Nicholas Toone

Nicholas Toone

  • And That’s That.

    Fedora was was real fun but, in the end, after a year, I gave up and moved on.

    A couple of things happened:

    A few weeks ago, I was installing Linux updates on this here laptop and on a restart things started acting weird. My audio interface was nowhere to be found. My mouse started acting real janky. And apps (mostly DAW) were just crashing randomly.

    JFC

    I didn’t have time to dive in and look so I booted over to my Windows partition and made a note to look into whatever was going on sometime later.

    This week, I had decided to trade laptops with my eldest as hers was just not handling the workload anymore. It’s an old, refurbished Dell Latitude that was purchased just before the shutdown in 2020. With it’s fifth gen i5 CPU and 4GB of memory, it was simply no longer up for the tasks she needs it for. I’d backup all the stuff off the HP laptop, (at this point only used as a Plex server) format it, install Windows 10 and then she would have something very workable. Then I’d install Fedora on her old laptop and use it to run Plex.

    Getting her setup was a breeze. There were zero hiccups getting the HP back to factory and getting Win10 running and she’s now happily doing schoolwork, playing games, and chatting with friends.

    As for the Latitude, Fedora installed easily. Past that, I wouldn’t do the one single thing I wanted it to: run a Plex server.

    I simply do not understand why. Plex installed. The Plex service was running. But Plex would not see the mounted external drive nor did it see any folder on the local drive. All the permissions were correct. Everything was showing up in the file manager. I spent hours searching the net for solutions. I tired every command line “fix” that was posted, and there were a lot of potential fixes. I even tried starting fresh by reinstalling Fedora only to wind up in the exact same spot.

    I finally just said, “fuck it”.

    I formatted that little laptop back to factory (Windows 10). Then I installed Plex, pointed it to a folder and …

    It worked.

    I went upstairs and tested it on the TV and …

    It worked.

    So simply I made the decision to flatten this computer back to factory and just move on with Windows.

    I just don’t want to fight to use a computer anymore. Windows 11 is actually, surprisingly, really good. It’s stable and you can uninstall and disable all the bloatware and advertising bullshit with a few clicks and it just hums along doing its thing.

    I still support Open Source and Independents. While I’m running Windows now, I still run and fully support the applications listed on my “Things I Use” sidebar.

    Sadly, Linux just turned out to be a no go for me. I will say that it is absolutely better than it was even a decade ago and I was able to use it as a my primary desktop for nearly a year (and I got to start and finish a song in it!). For me though,  it’s still not 100%. So here we are.

  • Music I Used To Listen To: Omen

    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 Omen: “Battle Cry”

    Omen - Battle Cry

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  • Learning New Skills, Part One: The Backstory

    I started this as a single entry, but it became so long that I decided to tackle it in a multiple parts.

    While I’m not going to go over the complete backstory, this abridged version does help set the stage of what we were dealing with that led to the decision to just DYI things.

    Ms. Tucker owns a small condo. By small, I mean small: 530-ish square feet.

    While tiny, it’s a cute, modern, open space layout, with 10 foot ceilings and huge windows that is located in the heart of downtown. It’s also very nostalgic for both of us as that’s where we started to build our life together nearly twenty years ago.

    As time went on and we decided to have kids, we moved out of the condo and a relative moved in…

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  • Music I Used To Listen To: Helloween

    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.

    The inaugural entry covers two releases from the pioneers of Power Metal: Helloween.

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  • I Replaced Everything And It Still Sucks

    This is an actual review on Newegg.

    I’d have just contacted the company and retured the card, but to each their own I guess :-\

  • Mantras

    My About blurb, has some mantras listed and I’d like to talk about them.

    This took a long time to write and then I waffled about even posting it.  Then I thought: fuck it.

    So here we go. And my apologies, it’s long.

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  • Outlook, Part Two

    If AI takes over the world, it will be incomprehensible. Literally.

    Hey, Outlook. You should learn to read what you're suggesting before suggesting it.

  • Downsizing

    I have three songs in the works. All of them need lyrics and vocals. Two also need drums.

    One of them turned out to be pretty terrible so I shitcanned it and now I have two songs in the works. One only has a single verse of lyrics to complete, which I’m just being completely lazy with, and the other needs a full set of lyrics and drums so near the end of July I recorded the drums.

    A few days later, I realized that the drumming for the outro is little off everything else so now I have to redo all of the guitars.

    “Wait,” you ask, “why re-record all the guitar parts? Why don’t you just re-record the drums?”

    Well, you see, I recorded the drum parts, gave it a quick listen and was happy at the time. Then I sold my drums.

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  • Outlook, Part One

    Thanks for the tip, Outlook, however you don’t know my reader.

  • Thanks, Glassdoor.

    How does one describe this absolute shitshow of an account creation page?