – that can preserve privacy while ensuring that the ads being presented to the user are relevant.

    Chrome 111 was released recently and everything is going well – what keeps me on Chrome isn’t just the performance (and the improved memory and power efficiency) but also the third party extension ecosystem. I only have one extension installed and that is uBlock Origin – although Google has been talking about phasing out MV2 in favour of MV3, they’ve kicked the can down the road a few times to now they no longer have a solid date. Long story short, it is easy to make an announcement but it is difficult to stick to it when you make an announcement before talking to all the stakeholders whose extension would no longer work because what is what they depend on MV2 no longer exists in MV3 – the WebExtensions Community Group minutes give a good insight. I think what is going to happen is that they’ll do a piecemeal deprecation of components. IMHO, there is no hurry, take your time and ensure you get it done correctly.

    Although I am having some ‘homesickness’ about breaking out of the iCloud/Apple ecosystem I am still enjoying the Nothing Phone, Chrome, Google Workspace etc. so I guess it is the jarring experience of having been using something for over a decade then abruptly changing then finding the experience is disconcerting as one adjusts to the new way of doing things.

    Watching the news regarding the SVB, Signature Bank and Silvergate Bank, and once again the right wing are looking to find distractions to move the conversation away from yet another example of Trump era deregulation coming back to bite the public on the backside. Unfortunately in the political world there is a lag between a policy being enacted and for the downstream effects of such a policy to materialise in the real world. It is one of the reasons why I would like to see longer parliamentary terms in New Zealand – move from 3 year terms to maybe 4 or 5 year terms which would encourage more long term planning not to mention giving enough time for voters to see the outcome of the policies so they can then make an assessment whether to vote for said party again.

  • Safari isn’t so bad after all.

    I’ve moved back to Safari as my main browser (I still keep Chrome around because my work uses Google Workspace – using Chrome integrates me into work so I have access to the saved passwords, bookmarks etc). The bigger decision is moving back to the Apple ecosystem and by that I mean moving back to the iPhone and AppleTV. The first step will be AppleTV because unfortunately the way in which Google has setup their home software is that I cannot access it from my laptop or desktop along with the insistence of Google Home going through Arlo’s own service rather than providing a hub for the security cameras themselves as with the case of Apple and how the AppleTV acts as a hub which in turn allows me to then open the Apple Home application on macOS to be able to check things out. There are also limitations to the Google Home application, for example, it doesn’t inform the end user of the battery life so one cannot keep track of how low the battery is then being able to guesstimate how much time until one needs to recharge it.

    Although I love my Nothing Phone the big problem when reviewers review phones, apart from their obsession over the camera, is the ecosystem in which the device is integrated into. In many cases it is the ecosystem that drives adoption forward of a given device and once a customer has a number of devices integrated into that ecosystem then the customer becomes used to the frictionless integration thus anything that ends up breaking that frictionless integration makes the overall experience more jarring.The big question is whether I wait for the iPhone 15 to appear or whether I just go with the iPhone 14 given that the difference isn’t going to be that extraordinary – we’re in the age of refinement and incremental improvements rather than the massive leaps where moving from one generation to another offered giant leaps but these days most people are updating maybe every 3-5 years (probably closer to 4 years for many people).

    Regarding the world of politics, I have to admit I am sitting back and watching the whole Fox News, Dominion Voting Systems saga it is interesting seeing how the various high profile names are dealing with it – throwing each other under the bus to absolve themselves of responsibility. What I find particularly interesting is post 2020 election where Fox News called Arizona for Joe Biden saw their view ship move to OAN and NewsMax – then suddenly all the hosts started to change their tune to give the audience what they wanted. Oh to be a fly on the wall and see the discussions taking place, I wonder whether any of the big names were all onboard with maybe pushing the envelop but were concerned with giving ‘the crazies’ a platform resulting in not only Fox News being impact but also themselves given that many have jobs outside of Fox News such as Sean Hannity who has his own radio show.

