Nicholas Toone

Blog

blog – verb (Merriam-Webster)
1: intransitive : to write or have a blog.
2: transitive : to write or write about (something) on a blog.

  • My Rules: The Computer Edition

    When writing yesterday’s post about Tech Rot, I was going to add a list of “rules” I have made for myself in order to enjoy being online in any way, shape, or form. It didn’t quite fit the flow or message of the piece, so I decided to post it separately. With the context out of the way, here is the list of “rules” I follow:

    • Uninstall/remove/disable any and all bloatware/scamware/adware in whatever OS you’re using. I happen to like Windows 11, but oh my god, the fact one has to do this to use your computer in relative peace is ridiculous. (Note this rule is not Window specific. Removing unneeded packages from whatever Linux distro you use, or uninstall whatever apps included in macOS that 1: Apple allows you to uninstall and 2: You may not use; GarageBand, Pages etc).
    • Disable any and all completely unnecessary noise.
      • Turn off notifications of everything that does not matter. On your phone, you should get a notification when someone texts you or calls you. You don’t need a notification when some app randomly recommends an article or has a pair of shoes on sale (and don’t get me started on news apps). On your computer, notifications should be for email and chat only.
      • Turn down the intensity of notifications you do enable. On your computer, all you need is a badge on the app (and only if it’s running). No one needs a badge, and a sound, a toast alert, and a preview… just a badge. On your phone, the only thing you should see on your lock screen is the name of the person calling/sending you a text.
    • Firefox. Just Firefox. There is no other browser (unless you want to go hardcore with Tor, but that’s a whole other realm) 1.
      • Run an adblocker at all times. Don’t ever feel bad running an ad blocker and don’t let sites make you feel guilty with their popovers telling you that everyone will starve unless you allow ads. Remember: ads would be fine if they weren’t so absolutely fucking invasive and shitty.
      • While you’re at it, fuck with YouTube.
    • Set your browser tracking protection to Strict.
      • The only websites you should have to whitelist for any reason are important ones like banks or insurance companies. If a random website won’t load or work properly because you have an ad blocker installed and/or strict tracking protection turned on, then that website it not worth your time.
    • Thunderbird. Very, very good at stripping out email trackers and other such nonsense 2.
    • Use multiple email addresses. You should have one from a well known domain (Gmail, Outlook, iCloud) for banking and other important life items, one for personal use (family, friends), and at least one burner account to use for signing up for newsletters, software trials, 10% off coupons, etc.
    • Use a VPN. Please, for the love of all that is good in this world, make use of a VPN.
    • Use a password manager. In fact, use BitWarden. It’s free – or very inexpensive if you want to support them 3.

    Finally, and most importantly:

    DO NOT adopt a devotion of any kind to any company.

    1: Don’t @ me about Brave. They’re shoving useless AI shit into their product, have a rewards program (opt in or not, rewards programs on software is lame and shifty), and have been trying to pull some shady shit over the years only to get caught and backpedal. So fuck that shit. Nothing in their business model tells me they’re to be trusted. Yes, Firefox does offer “Sponsored Shortcuts” on their Home page, but all it takes to turn this off is a single checkbox.

    2: The best part is not only does Thunderbird give you an overall option like “Allow content from The Online Store”, it also shows you a list of individual options like:
    – Allow content from tracker.shadyasfuck.com?
    – Allow content from “api.wearealwayswatching.com?

    3: I’m not getting paid to say this. They’re just that awesome.

  • Tech Rot

    Make yourself a nice, big cup of strong coffee, get comfortable, and take the time to read this: https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/

    Take your time. It’s worth it. I’ll wait…

    … you’re back. You look exhausted. Is it because it was a super long read and not a social media sized hot take? Or is it because it hits home in a super big fucking way? Both?

    As I read that article, I remembered my own history with this thing called The Internet.

    I first hopped online in early 1999. It was difficult for me in the beginning as my computer was a 386 Toshiba boat anchor running Windows 3.1 and it was so fucking slow that I had to access everything via a command line using gopher. I do remember once trying to load the homepage for a local ISP on that thing just to see if it was possible, and it took nearly twenty minutes. I went right back to gopher.

