Nicholas Toone

Nicholas Toone

  • 2/11/2025 – Deep Breath

    I’m reporting from Ubuntu, where most things have been great and others have been a little bumpy…

    Music

    Fucking hell, I got Reaper working with the Scarlett! Not sure why, but I think it’s because I install installed it using sudo which put the app into /opt/REAPER. After I became tired of fighting with it, I uninstalled Reaper with the idea of recording just in MixBus but quickly found my next bit of frustration was using synths and instruments in MixBus whose piano roll editor is less than stellar. On a whim, I decided to reinstall Reaper and see if I could get it working.

    This time, I decided to install it without using sudo and put it in /home/my_un/opt/REAPER/ and holy shitballs, it picked the Scarlett up on first launch and it just works.

    Now I need to see what exists as far as decent drum plugins for Linux. Off to Linux Music Rocks! I mean, AVL is fantastic, but I’m not sold on all the sounds yet and there is no way you can fine tune the individual drums.

    Writing

    Scrivner is doing its thing even though I dislike the non-native aspect. It also handles fonts weirdly. Some parts of the interface are just difficult to read and the editor does this weird thing where if I use italics some letters become illegible or, like, a capital P looks like a capital F, etc. Whatever, this is a minor gripe considering it works just fine past that.

    Gaming

    I know, I know, games are not that important in the large scheme of things, but I built this here computer for two reasons:

    1. Multimedia
    2. Gaming

    While Proton is an absolutely great idea, I am finding playing games challenging. Granted, I’m only playing The Witcher 3 at the moment, but it takes forever to load (mostly around two minutes or so, but there have been times that just getting the CDPR launch window took around five minutes after Steam loaded a bunch of Vulcan stuff), crashes randomly, some of my settings are never saved, and the cut scenes are playing only on the far right side of my monitor cutting off a chunk of the scene.

    I’m trying to take all of the gaming issues in stride. I know the issue is Proton is a compatibility layer that was created to allow Valve to build and sell Steam Decks. I know that they offer Proton to Linux users but pretty much wash their hands of it. Who can blame them? There is a literal metric fuck tonne of distros out there and Valve can’t honestly be held responsible for ensuring the games they offer in Steam are 100% flawless on every single one.

    At this point, I’ll probably be keeping a Windows partition around just for when I feel like fighting Drowners and Wyverns.

    Other Items

    Not Linux related, but my Razer Deathadder V2 Pro is slowly dying. I mean, I did buy it second hand, and the wireless dongle died a couple of months after I picked it up, but the Bluetooth has been aces. Now when the battery gets low and I plug it in, the mouse just stops working. Whatever. Not sure I’ll be picking up a wireless mouse next time around. For now I have an old Deathadder Chroma that is doing just fine, thank you very much.

    Flipping back and forth between Linux and Windows is hell on Bluetooth in general. Pretty sure this is because I’m doing it on the same hardware. It’s not a huge deal, I just have to remove and then re-pair my shit when I boot into a different OS.

  • 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.

  • 2/5/2025 – Pray For Me

    There are a pile of updates sitting in Discover. While there are security updates and patches, there are also a ton of updates to Plasma.

    To this point on Ubuntu, I’ve not installed anything past security updates. In the past, on Fedora, I had at least one major update hose my system so bad that I had to reinstall and turn off updates just to keep things running.

    This isn’t Fedora and, as I’ve mentioned, Ubuntu seems to be more… mature? I don’t know how else to describe it.

    Based on that, I’m going to run these updates. Even the Plasma ones.

    I’ll update here as to what happens. If you don’t see something in the next couple days, assume I’m reinstalling.

    Update: Well, that was a whole lot of worrying about nothing. Everything updated quickly and painlessly. Nice :)

    … Side note, my Razer Deathadder V2 Pro shit the bed. It won’t connect at all, even wired, Windows or Linux. It just sits there with a solid blue logo. Searching the internet for causes/fixes is like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I’m just going to let the battery drain right out and see what happens.

    Update: battery drained. Logo went blank. Plugged it in. Seems to be working. Hope it stays that way. I love Deathadder mice as they’re just perfect ergonomically – I’ve tried a bunch of different mice and the Deathadder is, for me, the best.

  • 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 was taught the difference between strategic customers and everyone else. I had 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 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 appeared to be a reporting feature that, once invoked, slowed 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.

  • 1/30/2025 – Knocking On ALL The Wood

    Not bad, not bad at all. The only weird thing I’ve run into is if I fullscreen Firefox, then restore it (y’know, F11 and all that) my screen starts to flicker. A restart fixes it, but it’s just weird.

    I’m still amazed at how well Bluetooth works on this distro. Both my mouse and my headphones connect without any issue at all and stay connected.

    I should have more to update but I haven’t run into issues since the last update. I mean, Spotify shit its pants the other day, but Spotify shits its pants on all platforms, so I don’t even consider that an issue.

    I did open Mixbus and do a quick remix of Oh! What A Time To Be Alive using just the inline EQ and compression (with some delay and reverb added via the included ACE plugins) and it turned out fantastic. Reminded me that you really don’t have to add a bunch of fancypants plugins to your tracks. As always, keeping things simple is usually best.

  • 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 :)