    The reason why I raise this is because if things get a bit spicy then those networks syndicating Sean Hannity’s radio show (along with other hosts that have their own radio shows and podcasts) might be concerned that what is being said on Fox News might make it’s way onto their radio network thus potentially exposing them to trouble some time down the track. This is where I think that maybe some of the big stars may cut their losses and the big question is what is going to happen with Fox News going forward – do they shut down the channel and relaunch a new channel in it’s place with a focus on not repeating the mistake of the past? the reason why I ask is because I think back to people who have gone to the crazy end of town then realising what they had done to then try and back pedal only to find that the audience they lost in their move to the extreme aren’t coming back and those on the extreme will either abandon them by labelling them as a sell out or find people who are willing to go even more extreme.

    Side note: Although Fox News likes to boast about being number one cable channel but one thing to remember is that the media in the US is very fractured with Fox News as of 2022 having an average view ship size of 1.996 million – the average house hold size is 3.13 and a population of 331 million meaning that there are around 100 million households meaning Fox News gets around 2% of households watching their channel. When you break down the numbers it isn’t as impressive as the marketing make it out to be. That doesn’t even touch on the fact that the demographics are certainly not on their side with Fox News (their audience skews towards older demographics) along with not giving numbers on the number of subscribers using Fox Nation – their service that is apparently trying to win over Gen Y and Z. If their numbers were great then it would make sense that they would boast about it at almost every opportunity but from what it appears the fact that the only data has been guesses by analysts and the downplaying it as a ‘companion service’ (link) (I’m using a Google Cache link because the original website forces you to create an account):

    Fox News had a business model that worked for 26 years but maybe it is past it’s ‘use by date’ with a core demographic dying off and the new generations coming through that are less and less socially conservative and reactionary resulting in the question – what does Fox News do? where trotting out the ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ boogyman might get the low information voters and those raised during the Red Scare but hardly an audience size that advertisers are willing to spend money targeting.

  • Well, that was rather unexpected.

    I was reading through the improvements that are coming to the various web browsers in February in terms of web based technologies (link) and at the bottom it talks about the big list ot changes coming to Safari. Being the cynic that I am I brushed it off and went straight to the source to see what changes are going to come in Safari 16.4 (link). The laundry list of issues that have been resolved are huge particularly in the area of the Webextensions API which should hopefully make content blocking a lot more reliable on Safari (when using AdGuard) when compared to the almost ‘solid as a rock’ robustness that uBlock Origin has on Chrome.

    There is still a lot of work being done on declarativeNetRequest – although there are rumours of a date that Google will start pushing MV3 to replace MV2 I believe it’ll be 1-2 years before anything happens. The best way to keep track on what is happening is check out github, the same answer I give when people wondering what is happening behind the scenes at Apple, check out the outsource projects because you’ll get a good insight regarding the direction being taken by developers. For example, one of the big features in regards to the development of MV3 is the User Scripts API where a proposal is being made but that’ll involve many discussions between the many stakeholders – both the developers of web browsers along with the third party developers that’ll leverage the User Scripts API as they’ll want to ensure that what is being developed is fit for purpose.

    The Chromecast with Google TV although it is incredibly sluggish when compared Apple TV. I really cannot work out the psychology of Google when they conclude that what was holding Chromecast with Google TV back from wider adoption wasn’t the pathetically small number of countries they launched it in but rather it not being cheap enough. Side note, I would be more than happy to pay an extra $20 to have a better SoC inside with more storage and memory and I hazard to guess that availability is a greater driving factor whether a given set top box is purchases when one considers how ubiquitous Apple TV’s are to purchase – it was launched 30 September 2020 however it didn’t arrive in New Zealand until June 2022 with the Pixel Phone still not here even though New Zealand and Australia (which has the Pixel) are treated as a single marketplace yet New Zealand doesn’t appear to be a market Google is interested in catering for. It will be interesting to see whether the Chromecast with Google TV will receive the Android TV 13 upgrade or whether we’ll see it die on the vine.