    By mid year, with the help of some friends, I managed to get my hands on a computer that could run Windows 95 and all of a sudden, everything began opening up to me. I could just feel the potential. Here is what appeared to be nearly everything I was looking for when it came to creativity.  Yes, yes, “real” art better and all, but here was something I could not only use to create art but advertise said art. Soon, I was introduced to Photoshop and Front Page and that was that. I was hooked.

    One thing I can say was that my desktop beige box was also very slow, so doing anything past surfing was a lesson in patience. I remember a friend of mine, who has just purchased a top of the line PC, watching me work on a graphic for a show poster. It was taking up to two minutes to render an effect on a layer and he said “I don’t know how you sit there and wait for that to render. I’d go nuts.”

    Thing is, I had no choice. At that time I didn’t have the money to just buy a new computer or faster hardware. Yes, people made fun of my slow computer but as I mentioned, I learned something that seems to be missing today: patience. For me slowness wasn’t due to the shittiness or bloat of the software per se, I just insisted on installing the latest, load heavy software on a computer that just met the bare minimum of requirements and then insisted on pushing said software to its limits. I’ll also note that the desktops I had were built from parts. I didn’t have a Dell or a Compaq or an HP so I didn’t discover what kind of bloated shit these companies installed on their branded computers until I helped someone figure out why theirs was running like garbage.

    Luckily I had friends who taught me what to do and what to stay away from. Back then, besides having to be acutely aware of certain issues, namely spam and scams, and don’t reply to shifty looking emails because that Nigerian Prince is not going to send you money 1, I also found out very quickly that the big companies were shady as fuck and made money based on people’s ignorance. The most obvious example being AOL who mailed out hundreds of thousands of CDs knowing that people would put them in their computers and sign up without knowing what they were getting into 2.

    I used to do tech support for a national cable ISP where they insisted you install their shitty software in order to “use the service to its full potential”. This software was nothing more than a scamware browser and chat app that hogged up system resources and served you ads for their other services (Home phone! More TV channels!). When I was going through my training, the first “instructor” was an obvious company shill who bestowed the value of this software on us. The instructor for week two, the actual nuts and bolts tech trainer, informed us that this software was complete, unnecessary bullshit. “You just have to plug the cable modem into the computer, go to the network settings, enable DHCP, and you’re good to go.” Thanks to him, I spent more time on calls getting people to uninstall that corporate shitware than I care to remember. In that second week of ISP Support Training I learned an important lesson:

    A good portion of what any tech company is selling you is shit.

    But at least you could, for the most part, uninstall/delete any and all cruft and go on with your life.

    About halfway through Zitron’s article, he talks about his experience with “the bestselling laptop from Amazon”, and how these machines are so horrible not just due to the older hardware, but the absolute horrorshow of software clamouring for your attention (and bogging down your system resources). I read this bit thinking two things:

    1. I need to remember that, just like past me with a beige PC that would take two minutes to render a Photoshop layer, most people out there don’t have the kind of money to drop on a computer that is not speced with bottom of the barrel parts and bogged down with ad infested bloatware and…
    2. It irks to no end me that the phones we now all use on a daily basis leave the desktop PC’s we were using twenty five years ago in the dust performance wise, and today’s laptops and PC’s are so far ahead of what we had in 2000 that it’s simply crazy to think of. Yet these IT companies are still finding new and exciting ways to make the whole experience utter garbage for a lot of people. Especially those who can’t afford the latest, cutting edge components.

      And, as he points out, not everyone (read: most people) has any real idea how to bend these products to their will. They buy what they can afford and put up with the bloat and cruft and ads and junk and shit performance and more than likely, accidentally make things worse by clicking on some shady link or dialog box.

      On top of all this, on top of the ads that junk up everything, on top of the bloated apps and OS’s we’re pretty much forced to use, on top of constantly changing UI’s and algorithms that serve us up a whole lot of nothing useful, we  fight and argue over which tech company is better. Every single one of these companies serves us shit of some kind and people fall over themselves to proclaim that the shit they eat is better than the shit someone else eats.

      Look, just because one company serves their shit on a silver plate doesn’t make it taste any better than the shit that’s served on a paper napkin.

      What people don’t realize is that at the end of the day, anything and everything any company tells you is just marketing. You are not a better person if you use Apple. You are not a lesser person if you use Android. We’re all just people trying to get on with getting on and these companies bank on us all throwing shit at each other over stupid things like brand preference.

