Nicholas Toone

  • Project: Friction

    Following up on my last post, I’ve come up with a plan to untangle myself and Ms. Tucker as much as we can from Microsoft, Apple, and Google.

    And, because I’m oh, so very edgy, I’ve named whole thing Project: Friction. Here’s what I’m tackling:

    Microsoft 365

    I’m not going to lie, I kind of like MS 365. Scratch that, I like OneDrive which is one of the better of the Big Tech cloud storage options that is pretty seamless across Windows, macOS, and even Linux by way of InSync. However, like everything else Big Tech, they done gone and fucked it up. Standalone OneDrive accounts are gone. You can now only get a “basic” plan that includes 100GB of storage, the web based apps, ad free Outlook (seriously) and some other nonsense. If you want more space, then you need to sign up for one of their personal or family accounts that has 1TB of space (ok, cool) and a bunch of shit you may never use (it will install all of their apps on your computer, most of which you’ll probably never use). Oh, and they just increased the prices because they’re forcing stupid Copilot on everyone.

    Essentially, fuck all that. Reminds me of this from last year:

    Same mood now as then: fuck you and your growth at all costs.

    I’m taking the following approach with Microsoft:

    Cloud/OneDrive: A new provider that’s (a) not based in the US and (b) supports Windows, Linux, and macOS. I think we’ve settled on pCloud. I’ve been playing around with the service on a basic month to month plan for about a week now and, so far, it’s pretty amazing. Aft first it was not as straightforward as OneDrive but that was to be expected. It is a wee bit of a finicky setup on Linux but that was figured out (and I’m keeping this link handy). I have everything backed up and syncing and it’s humming along doing it’s thing. Remember: Embrace Friction. Bonus points to pCloud for offering a lifetime option; pay once and it’s yours.

    At the same time I’m working on configuring a local NAS. While I love the idea of syncing files to the could, let’s face it, we all should have local backups on hand just in case. I have an old, second hand mini computer and will be testing out TrueNAS CORE. This will be a challenge for sure

    Apps: This one’s easy: LibreOffice. I mean, come on. It all does the same shit as Microsoft’s apps and, let’s face it, the Microsoft stuff has never really been great. Microsoft is just a monopoly and they tell us they’re the best while duct taping more shit (sorry, “features”) onto their apps. Now we have to deal with Copilot and they can just fuck right off with that.

    Operating Systems

    At this point in the game, I’m back to Linux being my daily driver. I may setup a dual boot of Windows for the sole reason of playing games1, but we’ll see. Now that I’ve made a full cloud backup with pCloud, I’ve completely flattened my PC and started fresh with just Ubuntu Studio. I’m taking my time configuring everything to my tastes.

    Note that I’m not going to force anyone else in the house to take the Linux path but, going forward, I will be looking at setting Windows up without an MS Account.

    Goddamn Phones

    This one is the most difficult. Your choices are Apple/iOS, or some flavour of Android be it Google or Samsung or whoever. Which means you need to have an Apple ID or a Google account (or a Samsung login or whatever) in order to use the phones in any real capacity.

    Then we tripped across GrapheneOS.

    A hardened version of Android with all of the Google slop stripped out? And the Google stuff you do install has to live in a sandbox where YOU control its permissions?

    Fucking sign me up.

    So here we go…

    After four days my oh so brief review is this: GrapheneOS is excellent except for two things:

    1. The handful of apps I need for my job don’t work 100%.
    2. I can’t get RCS chats working.

    The apps I require for work are only half functional. Messages do come into them, but notifications are broken; they simply just don’t alert me. Since part of my job is an OnCall sift every few weeks I need to ensure that I get notifications. I’ll have to stick to the stock Google OS until I can get this figured out. If I can’t get these apps sending notifications at all, then GrapheneOS will have wait.

    RCS is another matter. Do I really need it? No? It is nice, but it’s not a deal breaker. I can make due with SMS and I’m working to find out who on my contacts list uses Signal. I know that RCS in the Google Messages app is implemented via Google and I suspect that I can’t get it working because my Google account is not tied to the GrapheneOS phone.

    On the other hand, Ms. Tucker has an iPhone 8 that is giving up the ghost and she’s not sure that she wants to give any more money to Apple. So the plan may be to slowly get her used to a Pixel 7 running GrapheneOS with the limited Play services so she can access the apps she needs and see how that goes.