    Personally, I could see AV1 video support appearing soon in iOS and macOS given that it has already been added to the Web CODECs in the Technology Preview release a few weeks ago (then removed from the public blog page). Even if there isn’t hardware accelerated built into the Apple SoCs I’m sure there is enough grunt to to be able to decode it given that there are already phones running less powerful SoCs that are able to decode an AV1 stream from YouTube via the YouTube app and the Chrome web browser.

    Jack Dorsey is now pushing out a public beta for their BlueSky (link) – for me it is a solution to a problem that either doesn’t exist or already being addressed. He talks about the AT Protocol as the backbone to BlueSky but why not work together on ActivityPub instead of reinventing the wheel? are their shortcomings or flaws in ActivityPub? I don’t know since I’m not an expert on protocols but something tells me that given that ActivityPub is an open source project then I’m sure they would be more than happy to take on any contributions that could be made to make the protocol even better. It reminds me of this cartoon (link) and very much the numerous open source projects where the effort is split amongst competing projects rather than putting egos aside in favour of working on something that’ll have more success because the effort isn’t being split in different directions.

  • Weeding never ends.

    Sigh, even with the concrete backyard with limited flower beds I really loath having to weed them – I am getting to the point that I think I’m going to get a big bag of weed killer and make it up myself then use my watering can to dispense it then maybe I’ll look at getting some bricks or logs to build up a bed then fill it up with nothing but pebbles to ensure that nothing grows back. That being said, I am also looking at getting maybe some big pots to bring some greenery to the backyard – maybe a lime tree and a lemon tree? I guess I’ll see how it all works out as I tackle other chores around the home.

    Went to the supermarket tonight and grabbed some chicken, burger buns and some tomato – home made chicken burger. The chicken I get is a frozen chicken fillet and it actually tastes really nice – like actual chicken because it is actually a chicken proper chicken breast rather than a processed patty. I’ve got some red onions (why do we call them red onions when they’re purple in colour? I guess that is a discussion for a different day) etc. I cooked them all up and they were wonderful. In future I might do a chicken cranberry and brie burger but I’ll keep that for a winter day when the comfort food is most needed.

    Went grocery shopping tonight – grabbed the essentials along with a punnet of cherry tomatoes that are super sweet. I’m not too sure whether it is just me but I’ve found strawberries have become less flavourful and sweet where as cherry tomatoes are sweet and more tasty hence if I feel that I need to satisfy my sweet tooth I’d sooner have some cherry tomatoes instead. They say that as you get older your taste buds become less sensitive so maybe that is the reason – oh well.

  • So I caved in.

    I’ve tried avoiding Meta for years but I had to give in because none of my family was willing to move to Signal. Ideally we’d all be using iMessage except my sister has disabled it because her and her partner share the same iCloud account which apparently causes them problem, I have a Nothing Phone, brother and partner use iPhones, mum has an iPhone – basically the only unifying messaging solution is WhatsApp. In a perfect world I would have preferred to stick with Signal but unfortunately a messaging application is kind of useless when all the family is using WhatsApp. It’s one of the reasons why the “just stop using xyz platform” because for many the platform is the only means given the reluctance by so many to consider alternatives.

    Personally I think the best thing that could happen would be for Meta to be broken up into four separate companies: WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and AR/VR Metaverse with Facebook and Instagram required to implement the ActivityPub protocol so that the ‘walled in’ problem of society networks can be undone by forcing them to federate thus allowing people to use alternatives while still being able to communicate (regarding the Metaverse and WhatsApp (along with Twitter – assuming Elon Musk doesn’t run it into the ground before it is regulated), if they can be federated as well then then that would be great too).