      Use whatever you want to get what you need done. It doesn’t matter, at all, if you prefer Apple or Google or Microsoft or whatever. They’re all the same. Computers, smartphones, tablets, and the software that’s on them are all just tools. Treat them and use them as such. Ignore most of whatever these companies tell you about enhancing the world, or security, or privacy, or sustainability because all these companies care about in the end is profitability and growth, and everything they say, every value they tell you they have, is all marketing in the name of making more money.

      Yes there are teams out there that take things like security and privacy very, very seriously. Trust me, I know. I work with one such team. However, when it comes to the bottom line, the Company can and will make decisions that can and will undermine the work that these good people do. What you have to realize is that it’s mostly the actual workers who care about enhancing the world, or security, or privacy, or sustainability. The people at the very top? They’ll embrace it so long as it makes them money.

      It’s these companies that are making our lives more difficult in every single way that Zitron talks about in his post, and some he doesn’t. I don’t know if it’s going to get any better any time soon. My guess is no. We have a lot more shit to eat before anything changes.

      In the meantime, do what you can to introduce some semblance of normality into digital life. Remember: whatever these companies tell us is normal is definitely not normal; don’t fight for these companies, push back against them.

      So turn on your ad blockers, crank your tracking protection up to Strict, and do your best to not fall for the con that is the Rot Economy, teach friends and family how to do the same, don’t belittle anyone for whatever tech they’re using and hopefully we’ll get there, wherever there is.

      1: Seems downright cute compared to what’s out there today… <cough>crypto</cough>

      2: AOL was the Columbia House of the early Internet age.

    3. Thank You, Good Night!

      Not quite what you’d think. Some acoustic venom with a bombastic ending.

      Link To Lyrics


      Thank You! Good Night ©2024 Nicholas Toone

      Song Notes

      This origins of this song can be found in this post from March 2022. As mentioned, I had purchased a hangdog of a classical guitar from a local thrift store. It cost me $75 and it came with a case. I don’t know why I bought it. It just felt like the thing to do.

      Let me tell you, once I got a new set of strings on it, it sounded pretty fucking great.

      It was around that time that I managed to snag a couple of second hand SM-57’s and they lived up to their reputation. The guitars on this recording are the ones from the linked post where I say: “The SM57’s are, hands down, the best for close micing the classical guitar. It may be that they’re the best for the cheap classical I have. I don’t know. I don’t have anything better to compare it with”

      Well, all this time later I can say: Who cares about comparisons? In the past I literally setup the used mics, spent a few minutes improvising on a beat up, thrift store guitar to get a test recording and now, well over two years later, “Thank You, Good Night!” is that test recording as it was originally played.

      To reiterate: this is not a rerecording. The acoustic guitar in this finished song is that original, one take test recording. Only some very mild EQ and reverb were added.

      The heavy solo section was built on top of the strummed chords I’d originally recorded. The electric guitars and bass were played through the ToneLib GFX plugin when I was still using Linux. The synths are all SURGE XT presets. This is the first track I’ve done without an actual drum set. The drums are SSD5 Free 1 played manually via my Oxygen 25.

      Lyrics were somewhat difficult. I had a hard time coming up with melody and a theme. What you hear was written and performed in about a day. I was coming up with lines on the spot, recording scratch tracks, and then ran through the final vocal recording while changing words and/or phrases on the fly.

      Finally, mixing was … almost non existent. Most all of the tracks were done with some minor tweaking via the Mixbus channel EQ and compressor. I routed the drums and bass through my standard NYC comp bus (which employs the ACE EQ and compressor) and the vocals were touched up with the absolutely wonderful Flying Delay.

      All in all, I’m super, super pleased at how this one turned out. There’s just something about it that hit all the right notes.

      Note: The artwork is a from the hip photo I took in NYC back in 2011. It was late at night. It was raining, hard. I was walking through Times Square after seeing a play, trying to stay dry with the five dollar umbrella I’d bought from one of the street corner dudes selling five dollar umbrellas. The lights had this ethereal glow to them. I pulled out my phone and snapped a shot… just as a limo came crawling past. Out of all the “in the moment” pictures I’ve taken, this is probably my most favorite; so spontaneous, so accidental, yet it captured that moment in time perfectly.