    GrapheneOS is amazing even if it reminded me how much shit actually runs on a phone all in the sake of “convenience”. Thanks to playing around with GrapheneOS, I’ve managed to clean up a pile of apps from my stock phone.

    None of this is easy, but it’s not meant to be. And I’m back to enjoying what I enjoyed about Linux those couple of years ago: learning new things. Yet it was so easy back then to just give up at the slightest hint of inconvenience and take the stupid, familiar route. Hell, it’s easy to do that now.

    At the end of the day, stupid, familiar routes are boring. And I just don’t want to fall back on that anymore.

    1: I am attempting to get my games running under Linux (Steam/Proton/Lutris) again.

  • Embracing Friction

    It took me the better part of a week to get this post going. I kept having to stop, collect my thoughts, and get back to it. I haven’t been worked up about something like this in a while.

    In the middle of figuring out how I wanted to frame this piece, I wrote a quick Linux Journal entry detailing how I’d managed to fix some issues that had been bugging me. When I first started that journal entry, I was on the verge of becoming frustrated which, of course, summoned that little voice in the back of my head that whispers: “Just give up. Who cares if you need to use a Microsoft account and Windows? It’s just so much easier!”

    I paused.

    The gist of is is this:

    I really don’t think the majority of people really understand just how much of our lives we’ve slowly, but surely surrendered to Big Tech and I also don’t think we realize just how complacent we’ve become to it all.

    We live our lives almost entirely on devices that dictate how we do, well, most everything, and the main selling point that all of these tech companies hit on is Ease Of Use and Convenience.

    In short, they’re telling you that they’re removing the friction from your life.

    While my family has discussed friction in the past as it pertains to life in general, the best analogy is taking a vacation. The idea of paying more for a vacation may look like the perceived addition of things, but it’s actually the removal of one single thing: friction.

    Yes, the resort/cruise brochure may tell you that the bed is bigger, the beach/pool is private, the drinks are premium, and the food is five star, but they also lean heavily on “we do everything for you”. They tell you you’ll have a butler and invite you to sit back, relax, and not worry about anything. In the back of your mind you’re really thinking “I don’t have to deal with any of the normal bullshit like standing in line for half an hour at the buffet or not being able to find chair at the beach.” At its core, this is a lack of friction.

    And remember: If friction is removed, it is always removed at a cost.

    Last year we decided to try one of these all inclusive places that advertises Complete Lack Of Friction®™. We decided to pay extra for what they called The Diamond Club. We wanted to sit back, relax, and not worry about anything. We took them at their word.

    Of course, this vacation turned out to be one of the most frustrating, friction filled experiences we have ever gone through; The whole food experience sucked, the booze experience sucked, the “private” the beach area was a crowded joke and the “luxury” amenities were sub par at best. 1

    Even though we had shelled out for the top of the line package the resort offered, at every turn we were told that if we paid just a little more for this and a little more for that, then a little more friction would be removed. The entire week was nothing more than dealing with microstransactions.

    The costs to get a better seat at the beach was not only monetary transaction, but a sense that we’d been swindled. We did end up paying some extra for a beach cabana just so we could salvage some sort of good memory that week. But deep down we were angry simply because we had to pay for something that should have been included in The Diamond Club experience we were promised.

    Think about that, then think about the phone in your hand or the computer you’re looking at.

    Most modern technology is sold to us on the idea of less friction. Everything is easy. Everything is more convenient. And that’s not really true, is it?

    While everyone seems to understand, at least on a base level, what the costs are for all the FREE and EASY platforms we use are (we are the product), what gets us is that these costs seem to change every time we get settled into whatever cost we just accepted last time around.

    • Our data scraped and sold to the highest bidder again and again.
    • Algorithms tweaked to make us stay on the platform and and become angrier and angrier.
    • Apple sells, supremely overpriced hardware that locks you into an ecosystem that so rife with greed it has become little more than a way to push shitty apps on you so Apple can get their cut of each and every microtransaction.
    • Microsoft will push out a marginally better performing version of Windows that tracks you and forces ads on you. Now the company is shovelling half assed AI garbage into its products.
    • Google: We know it’s all about Ads and Tracking and Slop, oh my!

    The shitty part is that even after we pay these costs, even after all the promises of Ease Of Use and Convenience, the tech that is foisted on us is so ridiculously user hostile it’s almost laughable. These companies keep shovelling more shit at us in the form of “new features” which may appease a small handful of people but will achieve little more than frustration for the rest. And we’re told that if we pay just a little more with a subscription, or a little bit more via an in app microtransaction, then a little more of the friction will be removed.

