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

  • Getting the backyard sorted out.

    One of the things I am going to do be doing this year is to make the backyard a lot more hospitable – tidying it up so that during the summer or just on a nice day I can spend time outside. The first part will be cleaning up all the weeds around the place with a whipper-snipper along with cleaning up the two gardens at the side of the house where the weed mat isn’t doing that it is supposed to do. Then after that I an looking at cleaning the house down – it has been over a year since it was last cleaned so I’m wanting to wash it down (walls, windows and guttering). 

    Once all the yard has been cleaned up I’m going to head down to Bunnings to see if I can get some giant terracotta pots along with some treees to grow in them – lemon, lime, maybe some with flowers but basically I want plants that are easy to take care of – doesn’t require me to constantly spent the weekends preening and pruning them resulting in it becoming a full time job (I’ve already got one, I don’t need another one).

    I do have my shed as well with a broken door which I need to fix up because at the moment it isn’t looking the best so I’ll see if I can get that sorted out just so I can close it and make the backyard a little tidier. I’d like to get some outside seating, maybe an prebuilt canopy that’ll provide some shade as well as however I’m also looking at maybe the alterbative beign something my brother-in-law could build because I’m not really interested in a see through roof given how the plastic deteriorates and discolours over time due to UV exposure.

    The back fence however I need to have a look at making it a lot nicer – colour steel is my preference because what it’ll mean is that I don’t have to worry about panting it and it’ll take care of itself over the long term because at the moment I have a wooden fence but some of the planks are rotting along with the fence along the sides of the property that are looking a bit worse for wear. I’m also interested in putting some stairs on the back patio area because at the moment there are no one set which is at the end – maybe putting a wooden deck will make it a little but nicer but then again one thing to consider is long term maintenance.

  • A couple of settings can make all the difference.

    So I’ve changed the setting on all of my devices to ‘reduced transparency’ then voila the performance improves, the stuttering on my tvOS device disappears – I don’t know what Apple did in terms of their liquid glass transparency but holy heck it must have had performance penalty. My Apple TV 4K was a bit of a confusing one because before doing reduced transperancy it would stutter, hang etc. but when after enabling it I then rebooting the device just to be sure that there isn’t anything else going on then I found it is fast and responsive. I’ve now been running it for a few hours and everythhing is going well.

    Another interesting setting I came accross was the ‘prevent cross-site tracking’ setting within Safari:

    Unfortunatly in Safari it is an ‘all or nothing’ feature – either you enable it for all websites or you enable it for none of the websites. What I have found is that some websites break or don’t work as expected when it is enabled. For example, if you’re on a WordPress blog and you click on your notifications rather than having the menu drop down it takes you to another page. Another example is if you’re logged into your WordPress account and then visit a blog then you’ll find in the bottom right hand corner you will need to login again. Yet another couple of examples, I’ve also noticed it on Google Chat where videos being sent fail to play and instead are downloaded which is annoying because it is one extra step rather than it playing in the bowser. Tiktok is another website that also has issues – not that I have an account but sometimes I’m given a link for a video but the video doesn’t work properly such as not playing or the audio not working as expected.

  • MAGA voters leaving MAGA and rebranding themselves as Republican.

    I’ve had a theory running through my head and I’ve touched on the theory in the past but I’ve never really gone into it in great detail. The reason I bring this is up is because of the recent news story regarding Susie Wiles and the inside workings of Whitehouse (link). My theory goes like this – the Republican Party establishment have tried to deal with Trump the following ways:

    a) Ignore him – they tried that in the 2016 election believing that he wasn’t a serious candidate, it was a branding opportunity and then when he loses he would use it to launch a new business venture. In other words they didn’t see Trump as a serious candidate and thus could be easily dismissed (on the other hand, the Democratic Party employed the ‘pied piper strategy’ of getting Trump to be the Republican Party candidate through disproportionate air time in the belief that he was so odious that people would be more or less forced to vote for Hillary Clinton because the alternative is so much worse).