      1: I enjoyed SSD5 so much I bought the full version when it went on sale at the end of November. It really is a great piece of software. My only gripe is that they use fucking iLok however, you don’t need the stupid USB dongle, just an iLok login. That, and the fact that it’s a one time purchase allowed me to bend a little. If SSD5 was subscription (and/or if it needed the stupid USB dongle) I wouldn’t be writing this paragraph. This is why I’ll never use the Slate Virtual Mix Rack; it’s subscription and it requires the stupid USB dongle for fucking iLok.

    4. Oh! What A Time To Be Alive

      “Oh! What A Time To Be Alive” is this thing in completed form. It took a bit (especially for a two minute song) but it was worth it in the end :)

      Click here for lyrics.


      Oh! What A Time To Be Alive ©2024 Nicholas Toone

      Song Notes

      A long, long time ago, early in the mystical year of 2020, I found myself messing around on my hi-hats. I was trying to mimic that style one hears in trap/pop/hip hop by doing quick buzz rolls on 1 and 4 and filling in the 2 and 3 with simple 8th note single strokes – all on top of a simple four on the floor kick. I eventually settled into the pattern you hear on the song and decided to record it in Reaper, and save it with the working title “Cidada Hats” 1.

      I would come back to it a few times over the years. At some point I came up with that funky bass line (recorded via my Ampeg PF-350 before I sold it) and added some basic, clean, delayed guitar and even some shakers and a tambourine. And… it sat on my drive.

      I came back to it this summer in a big way. I was going through my folders, doing a cleanup and saw the silly Cidada Hats directory and decided to see if there was anything there and, as the post from August details, I ended up doing some surgery:

      1. Deleted the clean/delayed guitar outright.
      2. Deleted the shakers and tambourine.
      3. Edited the fuck out of the composition. The original had three verse sections (each verse double what they are now) and four choruses and running about five minutes. It basically followed a pattern I was stuck on for my last two releases. It was too much. So I cut/moved/rearranged the drums and bass into the structure you hear now. Short, simple, to the point. The track is now just a shade over two minutes.

      Once the editing was done, I added heavy guitars to the choruses via  my Ibanez played through ToneLib GFX. Again, nice and simple. The final bit was some synths using SURGE XT presets. One of these was a preset that I tacked on to the back end of the verses as a goof but I wound up enjoying it so much that I figured out how to play on guitar to add as a double to the synth. The guitar double is not super obvious in the final mix, but if you listen carefully, it’s there.

      A more recent thing I fixed up was sound of the kick. It was lifeless. Hollow. Of course it was recorded using the old Intex kit I talked about here. I didn’t even try to EQ it into something. I just replaced it with a sample. Sometimes it’s the best and/or only option. I then added the snare, toms, and splash in the chorus using the SSD5 Free plugin played manually via a midi controller 2.

      The hi-hat, on the other hand, is the original I put down way back in 2020. Thankfully I’d direct mic’d it with a GLS ES-57 3. It was easy to compress and ratchet up the high end to give it that crisp, trap like buzz right where I wanted it to.

      The lyrics and vocals were the easiest of the three I recorded on the rented equipment.  I’d had vocal pattern nailed down and the lyrics about 90% complete since the early summer 4.

      Note: The artwork is a heavily edited stock photo by Pavlofox on Pixabay. The logo font is DymoFontInvers by Manfred Klein and [smartphone] by woodcutter Manero – both downloaded from FontFreak, my go to site for wacky fonts of all shapes and sizes.

      1: I chose the working title of “Cicada Hats” because of this stupid fucking video where Rick Beato whines about the sounds of the hi-hats in an Ariana Grande song and compares them to the sound cicadas make.

      2: I managed to snag a used M-Audio Oxygen 25 Third Gen from Kijiji for like twenty-five bucks.

      3: I did record overheads as well, but they were shitcanned even before I’d started to edit the song structure. They were really serving no real purpose at all.

      4: It all started when the “heaping dose of shit” line came to me one day during a company all-hands that was, well, not fun. It took me maybe a day and a half to come up with the rest. From there it was simply tweaking and editing in the name of cadence.

