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

  • Welp, never going to do that again.

    Well, after working all day I thought “I’ll treat myself to some KFC delivered” so it I ordered it online, it arrived 20 minutes late and half of the order was missing and was cold, I sent it back with the driver and the replacement arrived with it missing the coleslaw and drinks. During the time I rang the store six times – no answer. I rang the 0800 KFC KFC but because it was after 10pm it had closed – the last order was at 10pm, wouldn’t it make sense to be open past 10pm to address scenarios such as what I experienced? Well, I sent through a complaint – I want my money back. To wait 1 1/2 hours for a meal that was completely incorrect I think that is the least that they should do. Yeah, it sounds kind of Karenish but it really was beyond a joke particularly when you consider the driver was also stuffed around because the expectation is that when he picks up delivery everything should be in the bag ready for the driver to drop off.

    My iPhone is acting pretty buggy at this stage – random applications freezing such as Reddit app suddenly failing to load a subreddit then I force quit it then launch it again with it suddenly working. The other issue with the screen waking up but I’m unable to press any of the buttons on the scree – when the alarm goes off in the morning I press the ‘stop’ button and it doesn’t register my touching of the ‘stop’ butt with my finger. I thought it may have been the software but this issue never happened until recently so I thought I might as well give DFU reset a try to see whether a clean install will fix it. Then I thought maybe it is the software with that brand if iPhone but nope, the problems were unique to my phone. I’m going to hold onto the phone until it I’ve got the money saved but so far there is will be announcement at the 7 September Apple has planned where they’ll announce their new iPhone. Then there is the Pixel 7 and hopefully that’ll mean more markets that Google is selling into but not optimistic then there is the presentation early next year when Samsung announces the refresh for the Galaxy S range of phones which will have Android 13 preinstalled along with probably OneUI 5.1. I guess it’ll be a situation of “wait and see” because it is the sort of investment you only make every 3-5 years so you want to make sure you make the right decision.

    I had the unfortunate experience of coming across yet another individual who embraces the aesthetics of the left but in process push reactionary politics under the guise of being ‘anti-revisionist’ (link). Left wing politics isn’t in conflict with liberalism, it is the natural evolution that builds upon liberalism, a realisation that the phrase ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ rings rather hollow when you’re struggling to survive – how are you going to enjoy your freedom when you’re not free (due most of one’s time spent merely surviving) to being develop yourself and be more than just a interchangeable cog in the capitalist machine that is hell bent on ‘make line go up’ at all costs? As Noam Chomsky pointed out (outlined in many videos on YouTube where he is giving answers to questions put to him by students), such an individual (the writer of the linked essay) see themselves as the van guard who will whip the population into shape or by hell or high water send the ‘misbehaving types’ who display ‘bourgeois immorality that is incompatible with socialism’ (aka members of the ‘alphabet mafia’ such as myself) to gulags to ‘straighten up and fly right’. When your understanding of the proletariat is a characterture that you’ve conjured up in your mind based on stereotypes and second hand information then don’t be surprised that very few people are interested in following the particular ideology that you’re pushing.

  • Back to working from home.

    The weather has been atrocious so I told my boss that it would best to work from home to avoid the cold weather. I’d prefer to going into work since it provides a ‘wall of separation between work and home life’ which avoids the two from intermingling resulting in personal time being overtaken by work. It is good that my boss is flexible – I work just as productively at home as I do at work.

    I’ve installed Chrome on my MacBook and reading some of the changes that will be made with Chrome in the upcoming releases (link) with the interesting change which stood out being ‘Align Timers (including DOM timers) at 125 Hz’. In the explanation notes it appears to benefit Mac users by reducing Chrome’s energy Impact by 10% on macOS. I’m sure further reading will uncover more features but appears that Google is doubling down on improving Chrome on macOS.