    b) Fight him – during the primaries, in both 2016 and 2020 there were attempts to fight and push back (in 2020 primaries there was Bill Weld and I think another candidate but the primary was wound up with an uncontested coronation of Trump) but the reality is that the more they fought the higher his profile got as he played into the narrative that he was an outsider and those attacking him were part of the establishment.

    c) ‘Professionally guide him’ – once in power the establishment believed they could ‘professionally guide him’ (a term I borrow from the show ‘Yes Prime Minister’) in the right direction but the reality is that Trump will do what Trump wants to do and it is an act of delusion if you believe you can ‘professionally guide him’ in a direction that that Trump isn’t interested in going in even if the consequences of following the advice would also benefit him.

    After going down those three avenues I believe that the establishment are on option d) which is to let Trump and MAGA fail – if it is going to happen then let it happen rather than trying to fight it because the more it is fought the more Trump can blame someone else “well, I would have gotten it done but it was the deep state and the establishment that stopped me!”. It reminds me of the rope-a-dope strategy that James Carville’s was talking about in a recent article – I remember watching a video of JD Vance boasting about how Susie Wiles doesn’t try to interfere in what Trump wants to do which makes me wonder whether JD Vance is also in on it knowing that if Trump is left to his own devices he will self destruct. Allowing Trump to crash and burn has its risks but the risk of not allowing it to happen will result in MAGA continuing to be a thorn in the side of the body politic whose continued existence will metastasised into something even worse. Like an alcoholic, does MAGA need to hit rock bottom or are there a sizeable number of MAGA who are in such denial that even after hitting rock bottom they’ll still insist there is a nebulous force or forces out there that they’ll blame as the cause of why their ideology failing in the real world.

    We’re already seeing some polls out recently where half of Republicans no longer consider themselves MAGA but instead just Republican which makes me wonder regarding the time line ahead whether that number will get a lot lower to the point that only the absolute had core vibes based voters are left. I also wonder whether the change in category denotes an ideological change or have they held onto their ideology but realised that the whole MAGA brand is so toxic (if that is the case the change is superficial rather than something profound self-awareness). There is also the other side of the equation and those who are the group of people who now call themselves ‘America First’ who are closely associated with an online group known as the groypers who believe that MAGA/Trump didn’t go far enough – how many will move in that direction? I guess only time will tell.

    What can the Democratic Party do? Learn from the Zohran Mamdani victory in New York – material conditions matter and if you fail to deliver materially for the masses then don’t be surprised if a sizeable portion of the population fall for someone like Trump. Yes, that means you’re going to tax the top end of town, rebuild unions with employee representation on corporate boards (elected through the union), dealing with monopolies and have an active federal government that doesn’t sit on the sidelines expecting that any time soon the magic of the free market will deliver prosperity or that tax cuts at the top end of town will materialise in peoples material reality improving. Yes, that will mean setting up a ministry of works, having large scale public works projects, a pathway from high school to polytechnic to apprenticeship scheme so that a skilled army of tradespeople can be built so that we can get back into the much needed task of nation building – a career of meaningful work and sense that you’re contributing to something larger than yourself.

  • Getting back into using MarsEdit.

    For a while now I’ve been using the web based interface however given that I have a copy of MarsEdit I thought I may as well give it a try again. The one benefit of having a native app is the ability to work offline. I’m going to give it ago and see how it all works out. I made a few tweaks to the blog template in terms of the logo next to the name of the blog so that it gave more room on the left side of the screen for the category and recent post links.

    Regarding the recent announcement regarding enshittification Firefox – this is the vibe that I get from Mozilla:

    Once again we have developers in Silicon Valley huffering their own farts and convincing themselves that what they’re offering is what the end user is requesting when it comes to features/functionality. It shouldn’t be surprising given that I gave up using Firefox over a decade and a half ago when they were continuously denying that their app leaked memory, it was bloated and slow – a tonne of bug reports and nothing ever done about the reported issues. At some point, having reported issues and many other users reporting issues, you have to give up because it is like yelling into an blackhole and instead you look for greener pastures. It appears that many years later they still don’t ‘get it’ so the ramming of AI into everything continues. Oh well, maybe Apple lagging behind the competition will be a bless in disguise and combine that with the increasing profile Linux is having in the gaming community it appears that the damage has already been done to the Windows brand (even though they’re talking about gamer targeted features coming next year) and as long as Wine/Proton improves, more of the DirectX stack is implemented to support older versions of Windows games then I wouldn’t be surprised if we see an uptick in the number of Linux computers on Steam’s statistics that are collected each month.