    Growth at all costs capitalism got us where we are today. All of these companies need to make more than they did last quarter or last year. The shit we’re dealing with now is born from the growth mindset coupled with a complete lack of new, real ideas.2

    I’m waking up to the idea that little bit of friction goes a long way.

    If these products we are being forced to use at the cost of our data and privacy are so fucking horrible to use, even after we decide to pay fees on a good number of them, then why not just stop paying the heavy costs and instead allow the friction? Why can’t we just step outside of our comfort zones and investigate what technology exists besides these monopolies offer (and market to us that they’re our only hope)?

    I think I’ll be spending the next few months working, I mean really working to untangle myself from these fucking tech behemoths. I know it’s not going to be easy. It’s going to take some time and patience. We need to remember that not everything has to be easy. That’s part of the problem today. We have all conditioned to expect that everything needs be so easy 100% of the time.

    Nothing is perfect and there will be some steep learning curves a ton of friction but, goddammit, isn’t that what it’s all supposed to be about? Where we’re at right now and, more frighteningly, where we’re headed is all just too much.

    I’m choosing to embrace friction.

    1: We took the place up on their spa experience which turned out to be only marginally worse than soaking in the tub at home.

    2: I’m pretty sure Netflix raised their subscription prices recently because they don’t have anything new (especially AI related) to add to the product coupled with the fact that there are a finite amount of people on the planet with access to jobs and credit cards. I can picture a meeting in my head: “How can we show growth?” … “Why don’t we just just jack up the subscription prices?” … “I LOVE IT!”

  • Lies. All Lies.

    Whoa, hold up there. Just hold up. There is NO way this is a photo of an actual Support rep. That man is smiling ffs, SMILING.

  • Music I Used To Listen To: Possessed

    Every once and awhile, just for fun, I’m going to listen to some music I enjoyed when I was a teenager and and post about what I think of it now.

    Today’s entry is Possessed: “Beyond The Gates”

    Way back in 1986, everyone seemed to be talking about this album based on it’s kick ass, gatefold album sleeve and the strength of their debut album, Seven Churches. I had never heard Seven Churches and I never had a vinyl copy of Beyond The Gates. I did buy the cassette version that had the typical crappy mid-80’s lame, basic ass nothingness. I remember the intro was kinda neat but I can’t remember much about the rest of it so I can’t even say that I really “enjoyed it”.

    ANYWAY, I gave Beyond The Gates a listen last week and… wow. Just wow. This album sucks so hard I can’t even find the words. I’m just going to stop writing about it and move on with my life.

  • Sugar and Cheap Entertainment

    I’ve been on a hip-hop kick lately. Specifically Kendrick Lamar.

    Today I discovered, and now absolutely cannot get enough of, Cartoons & Cereal (feat. Gunplay).

    Yes, I know I’m late (very late) to the party, but what a fucking song this is. The passages that begin with “Now I was raised in a sandbox” is unlike anything I’ve heard in a long time; the childlike yet robotic vocals of Lamar and, I believe, Anna Wise, layered, ping-ponged on top of the horror soundtrack style synth and samples is otherworldly. And the way the I-I-I part in these sentences is stuttered adds a layer of, oh I don’t know what you’d call it. Unease? It’s definitely unsettling.

    Yeah, I’m nerding out over this simply because I can’t think of anything to compare it to and I’ve had it on repeat all night.

  • What If We Just Stopped? Part Two

    Twenty years ago this spring, I started my first “real” job at a local IT company. I was hired as Support, but it wasn’t the burger flipping, minimum wage earning, soul sucking Support of a monopolistic ISP help desk. This was Enterprise Support. I worked the same eight hours, at the same desk, Monday to Friday. I got to know the customers, their use cases, their workflows, and their work habits. I learned the difference between strategic customers and everyone else. I learned to work without a pre-written script.

    In the three years I was there I learned a ton, and memories come and go, but the one thing I always remember was this:

    At one point we had started receiving a lot of customer tickets around sluggish performance and Java out of memory errors.

    With the customers grabbing pitchforks and lighting torches, we finally had a meeting with the VP of Development and one of the senior Developers. We explained that the issue which was plaguing the customers was a particular feature (if I recall, it was a report of some sort) was, once invoked, slowing down the entire app and as the day went on, the whole system would just start to error out with java.lang.OutOfMemoryError messages. Restarting the servers every night seemed to give relief, but the next day it would start all over again. This was true for both our hosted servers (which were now being restarted every night) and the servers of our on premise customers who had logged tickets with us (and who we had instructed to restart their servers every evening).

