Nicholas Toone

Nicholas Toone

  • 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 :)

  • 1/22/2025 – Ok, Nice. Mostly.

    Thoughts Today.

    Holy hell, Ubuntu handles Bluetooth like a dream. When the computer lock screen comes up after I’ve stepped away from my desk, all I need to do it move my mouse just a little and it jumps back to life. In Windows or Fedora, I’d have to shake the thing for a bit to get it to connect. And the switch from the system audio to my headphones when I turn them on (and vice versa) is seamless. On Fedora this would work some of the time. The rest of this time, Bluetooth would just drop altogether taking my mouse with it. Sometimes it would come back on its own, other times I’d have to restart.

    Also to note, Ubuntu handles OpenRazer and Polychromatic beautifully. As of right now, I’ve not lost my settings once. Static white is the name of my game and that’s what’s happening. Even my old Deathadder Chroma 1 is happy. Razer doesn’t even support this mouse in the newer versions of their software, but OpenRazer is more than happy to step up.

    And good goddamn, I can’t overstate how fucking good Strawberry Music Player is. I only really use it for Radio (Soma FM) and my local collection, but it’s just so lovely to use. I first discovered it years ago on Fedora, brought it over to Windows when I switched back, and I’m happy to report it’s still awesome.

    Minor Gripe

    For a system that constantly brags about how customizable it can be, there are certainly some limitations that make little sense. Maybe it’s different distro to distro, but I find the Menu Editor in KDE Plasma weird in that it allows you to rename/rearrange/delete/whatever you want except “these few items!”. While I’m sure most can be accomplished via the terminal, or by fucking around in config files, I wish I were able to do more in the GUI or that what’s there is more obvious. Saying you can customize what you want and then limiting this is something I’ve come to expect from Microsoft or Apple (not that you can customize much of anything in macOS to begin with).

    At least there is an option to reset everything back to default, so there is that.

    Minor Thought

    I really think that most people could totally use Linux as a daily driver. What does the everyday person use a computer for? The web. seriously, everything is available on the web from Google to Facebook to MS 365 app and most all of this runs great in browser.

    Why don’t more people switch?  Most of it is change. People really don’t like change. They move to new things kicking and screaming and while they finally get used to change, it takes a long, long time. I know people who lose their minds when there is a slight GUI update. Hell, there have been more than a few GUI updates that I haven’t liked. 2

    A great example is my dad who, back in the day, freaked out when Outlook Express was put out to pasture and he had to switch to Windows Live Mail. Then he freaked out when Live Mail was gone and he had to use the Windows 10 Mail app. Then earlier this year there was the New Outlook and, well, yeah. The freakout over the New Outlook has only recently subsided. This was nothing compared to the freakouts when he had to upgrade Windows itself (every single time from 95 to XP and then to 7 and then to 10). Those were were epic 3. I don’t even want to imagine what trying to get him on Linux would be like (or any other platform to be honest).

    There is also the fact that the one thing Microsoft has worked on is relative ease of use. For all the things people complain about (and there are things to complain about), Windows is pretty easy to navigate. Anyone who has used Windows for any reason is used to, for example, just downloading and double clicking an exe file to install whatever application they need. They don’t want to have to figure out what Repositories are available, or what to do with a .run file once it’s downloaded. Or install an .sh file from the Command line. Deciding between Snap or Flatpack.

    For some of us, hunting around for solutions to the problems we encounter is not really an issue. We’re the minority, so we don’t count. The fact is that Linux offers just enough friction that even someone who want to just live in a browser will give up pretty quick.

    I have more thoughts on why people won’t be rushing to Linux anytime soon but for now I’ll end here.

    1: I generally use mouse on a new install before setting up Bluetooth, and now keep plugged in just in case something decides to shit the bed.

    2:<cough>Bitwarden</cough> Their update wasn’t that bad, but changing how you populate your creds in the browser is kinda counterintuitive after so many years of training your users to doi it a certain way that works just fine to something completely new is rough, man. Now I find myself clicking on the site name and seeing all the info show up in the BW window rather than populate the un/pw fields on the site I’m trying to login to (I turn off the autofil suggestions on the form fields because they’re annoying) . I then backtrack and click on the little button that says “Fill”. Like I said minor, and it doesn’t ruin my day when it happens, but why?