  • Finally settled on a new theme.

    I’ve been spending a few days trying to find a fresh new look and I finally found one that is a good balance between simplicity so that the content is the focal point of the blog but not so simple that it looks boring. I was going to go for a dark theme but I couldn’t quite tweak it the way I wanted it in terms of font size and making the blog balanced. I’ll see how this goes but so far I’m pretty happy with the outcome.

    I’m enjoying my time off, being able to sleep in and relax, binge watch television series, do some gardening, head down to go for a walk around the shops then enjoy a coffee and a muffin for afternoon tea. It is funny how, after getting so used to a frantic pace at work, leaning how to unwind and just enjoy the moment, getting out of the mindset of trying to schedule every day as if relaxing is something that needs to have a rigid schedule to some how maximise relaxation time.

    Once again the politics side of the internet is excited about the latest idiotic thing that Trump has posted along with a split in MAGA, some posting now that they ‘realise’ that ‘MAGA was a pysop’ and that they’re now going to back to being a traditional Republican, then there is plenty of FAFO content of people unhappy about the high prices. Whenever I see this sort of discourse I am once again sceptical that people have actually changed.

    As I’ve said the past, the benchmark of whether there has been a change will be what takes place in the mid terms – are we going to see MAGA politicians get primaries and replaced with traditional ‘Mitt Romney style Republicans’? are we going to see the Democratic Party win a veto overriding majority in both chambers? if we don’t see a change in substance in the mid terms then it tells me that the theatrics by many online are performative – if your unhappiness doesn’t translate to a change in voting habits then it tells me that it is all performative done for engagement rather than genuine anger/frustration.

    Apple has released the 26.3 update for their platforms and as I speculated earlier the update to Safari 26.3 will be rather sparse (link) which makes sense given that it is being developed over the festive season. There is a rumour that 26.4 will be a bit heavier in terms of features and bug fixes but that makes sense given that Microsoft has done the same thing with their December patch Tuesday they released – enabling features already baked in, fixing up bugs but leaving any sort of major change until next year.

    uBlock Origin Lite 2025.1217.1755 has been released and it appeared promptly in the macOS and iOS App Store – it appears that the length of time for review is very much dependent on what has been updated, the nature of the update and how complex it is. I’ve still been following the sub_frame Declarative Net Request bug and it appears that it is slowly making progress – hopefully we’ll see some movement being made and Safari will get to the point that content blockers that make use of the Declarative Network Request API aren’t faced with bugs that only Safari related.

  • Strange weather recently.

    We’re meant to be moving into summer and yet the weather has been strange recently. I went for a small walk around the block to get some fresh air then headed down the road to have a look around at the mall. I’m still working through the templates on WordPress – the difficult balance of finding something that is minimalist but not too minimalist – a middle ground of having something with design flair but without going overboard. Ah, the middle ground – if I could ‘dream up’ a theme it would be something that has William Morris style, a sort of art’s and craft movement vibe to it.

    I’ve been watching a few videos and it is good to see that there appears to be a growing chorus of activists online pushing back again rabid single issue voters when it comes to US politics (this is particularly important given the 2026 mid terms coming up next year) – purity testers that if they don’t get their pet project given the 100% undivided attention then they’ll throw a temper tantrum. If you have the luxury of being able to focus all your energy on a single issue at the expense of everything else then what that tells me is that you’re immensely privileged person who has the luxury of not having to care about health, education, social welfare, infrastructure, dealing with the root causes of why Trump got into power etc.