    5. Warms My Heart

      I’ve been keeping an eye on site statistics lately mostly because I’m curious to see if anyone actually reads what I post here. Seems that there are people out there who drop in from time to time.

      The surprising thing I found was that the number one page on this here blog is Linux Tip #1: Max Amount of Locked Memory. It really warms my heart that there are people out there in this big, crazy world who are trying different things. That Max Amount post was me stitching together what I learned after spending half a day gathering information from a few different websites and putting it all in a simple to understand format in case I ever needed it again.

      At the end of the day, even though I moved back to the world of Windows, it warms my heart that other people are taking a run at making Linux work and I hope I’ve saved them even just a little bit of hassle :)

    6. Big, Stupid Car

      “Here’s the problem. We’re accelerating, at speed into a wall in a big, stupid car that cost too much money”

    7. Your One, Short Life Being Remixed

      Yeah, the more I listen to Your One, Short Life on any speakers that are not my monitors, I don’t like the mix at all.  The snare is too buried. The heavy guitars are thin. The bass in the outro is almost non existent. The verse vocals sink into being near inaudible in spots, especially in the second verse.

      So fuck it. I’m in the process of remixing the whole thing. I’ll probably replace the “official” version with whatever I’m doing now, but I may still make the first attempt available just as a reminder to myself that while sometimes pulling the trigger is better than fussing, sometimes it has the opposite outcome.

    8. Your One, Short Life

      Wow, it really has been a bit. I posted Gods, Prophets, or Slaves wayyy back in January 2023.

      Here we are then. Enjoy “Your One, Short Life”

      Click here for lyrics.


      Your One, Short Life ©2024 Nicholas Toone

      Song Notes (There’s a lot to say this time)

      The main body of the tune is in F … something? I can’t remember F what. The only scale I know by heart is G major (yeah, I’m looking at right at you post-solo Master Of Puppets). I stumbled on the main verse of this song while fucking around with the scales section of the All Guitar Chords site and it kinda just went from there. I just hit up that site, load up some different scales, play around with them, and piece together whatever sounds good.

      This was one of those pieces that I worked on for an inordinate amount of time. I finished the composition and recorded the guitars in the mid summer of 2023; was still storing a friends axes, tube amp, and cab and used them to lay down the various heavy bits (the clean parts were played on my Ibanez).

      Recording the drums was bittersweet because what you hear on this track is the very last recording of my kit before I sold it.

      I laid the tracks down in about an hour, then put the kit up for sale on Kijiji. It was gone three days later.

      I gave it all rough mix, had a listen was pleased and…

      … then the tune just sat there. Yes, yes life was busy and all that, but the main issue was that I just could not come up with a melody for the verse sections. Everything I tried just plain sucked. Sometimes I’d listen to it on repeat in the car and nothing I tried clicked.

      Late one night, at the beginning of October, I woke up with a start. Without even thinking about it, I picked up my phone, opened my mail, sent myself the following message:

      … then put my phone down and went back to sleep.

      As I talked about in my post from the middle of last week, I decided to rent a pro level mic and preamp and get the vocals done for some tunes I had lying around. This was the first one I tackled and I took my email to heart.

      While it’s not a complete ripoff of Once In A Lifetime, you definitely hear the influence in there. As I moved deeper into the song, I stared jamming more words in there until the third verse is a near breathless block of words that pretty much sums up the overall subject. The choruses flowed naturally out of all this and took on a somewhat “marching” cadence with just a smattering of melody (and a whisper of harmonies).

      The mixing didn’t take as long as normal; I’d been playing with the instrument mixes on and off over the past year and the vocals we not difficult at all. I attribute this to the SM7B/NV1 setup I employed this time around. After all my whining about “top of the line” and how you don’t really need it, I feel like I have to walk that back a little.

      Yes, you can work with inexpensive, sometimes bargain basement equipment but there is a reason these expensive, top of the line options are so lauded: they do work as advertised. Now, top of the line equipment won’t compensate for a shitty performance. If anything it accentuates shitty performances. If you’re competent, however, top of the line equipment can make your recording effort a little bit easier.

      Remember though, work with what you can afford. Rent what you can’t afford (if at all possible).

      With all that being said, enjoy this new tune!