    After some discussion, the senior Dev stated, quite confidently, that the issue was simple to solve. “It’s running out of memory, so just throw more hardware at it until the error stops.”

    The VP looked at him and in a very level voice said: “No. That’s lazy. If it was coded properly in the first place, it wouldn’t be running out of memory.”

    He then instructed the senior Dev to optimize the code until it ran on on the bare minimum server requirements that we stated it was supposed to be able to run on for any on premise customers, and that would more than suffice for our hosted servers now, and in the future, and any customers servers to boot.

    The senior Dev, grumbling, went off and did just that. If I remember right, it took him the better part of a week, but he did it. We kept the customers at bay with promises of a fix, and when the new code was completed, tested, and pushed out, it was pretty glorious. The sluggishness vanished and the java.lang.OutOfMemoryError messages were nowhere to be seen.

    After having witnessed this it burns my ass that, to this day – a time where even the cheapest of consumer computing hardware is so insanely more powerful than the servers were twenty years ago were, the experience for a huge percentage of the population is absolute garbage.

    I’m not a Developer at all. I can write some mean HTML and am pretty okay at CSS, but that’s it. Code just does not click in my brain in the same way math doesn’t click for me, so I’m not gong to stand here and even pretend to know what’s going on with code. What I do know is that I’ve experienced, first hand, a major software performance issue fixed because a VP told a Dev to optimize lazy code rather than just throw more hardware at it until the problem went away. This proved to me that it could be done.

    This is what DeepSeek showed the world this week: convincing everyone that all you need is more hardware and more money is lazy.

    That’s us though. It’s all about releasing more new features. It’s about pushing code with an “acceptable number of bugs” and questionable performance out to paying customers. And if there is any kind of bottleneck, you can always just throw hardware at it until the issue goes away… but it never really goes away.

    While you theoretically can to fix a clogged toilet by making making the bowl and pipes bigger, it will still just keep right on filling with shit.

  • What If We Just Stopped?

    Two things happened this week that caught my attention:

    • DeepSeek (to be fair, this caught everyone’s attention).
    • Microsoft decided to jam Copilot into their 365 Subscriptions and charge more.

    DeepSeek is, without saying, the BIG news right now. I don’t have much to say other than I’m really enjoying watching OpenAI and it’s ilk get absolutely pantsed.

    For more info and a more eloquent rant, Ed Zitron has a great take on DeepSpeek and AI.

    I will say that all of this hit home more when I logged into Outlook webmail today and saw this:

    Can I turn off that gaudy Copilot button? Sure? Maybe? While trying to figure out how, I also found out that MS was going to increase our yearly subscription fee by quite a bit seemingly just for the privilege of having access to Copilot. After more digging, I found that we could switch our MS365 account to something they have branded “Classic” which is, you know, just MS365 without fucking Copilot and costs the same I’m paying now.

    To do this you have to begin the process of cancelling your subscription and then choose Classic while you’re on the “boo-hoo, please don’t leave” screen. It’s a bit of a dark pattern, but at least you can forgo paying for Copilot. However, since I’m in the middle of my subscription period, I’m stuck with Copilot until the fall.

    Of course, MS sent me an email regarding our account change:

    You can see that, just below the subject, Copilot wanted to summarize this email. Since the family is stuck with this shit until the middle of September, let’s see what it does. Fuck it. Show me the magic! Improve my life!

    I clicked on Summary and this is what I got:

    I knew it was going to do exactly this, yet I was still irrationally angry. It took ten seconds or so for Microsoft’s AI to read my email and give me that summary. In that time I could have oh, I don’t know, just read the fucking email.

    Microsoft Copilot is the literal equivalent of Dethklok recording on water; destroying millions of acres of natural habitat and blacking out cities so Nathan can record himself blowing a raspberry and clapping his hands.

    I can think of any number of problems in this world that need to be solved before I think, “Hey, I could really use a summary of an email!” Yet this is the exact shit all of these huge companies are trying to sell us. Google, Apple, Meta, all of them. They’re not in this to make your life easier. They’re in it to make money. They’re in it for power. They’re in it to say, “We’re number one!”

    Don’t ever let their marketing tell you otherwise.

  • Well, Ok Then

    So, I’m typing this in the Block editor after fighting to get my site to look like this. Take a look around. Basic as basic can get, right?