    Such individuals are the same reason I have little time for upper class liberals who use politics not as a vehicle to engage in societal transformation but merely as a way to morally posture and virtue single about how they’re morally super to others. They’re in a privileged position that, no matter who ends up winning their life doesn’t change so as a result they can play this game of pointless purity testing and vote for third parties that have no chance of winning because ultimately they’re largely insulated from the outcome of elections.

    During the primaries there is a time to yell, scream, debate, horse trade and protest but eventually once the dust settles and there is a candidate do you know what you do? you shut your trap and get behind the candidate with the realisation that the person running isn’t just representing you but also representing everyone in the area they’re running in – you not getting your pet project given all the attention of the candidate doesn’t mean that the issue is being ignored but the simple fact of the matter is that there is a limited amount of bandwidth and you have to pick your battles. Think of the bigger picture besides what interests you – there is more to the world than you and your wishes, whims and desires.

    On a side note, when getting legislation through it sometimes requires swallowing a few dead rats – that is how many bills are done, they mix in good policies with bad policy but it is up to the politician look at the bigger picture and realise that the benefits from supporting a given piece of legislation far outweighs the downsides. For example, if there is a bill that includes military aid for Israel but also there is money for relief aid to Gaza along with funding to rebuild then are you really going to vote down a bill resulting in Gaza getting no assistance at all? Another example is the combining of agricultural subsidies along with food stamps so then it is able to get broad bipartisan support, or a domestic policy with an international policy thus allowing politicians to defend the funding of international policy by pointing to the domestic policy that was passed at the same time.

    I’ve refrained (and will continue to do so) from commenting about the tragedy at Bondi Beach in Australia. The reason for refraining is because I don’t have all the information nor is it my place to comment. It is a scary time when one considers the rise of extremist political ideologies around the world and I hope that in the coming year that humanity will come to its collective senses and we get back to some normality where the serious issues facing us can be discussed in good faith and policies addressing those challenges are proposed rather than knee jerk reactionary politics that is more concerned with obtaining power for power sake.

  • What a day, what a lovely day.

    Woke up this morning and it felt so good not having the anxiety of feeling that all I had was this day to enjoy and then back to work the next day. I hung out around home, enjoyed some cherries I bought on Monday on special which were a lot more appetising than the strawberries that they had on sale. On a tangent, the strawberries down at the supermarket have been pretty lousy so far with very little flavour when compared to the trip I had through England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland with the time in Scotland the strawberries had so much flavour when compared to what is grown in New Zealand – the New Zealand strawberries appear to be big and ripe but next to no flavour. On a good side, the cherry tomatoes have been nice along with blueberries and blackberries where both of them were on special last week although I didn’t see any at the local supermarket on special (raspberries were ridiculously priced around NZ$10 per punnet – thank you but no thank you).

    I’m working through the WordPress templates to see what alternative template I’ll use going forward because at the moment the current one feels kind of dated however I’m trying to find one that is suited for a blog. WordPress has a pretty good selection to choose from and my main criteria is that I want a minimalist design that doesn’t distract from the content while also not being too minimalist that it ends up being incredibly boring to interact with. I’m also tempted to start maybe a podcast or a YouTube channel where once a week I make a 30 minute show which is a lot more free flowing than what I’d normally put on my blog, maybe reacting to new stories etc. but something like that I want to plan for rather than talking off the top of my head. Back when YouTube launched one could turn on a camera and just ramble but these days viewers expect a level of professionalism – a coherent video where topics are covered rather than 30 minutes of rambling which makes sense given the limited amount of time one has in a day one can spend on YouTube.

    I’ve installed OmniGroup Outliner which is a great piece of software I’ve been using for years right back to when I was at university. What I do is create an outline of an essay with key bullet points then indent them as I create each paragraph then once I get the outline done I then have it sitting side by side as I write my essay with the outline being a reference to ensure the I stay on topic. The reason why I need that outline is because I have a tendency to repeat myself and sometimes bring up something that I think is tangential related to the paragraph but in reality it would be best suited to be somewhere else in the essay or deserves to be a paragraph in its own right. Then there is also the conclusion where ideas will pop up but you have to keep reminding yourself that this isn’t the place introduce new ideas but to ‘bring it home’.