    There is also the ongoing saga regarding Manifest v3, webRequest and its successor declarativeNetRequest (link) with the continuing discussion between third party extension developers having to deal with the real world while the programmers at Apple, Microsoft and Google can’t seem to accept that their replacement API severely hampers the ability for third party developers to create sophisticated content blocking extensions. Hopefully we’ll see cooler heads prevail and there will be a satisfactory resolution which will avoid a bad experience for all concerned.

  • Enjoying the weekend so far.

    Well, something strange occurred this week. I logged into my iCloud account to check something with my domain settings then checked my mail settings – funny enough it appears that Apple had fixed the issue where I had an old custom domain email alias still appearing in the iCloud Mail aliases even though I had deleted it in the custom domain settings. I wonder whether there has been some updating of the iCloud backend resulting in these sorts of anomalies fixed up in the process. It is always interesting when a problem just corrects itself without having to intervene.

    Logged into WordPress and it appears there is a 50% off on buying a Workspace subscription being offered I’m always drawn back to Google’s enterprise offering because the Google Drive performance being better than iCloud Drive not to mention that Google will be setting up a local datacenter that’ll make the performance even better. It reminds me of this article (link) when thinking about how Google has suddenly appeared to get their house in order: Finally having a messaging strategy, Chat and Meet available for all users etc. It finally appears that the CEO has unofficially announced that the days of behaving like a startup with throwing ideas at a wall to see what sticks is over, that the focus is on maintaining and building what exists rather than simply creating new products to get noticed all for the sake of end of the year review (the same sort of toxic playing politics occurred in Microsoft back when they had stack ranking resulting in features being added but existing projects being not being maintained or poorly maintained because one received more brownie points for creating new features). Google has many great products and services, they just need to get their act together and execute them better so then they can gradually ween themselves off advertising revenue (just in case the US government grow a backbone and force a break up or impose some sort of regulation on ‘big tech’) in favour of growing their ‘paid for services and products’ revenue.

    The saga of Safari 15.6 and YouTube continues. For those not following me on Twitter or Mastodon, there is a compatibility issue between YouTube and Safari 15.6 (it started before that version) where you click on the back arrow but the page doesn’t back to the previous page. I originally thought it may have been AdGuard Safari Extension so I setup a new account on my Mac then logged in to try it on Safari 15.6 with a clean install – same situation occurred again. I’m going to see what happens regarding Safari when macOS 13 ‘Ventura’ to see whether this is a situation of a bug in Safari or YouTube using a web technology that is either not implemented or a buggy implementation of it.Whatever the case maybe I don’t want to make a rash decision so I’ll see what happens.

  • Another week working from home.

    Still got a nasty cough so I’ve decided to work from home but so far it isn’t too bad. The weather is still pretty bad and it’ll put back my recovery being out in the cold. There is also a lot of rain that is occurring at the top of the South Island so it’ll be interesting to see whether that ends up coming further north – another thing I would like to avoid if possible. At the moment it is raining outside so it could be the start of that rain making its way up to Wellington. Long story short, although the initial infection of COVID19 mostly cleared up in two weeks there are still lingering effects that may take longer – I checked out a few government websites regarding how long symptoms eventually disappear and what many of them note is that it can be anywhere from a week all the way to a month.

    I had a brief encounter with Twitter today so I can see what is happening on the platform I left behind and after a few hours using it I realise why I left the platform. I guess it’s like the old Bill Hicks routine about the ‘hate camel’ – maybe I need to pop my head into Twitter for a nosy around as a reminder why I no longer use it. Mastodon has a much more chill atmosphere and devoid of wall to wall politics. I’m not about denying what is happening out in the real world but the constant stream of depressing news, fighting and arguing, misrepresentation of the facts etc. basically everything that frustrates me. For me social networks should be about sharing funny memes, photos of food etc. maybe the odd post about politics underlying all that is a understanding that the conversation takes place in good faith. Far too much of social networking has turned into a battle ground between ‘political tribes’ whose concern isn’t about getting to the truth but instead ‘winning’ at all costs even if it means misrepresentation and lying.