    Almost a week and Android 13/Nothing 1.5.2 has been a solid update. As someone who keeps track of Android development, being the first isn’t always the best and I’ve seen my fair share of early releases only for end users to quickly upgrade then get angry that the update has broken something or there are numerous bugs such as the OxygenOS 12 for OnePlus 9 series. There is an old saying, you only get one chance to make a good impression which is why I would sooner wait a few months for the long hanging bugs to be addressed so when it does release if there are bugs they aren’t show stopper bugs that makes ones device next to unusable or so unreliable it cannot be trusted.

    What has been interesting regarding Android 13 (and even Android 12) is how Android (like iOS) has moved from making giant leaps to now the focus is on under the hood improvements and quality of life improvements in the area of user visible changes (link). There hasn’t been a blog post for Android 14 over on blog.esper.io but that is most likely due to the first developer previews being pretty light on details – sometimes Google likes to hold back on big features when they make the official announcement particularly those that are still up in the air regarding whether they’ll be ready in time to make it into Android 14.

    Politics in New Zealand is a nightmare and it appears that the National/ACT are doing the same old four step tango: 1) Tax cuts 2) Deregulation 3) Privatisation 4) Build a road. We’re in a climate emergency and this isn’t the time to give tax cuts to the top end of town when we need ‘all hands on deck’ to deal with not only cutting with GHG emissions but also dealing with the consequences that are already baked in due to past GHG emissions put into the atmosphere. Although on the left there are politicians fighting the good fight, on the right they’ve pretty much given up trying to deal with GHG (not that they ever put any real effort into it in the first place) in favour of “prepare the best we can and hold tight” which fails to address the fact that things will keep getting worse the more GHG emissions we put in the atmosphere. Sigh, adaptation is not a substitute for action but it appears that for some it allows them to keep their corporate masters happy while giving the unobservant voter the feeling that the care.

  • One more day to go.

    One more day to go andd then I can chill out and enjoy my day off but in meantime I’ve uploaded the contents of my external SSD to Google Drive – always best to keep an off site backup just in case. It is something I learned many years ago where I had around 130GB of rare MP3s but because I didn’t back it up, when I had hardware issues with the external hard disk I ended up losing the whole lot of audio files with many of them I couldn’t replace since the source of the MP3 no longer exists (they were out of print vinyl rips). Long story short, I learnt my lesson. The one thing I do like about Google Drive is that the uploading is a lot faster – I’m unsure as to the reason but given that they are working on a New Zealand based data centre, hopefully it’ll translate to improved performance goin forward.

    It appears that the downfall of Twitter continues – for weeks it was hovering around 300-400 new accounts per hour and then with the recent changes that were made to the algorithm then followed up with the changes regarding 2FA where non-Twitter Blue members would have to start paying with the only other option being the use of Google Authenticator.

  • A giant leap forward.

    I wasn’t expecting it but it has occured – Ubiquiti released UniFi OS 2.4 for UDM and UDM Pro which is the start of the long migration from 1.x to 2.x and eventually bring it in line with UniFi OS 3.x. So far it has been absolutely rock solid with the CPU running cooler, using less memory, lower CPU utilisation – a great experience overall. Unifi AP are going to receive an update soon – they’ve just released 6.5.28 however is is currently only available for a subset of APs where as 6.5.33 is still in beta testing which supports a wider range of APs so I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next month or so that it is released for all APs.

    Google has released two updates in quick succession over the last few days which update it from x.77 to x.96 to x.100 – it might have something to do with the recent update that Apple pushed out as part of macOS Ventura 13.2.1 due to Blink (the fork of Webkit by Google) and Webkit still sharing a lot of code between the two projects. It isn’t all that unusual for a bug to be found in Webkit and for it to appear in Blink or vice versa. If you’re interested in where Chrome is heading in the future there is the ‘Chrome Platform Status Roadmap’ (link) which outlines the big changes that’ll be occuring in the coming months. One thing to keep in mind though not everything is listed – sometimes Google like Apple and Microsoft like to hold back on user visible features so they can do a big announcement such as the rumour of Google making Chrome a more ‘material UI’ look and feel to bring it inline with what appears to be an attempt to create a unified look and feel through Google products and services.