    It looks like there was a regression with a recent update so there was a new release of uBlock Origin Lite from 2025.1214.2112 to 2025.1215.1455. So far I haven’t noticed any issues but then again it appears that the issue mainly impacted people using ChatGPT but since I don’t use that service it was a nonissue but then again it might possibly have impacted other websites but I didn’t see any reports of that being the case. The latest WECG minutes have been interesting reading particularly the ‘topFrameMatches / excludeTopFrameMatches’ proposal which appears to have broad support by those participating in the committee so that will be interesting to see what happens in regards to the finalised standard and when the individual browsers implement the feature. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I was sceptical that MV3 would be as powerful as MV2 but I’ve ben happily surprised at how quickly the concerns are being addressed.

  • What a wonderful day.

    I had a wonderful day today, went for a walk down to the local cafe, grabbed brunch then a few treats afterwards then walked back home while taking my time to enjoy the wonderful weather. It is something I need to do more often because I have a tendency to complain about the bad weather but when there is the good weather I don’t make use of it. I then went out again and picked up some chicken for dinner because I forgot to take it out of the freezer and I had that for dinner along with some vegetables.

    uBlock Origin Lite 2025.1214.2112 was released a few hours ago – all installed and I noticed a slight performance improvement where the cosmetic filters are applied. I love that uBlock Origin Lite keeps going from strength to strength with no noticeable loss of functionality when compared to the MV2 version of uBlock Origin. I’m tempted to give AdGuard another try to see whether the issues I was having were related to bugs in Safari 26.1 that have been fixed in Safari 26.2 so I guess I’ll give the a try when I have some free time.

    I’ve just started watching ‘The Rainmaker’ (the television series) as well as working my way through Alien and a few other television series. I’m looking forward to the new seasons of Silo, The Last of Us, Severance, Foundation etc. that’ll hopefully be coming around the beginning of 2026. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with the whole buy out of Warner Bros. Discovery by either Paramount or Netflix and how that’ll impact future tv series and movies they’re working on.

    Regarding Ubiquiti, UniFi Access Point (all U7 and E7 models) 8.3.2 has been made available as a release candidate however the Gateway is still as a release candidate over a week after they made it available so either they’re going to push forward to maybe the 5.x build going to be what they aim for or they’re seeing further there are any people reporting on new issues or reporting back that the issue they were experiencing has been addressed.

    It’ll be interesting to see whether 26.3 of Apple’s platform update turns out to be a quiet one due to it being developed over the new year given that Mac Rumors is reporting that the 26.4 includes quite a few new features and enhancements planned (link). I wouldn’t be surprised if Safari 26.3 turns out to be a bug and security fix with any sort of big improvements being held back for Safari 26.4.

    Daily writing prompt
    Is your life today what you pictured a year ago?
    View all responses

    It is a whole lot better than what I expected – I’ve lost a substantial amount of weight, I have no personal debt any more and I have decent amount of savings sitting in a term deposit that I’m letting roll over every 6 months. Long story short, I’m in a very good position at the end of this year – the first time in a long term that I’m going to end the year in a better position than when I started.

  • Wonderful first day off.

    Woke up this morning and headed down to the local cafe for some egg bene for brunch and picked up a few treats from the desert cabinet that I’ll enjoy later on when I have an afternoon coffee. I’m going to make use of my Snapper Card and do a bit of travelling around on my time off and hopefully the good weather will continue because Wellington is wonderful on a summer day with the fresh breeze when walking along the waterfront. I might also go for a trip up to Paraparaumu to see how it has changed and maybe having a look around at Porirua as well which has quite a big mall along with a lot of new development since the last time I had a look around.