    It has been around two weeks since my Apple Silicon Macs arrived and even after two weeks I’m still astonished at the huge leap of performance Apple has made over Intel while being incredibly efficient in terms of power usage. What I have found funny is how macOS on Apple Silicon feels a whole lot less buggy than the Intel version, that quirks and strange behaviour don’t appear, Safari behaves a lot more reliably along with AdGuard Safari Extension. I can’t make heads or tails given that in theory they share the same code base but that being said, given that iOS has a larger installation base I wonder whether the crash logs, telemetry data etc. enabled them to fix many of the issues that pertain to the ARM branch (large projects will have code that is shared and architecture specific components) of the various OS components resulting in a well optimised version of macOS when they made their transition. It’ll be interesting to see what the upcoming operating systems will be like when Apple will release in the next couple of months.

  • Another week of coughing, better things to come hopefully.

    Almost the end of another week and although I’m not totally healed I’ve decided to go back to work but instead of going into the office I’m working from home because I still have a nasty cough. Given the cold weather out there at the moment with the combination of rain and cold weather what I hope is that I can keep working from home. I’m going to see whether I can stay at home for this week to work from home – the bad weather is continuing which will exacerbate my cough. On a good side, in the second week of September my work schedule moves to 11:30 to 20:00 and 13:30 to 22:00 – I’m more of a night owl so that’ll result in a return to a schedule that is more in keeping with my body clock.

    Both computers are going well and I’m looking forward to seeing the release of the next Apple operating systems – rumour has it that the release date is in October although there are other rumours circulating that they may push it back. With all that being said, the usual schedule is an event at the end of September where the next iPhone is announced and maybe a few updated products but primarily it is an iPhone announcement event. For me the interesting announcement will be next years Samsung Galaxy announcement with rumours that they’re going to go all in with Snapdragon but then again the same rumour mill claimed that they weren’t going to ship Exynos chips with AMD GPUs but they ended up doing it.

    As much as I am getting frustrated by YouTube not behaving itself with Safari, I’m not going to ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’ by going with Chrome. I’m hoping that a lot of the improvements that have made their way into the Technology Previews will end up in Safari 16 or at the very least there is some catch up in future 16.x updates. The biggest benefit with Safari is that it is super efficient – memory, cpu utilisation and taking advantage of the various optimised frameworks that take advantage of Apple Silicon.

    Going to have Fish Pie this evening followed by sticky date pudding with custard on top – it’s a cold miserable day where I am. Although the temperature is 8 degrees celsius it does feel a lot colder than the temperature lets on. I can’t wait for spring and summer to come so that things can get a bit warmer rather than freezing to and from work not to mention the cost of warming the house – keeping in mind that I’ve got good insulation as well as double glazed windows which result in better retaining of heat.

  • Perusing Geekbench makes for interesting reading.

    The one thing that astonishes me is the massive leap in performance between my old MacBook Pro 15 inch (2017) and my mew laptop – the single core and multicore performance doubles in a space of 5 years and within that space that SoC is so efficient it no longer requires a fan. I don’t know about you but the more by Apple to their own in-house SoC is the best move they’ve ever made. When I first heard about the change I was expecting maybe some modest improvements but holy heck the improvement is leaps and bounds ahead of the competition. The performance of my Mac Studio, the single core is twice as fast and the multicore performance over triple the speed of my iMac 27 inch (2017). I’ve loaded dBpoweramp onto my Mac Studio to try out ripping and encoding music – very fast, no complaints by me. I’m tempted to see how things work with Handbreak when I have the chance but long story short the fact that it was all done without firing up the fans really goes to show the love of investment Apple has made.