    3: My favorite memory was him absolutely losing his mind when I installed Windows XP for the first time. I had to go in and flip from the Luna interface back to the old Windows Classic interface and set up Explorer to look and run exactly like it did on Win 95 – yes, when you double clicked on a folder another folder would open. Even after all this was done (including finding the wallpaper for the old 95 Plus Pack Dangerous Creatures theme – and he still uses this wallpaper today), he was beside himself that there was a My Documents folder on the desktop. It took a long time for him to just give up and accept it.

  • 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.

  • 01/21/2025 – Fuck It

    I don’t know what it is, but the moment I get comfortable, I manage to click on something and then everything breaks.

    There seemed to be a brief period in 2022/23 where everything was working just fine. Hell, I even finished two songs under Fedora, and the experience was smooth pretty much all around. I was happy in the thought that Linux had finally achieved something near mainstream workability. Then I ran an upgrade (a jump from 36 to 38 I think?) and it completely wiped out my audio. Nothing I tired would get it back. So I reinstalled the earlier version and turned updates off. Didn’t matter though. A couple of months later, I did something else that hosed nearly everything on my system. Then I went back to Windows and then missed Linux, then Linux really got janky and …

    … Fuck it, back to Windows. I just didn’t have any more patience left at that time to deal with Linux’s little fits. Windows 11 is a lot of things but one of the things it hardly does anymore is crash. Next to Windows 2000, it’s one of my favorite versions based on stability and general ease of use. The marks against it are the increasing levels of shit MS is stuffing in there. I don’t wants ads or tracking or AI and I’m speaking as someone who has a home built computer with enough horsepower to run most things well and who doesn’t have to put up with Windows S mode.

    Then last week I decided to say fuck it, and put my money where my mouth is and try Linux again. I downloaded and installed Fedora Jam (I was used to it) and it was ok but a little weird due to some minor changes in the latest version of KDE Plasma. I also had a few hiccups, one of which caused me to do a full reinstall … and things were just off. Sound, especially sound kept dropping in and out. Among other things, devices would drop off the list if I chose a different  profile for another device. Fedora Jam just didn’t feel as “welcoming” as it did a couple of years ago. Finally I gave up and spent Sunday evening back in Windows just to finish a few writing things up.

    Yesterday I said fuck it. There are sooooo mannnnyyyy distros out there why try and force something that’s just not working? Throw a dart. Let’s try Ubuntu Studio.

    And here I in Ubuntu studio. Even though it’s taking a little bit of getting used to, Ubuntu is holding its own at the moment (I’m knocking on all the wood I can find). The only issue I’ve run into is, again, Reaper just does not want to play nice with the Scarlett 2i2. Mixbus loves it so, ok. Fine for now.

    Ubuntu Notes
        • Installing Steam was a bit of a pain until I realized that the Flatpack repository wasn’t enabled. Once I was pointed to Flatpack, everything was smooth sailing. The Wither 3 took an inordinately long time to start on first launch, but it runs just as well as it did under Fedora which is to say it runs just as well as it does under Windows (again, knocking on that wood).
        • Got Scrivener running with zero issues this time around.
        • Configuring the desktop look and feel was easy as Ubuntu Studio is still using KDE Plasma 5.x. I think I’ll hold off upgrading Plasma for a good while.
        • Wayland is a much better graphics option than X11 if you have a large monitor.
        • Sure there are no ads and trackers to disable, but christ in a sidecar, the amount of apps installed by default on these distros is insane.

  • Money, Meet Mouth

    I’ve spent the past few posts ranting about the state of big tech and how it is just getting worse and found myself feeling a little off.

    I’ve been going on and on about moving away from big tech and here I am using Windows. While I really like Windows 11, there is something wrong with having to spend time disabling tracking and ads in a fucking operating system. I recently reinstalled Windows 10 on an old laptop and the amount of absolute crap you have to opt out of/disable/uninstall is just stupid.

    So I decided to give Linux a try once again. Fedora 41 (Jam) baby!