    Something that few under the radar was the release of an updated Matter standard which now includes support for security cameras and other devices (link). It has been a long time coming but I guess it is one of those things that are akin to trying to herd cats with each of the members that make up the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) more concerned about protecting their fiefdoms rather than working towards interoperability. It isn’t surprising because HTML5 had the same mess of one particular organisation (who will rename nameless) who threatened to use their patents to hold up the standard because they had a vested interest in protecting their proprietary technology. That doesn’t even touch on organisations involved with the HTML5 standardisation process which left me wondering why the heck are they even involved – they don’t create developer tools or a web browser so why are they even having a say in the matter?

    uBlock Origin Lite version 2025.1214.2112 has been released although it make take a day or two to appear in the usual online stores. It’ll be interesting to see how the changes to the cosmetic filters will translate to improved page rendering performance on Safari although so far I haven’t had any issues. I’d still like to see some way for the end user to see the progress of the filters being converted from what is included with uBlock Origin Lite to the native format or at the least rebuilding Declarative Net Request (DNR) natively rather than sitting on top of the native content blocking API that Apple has shipped as part of Safari for quite a few years.

    Daily writing prompt
    What cities do you want to visit?
    View all responses

    I have visited Paris and London with my preference being London however cities I would like to visit would New York, Boston, Berlin and once there is a new regime in Russia then Moscow and St Petersburg. I personally lean towards older cities with greater density than the sort of sprawl one observes with the likes of Los Angeles hence my preference for Wellington over Auckland (funny enough I prefer Melbourne over Sydney). Walkability for me is also a major factor as well as a well run public transport network since I don’t have a full drivers licence and even if I did I wouldn’t want to drive overseas because I’d prefer to keep my holiday as stress free as possible.

  • Let the annual leave begin.

    Finished work tonight and it never felt so good knowing that for the next two weeks off I have no responsibilities other than to take care of myself. I put the first load of washing on then went for a relaxing walk tonight around the block, came back, put the washing out, had a shower, then put the remaining washing in the washing machine the hung it out once completed. On Monday I’m going to just relax and see where the day takes me – I might even pop down to the local cafe for eggs bene for brunch – something I like to treat myself to at least once a month.

    One thing I forgot to mention is that with the upgrade from macOS 26.1 to 26.1 the firmware was updated from 13822.41.1 to 13822.61.10 with the wifi stack, driver and firmware updated from IO80211_driverkit-1530.16 to IO80211_driverkit-1533.5. As noted in the past, I think the destination of DriverKit points to it operating in user space (the actual Broadcom driver being com.apple.DriverKit-AppleBCMWLAN). It’ll be interesting to see Apple gradually move more components out of the kernel with my guess being that with the big push to end support for x86-64 in macOS 27 I wouldn’t be surprised if we see that take place and the kernel will be fully locked down with the expectation that if you need to support hardware then you’ll need to do is all in user space.

    I was reading through a post on Reddit regarding a YouTube I follow who was talking about the USSR and it is amazing how even 30+ years after the collapse of the Soviet Union the red scare paranoia is still alive. The person in the video was basically talking about the USSR and homosexuality, bisexuality and transgender. It should be relatively uncontroversial but apparently because the video creator didn’t portray the Soviet Union as the root of all evil in the world and everything they did was utterly evil it some how made the video creator an USSR apologist. Imagine suffering from so much red scare paranoia that a balanced video regarding the USSR triggers you. I guess if you have a population insulated from knowledge then it shouldn’t be surprising that even those who are born after the collapse of the Soviet Union display this level of paranoia as if it were some sort of genetic trait inherited from their parents.

    On a side note, I always find it funny how in the United States there is the equating of capitalism with freedom and equating the market with capitalism. The propaganda that the average American is exposed to really has done a number on so many peoples brains in the United States which explains why there is this slavish devotion and worshipping of wealthy people. It isn’t helped there is the myth of meritocracy that is perpetuated by the capitalist class as a way to justify to the working class the way society is structured as well as a well for the capitalist class to morally justify to themselves why they’re at the top. When half of the people posting on Reddit are from the United States it isn’t surprising to see wealth individuals and/or corporations being defended but after a while it does make me feel sorry for them because the propaganda runs so deep in their society.