    To be frank, I was one of those who were sceptical about whether Apple could scale up an ARM based SoC but I’ve been happily proven wrong. The other benefit of having spent years optimising for ARM has been a rock solid macOS that is optimised for ARM from day one. The reason why I was sceptical was because scaling up GPUs, for example, can be incredibly difficult – scaling isn’t always linear so it isn’t always possible to take a lower power design then scale it up simply by scaling up the number of cores. The other scepticism was regarding Apple’s ARM CPUs from the point of view that the power efficiency may become a limiting factor but once again I’ve been happily proven wrong.

    There are rumours that Apple has a big architectural change in the next couple of years so maybe that’ll make the move to ARMv9 which will include SVE2 plus other enhancements but that being said , as Rene Ritchie noted, Apple has already made a lot of those improvements available in their own implementation. The big thing will be where SVE2 fits into it but that being said I don’t think it’ll be the massive improvement given that Neon SIMD extension is good enough for the vast majority of programmers who write software.

  • It’s more complicated than that.

    There was an interesting ‘Brooks and Capehart’ discussion on PBS regarding the issue of abortion with David Brooks raising the issue that although European countries have more restrictive abortion access laws, Europe also have more comprehensive ‘wrap around’ services in the form of welfare.

    This makes me wonder about the issue of gun violence n the United States and the focus by many on passing more restrictive laws on the basis that restrictive laws keep the public safe. That being said, if we follow David Brooks line of thinking that maybe the issue is more complex than what people make the gun issue out to be, that the complimentary nature of having a public healthcare system with well funded mental health facilities married up with reasonable gun regulations results in better public safety rather than it solely being a matter of just passing gun regulations alone. I thought it was an interesting way of having a look at an issue that uniquely plagues the United States in terms of the number of mass shootings that take place in the United States.

  • It has been a long time.

    Yeap, it has been a long time since I last updated my blog. The clumsy person that I am, I had an accident which damaged my laptop and desktop beyond repair resulting in the only device I have left over is an iPhone which is wholly unsuitable for completing blogs online hence I’ve been offline for the last couple of weeks. The replacement computers being a Mac Studio, Monitor and a Mac laptop. He laptop has arrived today and is going through the processing of being setup – the Apple Silicon experience is a massive leap from the Intel era. When Apple first announced the Apple Silicon I was expecting just modest improvements but holy heck is it fast.

    The other ‘interesting’ event in my life is the fact that I’ve had COVID for the second time but this time it feels a whole lot worse than the first time due to the first time being not too long after my booster shot. I originally thought a week off from work should sort it out but even after a week I’m coughing heavily, brain fog and other symptoms. I really want to get back to work but I’m not all that useful if I’m spending most of my time either coughing or taking too long to do basic functions that in the past I could easily get done in a few seconds. It is probably best for all concerned that I take time off from work until I’m back to full health.

  • Another week has come and gone.

    On 22 June 2022 Chromecast with Google TV was released in New Zealand – available through ‘big box’ stores (to quote an Americanism) such as Noel Leeming (where I bought mine) as a replacement for the built in ‘Smart TV’ software (Samsung uses Tizen). The problem with my television is that it doesn’t support 5GHz WiFI which requires me to run an ethernet cable from my television to my router which isn’t ideal where as I was able to hook up the Chromecast with Google TV to my television and connect to my 5GHz WiFi network without any problems.

    Once all hooked up there was a 758MB download to update it to the latest version. I was holding out for an updated version but I decided that what ever improvements may exist in a theoretical future product, I doubt it’ll be a massive improvement to justify holding off till its launch. All the apps are rock solid and the device is working great, fast and responsive – funny enough I’ve found it more responsive than my Apple TV. If you’re wanting an affordable alternative to Apple TV that is just as good then the Chromecast with Google TV does the job.