    Took a bit of work at the start. I don’t know what I did with my first install, but after messing around in the console trying to get software installed for my keyboard and mouse, I rebooted to an 800×600 desktop with no other hardware working properly: no internet, no sound and… whatever. I’d not installed anything at that point so I reinstalled and here we are.

    Issues and Thoughts So Far…
        • Reaper won’t connect to my Scarlett 2i2. Got this somewhat fixed; the Scarlett is connecting now. It’s a GUI issue in Reaper. When you choose ALSA, you have to choose the device. If you click on the drop down, you get a blank list. This led me to beleive that the hardware was not detected. Turns out that you have to click exactly on the drop down arrows to see your device choices (e_e) I still need to test at some point as I don’t see the two separate inputs when I select a track input.
        • Installing and getting Scrivener 1 to run on Linux was a pain in the ass. I tried setting it up in Bottles and just could not get my license to activate no matter what I tried. I finally got it running in Lutris and so far so good even if the font rendering isn’t as crisp as it is in Windows. It did crash a couple of times at the beginning, but I messed with it and now have it working. I am pleased that I can access the work saved from Windows via my OneDrive folders (thank you sooo much Insync!).
        • Razer. Oh Razer. I love your hardware. Your DeathAdder mice are the best I’ve used when it comes to ergonomics and feel. And this Ornata TKL I have is is simply fantastic. Your software though? Garbage. Just garbage. For Linux there is OpenRazer. Means I can get my hardware working in Linux, yay! Everything is just as janky in Linux as it is in Windows, boo! Note that this is a not a bitch about Linux, or the people who work on OpenRazer. This is a bitch about Razer. I really don’t know why these companies can’t make decent software for their devices 2.

    And… I think that’s it? For now anyway. I mean, I just can’t figure out how to customize parts of the interface; there have been some changes in KDE Plasma in the past year and a half it seems, but that’s just me nitpicking. Besides, I’m goddamn playing The Witcher 3.

    On Linux.

    And it’s absolutely glorious 3.

    Look, I could go on about this shit forever and I know that there are those of you out there rolling their eyes thinking “oh, here he goes again!”. I also know that me blathering on about this shit doesn’t really amount to anything, but so what? I’m allowed to change my mind when I want just like everyone else is allowed to change their minds if they want. And like you all out there, I have to navigate the systems in which we live. I’m just not going to play ball one hundred percent of the time. I want to try and live by what I feel is right and blindly supporting Big Tech is not something I feel comfortable doing so I’m going to do my best to not support them, I know that there are times that I’ll have to use their services. I’ll just have to be conscious of my decisions.

    Will this Linux thing work this time around? I don’t know. I really don’t know. But I do know that I didn’t feel right not even trying.

    1: I own and use Scrivener for writing non blog stuff. After spending nearly six months trying out different writing software, Scrivener was the one that had the features I need and would use. Unfortunately, it’s Windows and Mac only.

    2: I mean, come on. I’m a simple man. I just want my lighting set to static white. That’s it. I don’t care about game modes or intelligent functions or breathing fire waterfalls. Just static white. Yet this never sticks. And if I bounce back to Windows for a moment holy crap, the lighting in both the mouse and the keyboard starts having seizures. The shit thing is that the software for all other peripheral companies is just as bad, if not worse. I’ve had to deal with Logitech before and Razer is downright revolutionary in comparison.

    3: For this I give a semi-cautious shout out to Valve and their Proton compatibility layer. Yes, I know Proton exists so they can sell Steam Decks and yes, there are things wrong with Steam,  but no other game group has, that I can see, has allowed for something like Proton. Sure, there is Lutris (which I have installed for Scrivener, but yet to try with games), but the fact that Steam not only built this compatibility layer but decided to include it in a Linux desktop version of Steam is actually pretty amazing and, so far, the experience has been seamless.

    Is Valve one of the bad guys? Sure, they are. I mean, they are the biggest digital game storefront there is so they do throw their weight around. Yes, yes, I have a GOG account, have bought games from them, and support their “you own the game” ideals, but unless Lutris really comes through then GOG is pretty much Windows only, and even if the GOG platform means well, they still offer and support games from the big studios so where do I stop?  I’m not here to go down every rabbit hole. I’m here to do the best that I can.

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