    At the moment I’m deciding whether I should upload my music to YouTube Music or just transfer it via OpenMTP (link) with 3.2.10 being the latest version and it supports Apple Silicon. The benefit of uploading it to the cloud means that my music is accessible on all my devices but there is the process of having to upload it to the cloud in the first place but when it comes to OpenMTP it’s a matter of minutes when transferring it from my desktop to the phone.

    Ordered dinner from Sabaidee Pah Khao Lao – they make some great food and their servings are very generous, something I found out the first time I ordered but on the good side I had a meal to eat the next day not to mention the fact that eating a whole lot of vegetables and rice feels a whole lot better the next day than ordering pizza. Looking forward to knocking off from work in the next 20 minutes and then relax in front of the television watching news on YouTube.

  • A few months later.

    Well, it has been a few months since getting a Nothing Phone and I’ve come to the conclusion that it is the best Android phone I’ve ever used – no crapware or adware, prompt updates (link), does not insist on reinventing the wheel in favour of using stock Google/Android default apps. The other benefit with the lack of bloat is that copious amounts of time and money isn’t wasted on not only maintaining duplicate functionality but not having to migrate all these ‘enhancements’ every time a new version of Android is released. Android 13, although trailing behind the official release, I would sooner have stability than being on the bleeding edge after having seen the effects of people jumping as soon as they can only to find that they were bitten by some nasty bugs – I guess without those early adopters that many of the bugs wouldn’t have been fixed for those who take a more cautious approach.

    Even though it has Qualcomm Snapdragon 778+ SoC is is incredibly fast and fluid – helped along by the 12GB of RAM which enables more apps to stay in memory so then it is possible to quickly switch between applications without having to wait for the app to load itself back into memory again. The retaining of a largely vanilla Android with some light customisations results in a very responsiveness interface that isn’t weighed down with features that I don’t actually use. It is something I find that with many OEMs that their focus is about filling up with as many tick boxes as possible for the sake of being able to boast about being ‘feature rich’ but in reality it is dubious as to whether what they have added actually benefit the user beyond ‘specification flexing’ between fanboys. When it comes to product development, it is easy to throw features at the wall but it is a lot more difficult to say ‘no’ not to mention the challenge of removing features that aren’t absolutely core essential.

    When it comes to Android 13 based Nothing OS 1.5, there was a beta 2 released around a month ago (link) with notes that imply that they’re getting closer to some sort of release. In the past one would get frustrated about missing out on the latest cool changes in Android but over the last few years there hasn’t been the massive changes because as a platform is is maturing with many of the major deficiencies being addressed many years ago such as in Android 7 when ART introduced when Google switched Android’s Java Runtime Environment from the discontinued Apache Harmony to OpenJDK with the recent years less about radical change and more about optimising what already exists. A good example of those optimisations being in Android 9 was to make greater use of bytecode compression and in Android 13 introducing a new garbage collector which will improve memory utilisation, reduce size of the code etc. The wikipedia page goes into good details along with sources (link).

    Now, am looking at going back to an iPhone? No, I’m staying with my Nothing Phone because it makes little sense to keep jumping between platforms when it appears to be something that is motivated by the need to ‘scratch an itch’ than actually a genuine list of issues that causing major grief. I’ll also stay with my Chromecast with Google TV because with each update the experience is getting better and better and with the improvements in Android 13 regarding ART (link) then there is a good chance that those memory efficiency improvements will make their way through to Android TV which will help both the 4K and Standard Chromecast with Google TV.