    Another interesting thing that has happened recently is Twitter launching Notes (link) which will enable long articles to be written as a single article rather than it being spread across multiple tweets that are sewn together. It’ll be interesting to see whether this poaches some end users from Facebook as Twitter add features to make their service more comprehensive beyond just microblogging capabilities. It’ll be interesting to see whether, at some point, Twitter offer a messaging app that is seperate from their Twitter app for those who want it or whether they’ll keep it part of the main app particularly if the rumours of Musk wanting end to end encryption, maybe utilising Signal to achieve that. Although I am on Mastodon I also keep my Twitter account just in case things change but most of the time these days I am on my Mastodon account where the vibe is a lot nicer than on Twitter.

    I’m going to write up an article about the whole overturning of Roe vs Wade but I’ll do that tomorrow. All I can say is that this overturning of Roe vs Wade is part of a much longer plan that the right wing have been working on for decades. If you believe that the rolling back of rights will stop at Roe vs Wade then, to quote a great Americanism, “I have a bridge to sell you”. This is what happens when you keep telling yourself that “I’m not interested in politics” – well, you may not be interested in politics but politics are very much interested in you.

  • Enjoying the last few days before getting back to work.

    At home chilling out watching Season 1 of Law & Order – starting from the first season and moving forward. I was going to have a small holiday away from Wellington but winter has been so crappy I decided to stay at home and enjoy the warmth and familiarity of home. The temperatures so far have been getting down to as low as 6°C – hopefully there won’t be too many wet days, I can handle a cold dry days because you can still get things done with an extra layer of clothing to keep warm but rainy days are just horrible.

    Monday I’m going to get my kitchen sorted out now that I’ve given the splashbacks a good 72 hours to dry but I’ll check with my sister whether it’s ok since I’m not an expert in that area. Once given the all ok I’ll put everything back to normal then complete the backlog inn washing that needs to be done. At the moment it is raining so what I’ll do is put the clothes on the clothes horse then have the dehumidifier running to dry the clothes quickly and avoid the damp smell and making the house damp.

    Watching some of the more recent videos put out on the WWDC 2022 sessions page – I think the larger theme that one can deduce from the videos is:

    1. Swift is the language of macOS development going forward – Swift is to macOS like what Objective-C and Objective-C++ to Mac OS X. Not all the frameworks may not be 100% mature and ready such as Swift UI but when it comes to where Apple is heading then it is best to get on board the Swift bandwagon.
    2. Metal, updated to Metal 3 in macOS Ventura, is being pushed and Apple is addressing the shortcomings to fill in the gaps that OpenGL developers need filling. Long term eventually Apple will remove OpenGL support particularly as big names like Adobe move their codebase over to Metal.
    3. End of the line for traditional kernel extensions – the future are userspace drivers based on DriverKit. DriverKit is not only available on macOS but also on iPadOS running on M1 iPad – I wonder whether there is a difference in the kernel settings which makes DriverKit support a M1 only feature rather than available to all iPadOS devices.
    4. Apple has consolidated the improvements that have been made available via the Safari Technology Previews into Safari 16 but even with the improvements I can’t help but feel that Apple is dragging their feet to protect their App Store interests by crippling the browser from being able to run complex Progress Web Applications (PWA).
      There is also ‘The Competition and Markets Authority’ in the UK who are concerned about Apple stifling competition in the browser space on iOS due to Apple’s refusal of allowing browsers vendors to bundle their own web engine with their software and thus forced to use Webkit – the concerns have also been voiced by European regulators as well along with Apple’s vice like grip on the App Store by blocking cloud based gaming platforms to distribute one app for their whole library which is accessible via their streaming platform.
    5. The operating systems are maturing, if you have a look at the API changes (link) the focus appears to be on laying foundations and optimising for Apple Silicon rather than flash new features. The focus appears to be about nurturing the third party ecosystem a lot more as a way of propelling hardware sales.

    I’m going to keep track of how things progress while experimenting with different content blockers. What I hope is that as Manifest V3 that issues raised will be resolved although interesting discussions are being had behind the scenes at Google about the possibility of pushing back Manifest V2 support being removed as concerns are being addressed but time is running out for the 2023 deadline.