    This look is slightly not what I was aiming for. I did plan to have an image at the top there, but the Block I was using fucked with the colour of the font in the navigation drop down so you couldn’t actually see the links. I mean, whatever. For now this is ok.

    Edit: Fixed this, obviously. I will warn you that as I poke more, there may be more changes but I’m going to try keeping it minimal.

    Anyway, I have been picking away at Linux and I’m still here. For those that really want to see what’s happening, I’ve started a journal that you can navigate to via the fancy new Linux > Linux Journal link in the navigation. I didn’t want to clutter up the main page with my prattling, so you can find it there.

    One thing I’ll update here is I noticed some issues with the Scarlett 2i2 in Mixbus, namely shaky playback and the inputs would drop out depending on how it was set in either System settings or in the Mixbus audio engine settings. Well goddamn, after some digging around I came across this video on YouTube that all but fixed me up.

    If you have a Focusrite, Scarlett 2i2 Gen 3, keep this handy:

    $ echo options snd_usb_audio vid=0x1235 pid=0x8210 device_setup=1 > /etc/modprobe.d/snd_usb_audio.conf

    There’s more info in the video, of course, and it’s all great.

  • Hear Ye! Hear Ye!

    This is a quick note to let everyone (yes, all four of you) know that I’ll be fucking around with the design and layout of this here blog over the next couple of days. So things may be wonky at times as I try and figure out how, exactly, WordPress Blocks work.

    Blocks is something I’ve been scratching my head over for some time. I’ve mostly stayed on older themes and use the Classic editor because why do you need a separate “block” for each paragraph of text? Turns out I’ve been itching to update the look of my site for a while now and none of the older themes seemed to, as they say, twirl my beanie. The new Twenty Twenty Five theme, however, was what I was looking for design wise.

    So Blocks it is I guess – at least for the layout. I’m most likely going to stick with the Classic Editor for posting.

    While it’s finally starting to sort of click, I just really wish I knew the thinking behind Blocks. It’s just so fucking convoluted to the point that it borders on hostile. When you see the layout I decided on and compare it to what is in place now, you’ll wonder why it took me nearly a week to finalize.

    Whatever. For now, here’s a picture of a chipmunk I took a few years ago :)

  • Derp

    This is a quick story about a blithering idiot.

    Sometime in November of last year, the screen on my phone started to come away from the body. I have no idea why, it just did. The screen still worked, it was just separating from the rest of the phone. I put my phone in the bulky case I have because it wraps over the screen and kinda holds everything in place and started looking at repair options. I quickly found that this was something I could fix myself thanks to iFixit who, I may add, has saved my ass a few times in the past. So I ordered one of their iOpener tool kits and a replacement screen adhesive. Cost = Not So Much compared to what a mobile shop would have charged.

    The tools and the adhesive arrived and I spent about half an hour following the instructions and, in the end, it wasn’t difficult to replace the screen adhesive and put the phone back together. I mean, attaching the screen cable back to the phone was a little finicky but, past that, no sweat. I kept the phone in the bulky, cheap case as some added insurance.

    Two weeks ago, I decided to get another cheap case that wasn’t as bulky (seriously the one I’d been using was just, ugh). And this new cheap case showed me one thing: the screen was coming off the body again.

    FFS

    I put the phone back into the old cheap, bulky case. The next morning I drove to the mall where there is a mobile store who does good repairs. After saying Good Afternoon, I told them I had what would probably be an easy repair. I took my phone out of the shitty, bulky case and showed the dude how the screen was coming off.

    Dude called over his manager. Showed my phone to her. She took a close look at it. Wrinkled her brow, looked at me and asked: “Did someone repair this recently?”

    I said, “Well, yeah. I tried to repair it.”

    She nodded, put the phone on the counter and showed me that…

    … I had forgotten to remove the final liner before putting the phone back together.

    See this?

    Yeah. For whatever reason, I didn’t do this step.

    I muttered “son of a bitch” and she instructed me to grab the little blue tab and pull the liner off. She then placed the screen back on, picked up my phone and ran her fingers around its perimeter making sure it all stayed together.

    She handed me the phone back. “You should be good. No charge.”

    “Not even an idiot tax?” I asked.

    “No idiot tax.”

    Apparently my obvious embarrassment at my own stupidity was enough.

    I thanked them both, picked up the liner and put it in my coat pocket, and walked out of the store.

    I’m keeping this as a reminder to always follow all the instructions.