    Regarding my cloud provider, I am sticking with Google Workspace – for NZ$18 per month the price is pretty reasonable when you consider that iCloud has 2TB option for NZ$16.99. Although I could split between using Safari/iCloud and Google Workspace I decided to standardise on Workspace by moving to Chrome. The recent builds of Chrome have shown a marked improvement (I use it on a regular basis for work since my workplace also uses Google Workspace) in terms of performance, memory usage, compliance with standards etc. and unfortunately Safari suffers from the same issues that were raised for years – it can work fine when it comes to simply web pages but as soon as you move into the area of progressive web apps that make extensive use of web standards then you quickly find that either things break or if they work you find that within a given period of time it’ll come up with an error message about a web page using too much memory with the whole page just hanging there – keeping in mind that I’m running Chrome on either a laptop with 24GB RAM or a desktop with 32GB RAM so one can guess it cannot be insufficient RAM in the devices.

    Regarding the recent hype around ChatGPT I think that far too many in the press are getting far to ahead of themselves in terms of the implications of such a technology. Yes, Microsoft has hyped it up and Google’s presentation wasn’t exactly smooth but in the real world I go to Bing and it still makes a pigs breakfast bringing results back that even Google, when operating in ‘Incognito Mode’ meaning it doesn’t have the benefit of learning what my preferences are, still come back with better results. The reality is that if the underlying technology produces bad search results then it isn’t going to matter all that much if you plonk a AI bot on top because it is still a matter of garbage in garbage out. Was the Google presentation pretty rough? sure but lets wait to see what happens in the real world because it is all very well to put on a great presentation but the question is how well it holds up to real world use outside of carefully controlled conditions that a presentation operates in. With that being said, the rumoured cutting investment (link) in Google Assistant has come back to bite them in the backside – this is what happens when you make decisions purely on a spreadsheet without considering the broader implications of cutting investments to save money short term but for the consequences to be disastrous in the long term.

    Side note: Android 14 Developer Preview 1 has been released (link) which has a limited number of new features but like what normally happens, the big features will be announced at the next Android developer conference. For those interested, here is an interesting video regarding the Linux kernel and the Android Open Source Project (AOSP).

  • A good week so far.

    Making changes to my life gradualy – rather than trying to make a large number of changes all at once I started off with something small then worked my way up from there. They say that if you do something consisdtenly for a month it becomes second nature, like muscle memory where you just simply do it without havint to conciously remind oneself to do it. What I’ll do is gradually over the year make small changes so then eventually by the end of the year I will hopefully get closer to my goals. Step by step, making sure that those changes stick.

    Samsung announced their refreshed Galaxy range of phones – an incrimental update to their product line up which will probably result in the ‘tech dude bros’ on YouTube whip themselves in a frenzy with the usual ‘doom and gloom’ about how Samsung is no longer innovating etc. etc. The reality is that smartphones are now a mature product range where the features being added appeal to fewer and fewer people where existing features are being refined – customers certainly like those incrrimental improvements but it is doubtful that they’re something that’ll push customers to go out of their way to upgrade their phone before they absolutely need to upgrade their phone.

    I’ve opened up a Signal account – encouraging family members to move over to Signal because I flat out refuse to use WhatsApp but not everyone uses iMessage so the compromise being Signal. I have to say, Signal’s app for the phone is stil much better than the clunky WhatsApp. If you’re wondering why I don’t use WhatsApp – consider who owns it and their reputation when it comes to privacy, it is an organisation I would prefer avoiding if at all possible. Yes, I would like to ween myself off Google but given the alternatives are just so horrible, see Bing and the attrocious search results if you live outside of the US of A, the only choice at the moment is Google (see rant on my Mastodon page about this very issue).

    Looking forward to WWDC this year although things have been fairly quiet – usually there are strategic leaks with enough ambiguity that it gets the chatter starting online as people speculate what it could all mean for the future of a given product and service. Personally I would like to see a whole lot more work put into Safari, in particular getting it to the point that Webkit/KJS can be a drop in replacement for Chromium when it comes to electron based applications. Sure, in a perfect world we would all be using native applications but alas we live in this world where corporations see providing apps as a cost burden rather than a way for customers to build up brand loyalty through a great user experience hence the emergence of web apps which promise to deliver the ‘write once, run everywhere’.