      Note: The artwork for this track is a photograph I took of a stray dog Manzanillo, Mexico in January 2019. Text effects were added via Affinity Photo.

      NoteNote: The drums are 90% the recorded kit. I did have to blend in samples for the kick and snare as my playing is not what you’d call consistent. Recording this track is probably some of the best drumming I’d done at that point, but I still qualify as an amateur.

      NoteNoteNote: I remixed this song on 1/1/2025. You can find the original mix over here.

    9. Forthcoming

      This is me most days: Oh I wanna do music! No, I’m gonna write! Actually, I think I’ll pick up a paint brush! You know what? Fuck it, I’m going to fire up a video game and lose myself for a few hours 1.

      This is why I have a pile of half finished/not quite finished stuff lying around, I’m like a fucking ping pong ball.

      Anyway, I recently got a bug up my ass to finish the three songs I have sitting around. The only thing they needed was vocals. I mean, I’m not going to die if I didn’t get them done but I just wanted to get them moving, y’know? Figured there was no time like the present. It’s always good to take care of something as soon as you get a bug up your ass about it.

      My issue this time was pure ego. I did try adding vocals to one of these tracks at various times over the past couple of years using what equipment I had on hand, but was just never happy with the results. I tried my SM-57s, the SM58, the GLS-ES57’s, the Behringer C-1… all of these have served well in the past but now I just could not get them to do what I needed.  

      After hmming and hawing over it, I decided to rent an SM7B and a Great River ME-NV1.

      If you’re on the internet, you know what an SM7B is. All I have to say is “those big, microphones that all the podcasters use”. Yeah, you know.

      The ME-NV1, for those who don’t know is a mic preamp that I’ve seen talked about in many a YouTube video (and audio recording forums) and the general consensus is that these two combined can make for a killer vocal sound, spoken or sung 2.

      I’m never going to buy either of these items. I’ve no real need to have an SM7B on hand, let alone a top of the line preamp. Both are expensive (the NV itself will run you fourteen hundred bucks before tax) and both hold their value on the used market, so rental it is!

      Heh, you know what? I got so into what I was doing that didn’t even take a pic of the mic/pre setup so instead here’s the rental receipt:

      I set up everything when i got home (SM7B > ME-NV1 > Focusrite Scarlett > PC/MixBus 32c), did some quick tests and wow. The vocal sound I was getting surprised me. Like, really surprised me. I don’t know if I would call it major label studio quality, but it was far beyond anything I’d done in the past.

      My main problem was that out of the three songs, only one of them had any semblance of lyrics; just very rough idea sloppily written down. The other two? Pffft. Nothing. Nadda. Jack fucking shit.

      So here I was with a good mic, a good mic pre, three songs, no lyrics, and maybe two and a half days.

      Fuck it.

      I pulled out some blank paper, took a deep breath and started to write.

      And goddammit, I did it.

      I just steamrolled my way through it all, scribbling down words while the tracks played; scratching out mistakes and trying again. Testing out ideas in real time. There was one point where I got stuck and had a mild freak out. “There is no way I was going to pull this off, I said to myself. “It normally take me days to write a single verse”. This didn’t last long though and I managed to push through.

      Here’s the pile of in progress sheets.

      My pen started acting up at one point so I had to stop and figure that out.

      With thanks, as always, to the unsung low subscriber hero’s of YouTube, I was able to fix my pen and move on until finally I had three full sets of lyrics written and the vocals recorded:

      Now it’s on to mixing which I don’t anticipate taking too long as I’d been editing and playing with the mixes of all three songs over the past while.

      So, sit tight and over the course of the next few weeks there’ll be three new tunes appearing both here and in Bandcamp.

      1: Oh. My. God. The Witcher 3 is soooooo fucking good. I thought Cyberpunk 2077 was the best video game I’ve ever played but there’s something about The Witcher 3 that hits just right.

      2: Yes, yes there is also the famous Neumann U 87, but the rental on those beasts are prohibitive. While the monthly rate for the SM7B was $46, the U 87 would cost $300 for the same time frame.

    10. What Social Media Exists For

      Here’s what I think Social Media exists for: Social Media exists for people to remind you what they won’t forgive you for.

      – Jon Stewart – NYT Podcasts 11/4/2024