Nicholas Toone

Random Tech

If it isn’t directly software or hardware related I’ll maybe put it here.

  • Friction Update: GrapheneOS

    I’m taking another run at GrapheneOS and this time, I think I’ve managed to make it work.

    I basically have the same issue I did when initially moving from Windows to Linux: I needed to change mindset from “ok, what replaces this thing that I use” while looking for the exact the same thing with a different name to “what is it I need/want to do?” and then find something that does that thing – and be patient while learning the new app. Sure, Photoshop may be the industry standard but boy, do I remember how difficult it was to learn how to use it. It’s the same with every tool out there but we just allow ourselves to lulled into the complacency of the status quo.

    The cool thing about the Open Source world is there is something for everyone. Some apps are completely amazing. Some are utter shit. And there is everything else in between. Be patient. You’ll find something that works.

    Yes, there will be a learning curve but that’s all part of it. And the learning curve for GrapheneOS turned out to be not as bad as I thought the first time around. If I include the few days I played with it at the end of February, I figure it took about the same amount of effort as it did when I switched from iOS to Android.

    You just gotta be patient (there’s that word again) and treat it like something brand new not something you feel should be exactly the same.

    Blah blah blah, here’s where I am:

    App Stores

    The GrapheneOS “app store” literally has twelve entries in it. One of them is an app store called Accrescent which I installed, downloaded a maps program I haven’t opened yet. There’s not a lot there tbh.

    The GrapheneOS “app store” is where you can install the Google Play Services and Store, allowing you to login and download apps. However the idea of GrapheneOS is to avoid this if you can, so I started looking to the alternatives.

    F-Droid

    F-Droid is an Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) repository. It’s pretty easy to install, just go to the website, download the APK, tap on said APK and install when prompted.

    I really, really like F-droid so far. I’ve found all kinds of goodness that I’m using on a daily basis.

    • Auxio. A nice, neat, simple music player. While I like Qobuz and appreciate a vast catalog of music on demand and in my pocket, I do love that I can copy my actual MP3 collection to my device and not have to worry about whatever I’m listening to crapping out as I drive outside of good cell reception.
    • QUIK SMS. I don’t really like the default GraphereOS messenger so, at first, I tried out Simple SMS Messenger. It was ok but it has an issue where pictures that my contacts sent through would not load. QUIK SMS doesn’t have this issue and seems to do the job.
    • HeliBoard. Admittedly, I really like Google’s keyboard (Gboard) but I don’t like Google and don’t want them tracking all the shit I type. I also don’t like the default GrapheneOS keyboard. It’s kinda butch. So I’m trying HeliBoard. So far it’s good. I miss the gif option, but I’ll live. I have installed Gboard for comparison purposes and so far HeliBoard is doing what I need.
    • Aves Libre. The default GrapheneOS image gallery is junk. I mean it’s, really, really bad. It picks up single photos as folders and just shits the bed with navigation. No matter. If there is one thing I love about FOSS, it’s that someone out there has come up with a reasonable alternative. And, so far, Aves Libre seems to be just that. Its Collection layout makes sense, you can hide shit you don’t want to see, you can do a variety of edits from basic filters to more advanced options like curves. I may try out a couple of others.
    • Acrticons. Holy shit this icon pack is amazing. For the first time I’ve found a pack that covers all of my app icons1 and really helps with the look and feel I was going for. Fantastic.

    Aurora

    If you need something from the actual Play Store, but don’t want to bother with the Play Store, the Aurora Store is an excellent alternative. I’ve grabbed the rest of my apps from here; Simplenote, Qobuz, my financial shit, and my work shit. I haven’t had any real problems, only mild annoyances – the main one being my work shit needs the Google services and Play store installed to work properly. Regardless, Play is installed, but I haven’t even launched it. I guess it just needs to be there (and both it and its services are sandboxed). If there is an app of the closed sourced variety I need, I just grab it from Aurora and away I go.

    Some Friction

    Maps. Hooo boy. I really want to not rely on Google Maps, so I’m giving Here We Go a spin. It makes me realize how fucking good Google Maps is. But Google Maps is so fucking good because they track every single thing we do.

    We have a grocery store here named Metro. I was out with the family the other night and needed to pick up a couple of items. In Google Maps, I’d simply type in metro and it would automatically pop up the one closest to me and I could then very quickly select it and check store hours.

    In Here We Go, I typed metro and… it showed me all the Metro stations in downtown Montreal.

    I sighed, opened a browser and checked the Metro Grocery store website and found that they were still open.

    Look at that. We live in a world where an extra thirty seconds of work feels like a personal slight. How dare I have to open a web browser and search a store’s hours?

    I just took a deep breath and, realizing the absurdity of the whole scenario and headed to the Metro.

    Then there’s text messages. I haven’t been able to get RCS working on GrapheneOS. When I first tried this in the spring, I thought RCS was a must have and was one of the reasons I gave up.

    I now realize that RCS doesn’t really matter all that much to me. RCS is really just SMS two-dot-oh and it appears that Google has locked down the API that would allow RCS so other developers are shit out of luck adding RCS into their message apps. And I do not want to use the Google Messenger app.

    Besides, I don’t use 90% of the features crap that’s been stuffed into modern messaging apps thanks to RCS or iMessage, or whatever. I just want to send you a message. Or a picture. Sometimes I’ll use an emoji. Maybe a gif2 if I’m feeling fancy. I mean, I really miss simple text emoticons. They convey so much with so little.

    Of course, my convos from the Google Android phone didn’t come over but I wasn’t expecting them to. I did manage to export and import my contacts so there is that. I’m still going to answer people with “New phone, who dis?” when they message me first.

    So…?

    I’m fucking loving it. I think I may just have GrapheneOS working just right. While I’ll give it a few weeks and see if there are any major snags, so far it looks like I’m ready to ditch the official Google Android for more private pastures.

    1. One exception: There was no icon for CloudPlayer, but no matter. I’d replace this with Auxio anyway. There is an icon for Auxio. Problem solved. ↩︎
    2. Hard G. Yes, I’ll die on that hill. ↩︎

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Universal Stupid Bullshit

    There has been some ballyhoo of late over the EU’s regulatory decision to force phone hardware companies to use strictly USB-C connectors for charging.

    The quick and dirty is that the EU wants to force hardware manufacturers to make charging ports on all phones, tablets, cameras, headphones, portable speakers, and handheld video game consoles USB-C.

    Uh-oh. Sounds like they’re trying to stamp out innovation, kill competition, and shut down Christmas all at the same time.

    (more…)

  • The Easy Part Is The Computer

    I’m going to add a little more to my post from last week. Yes, yes I’ve whinged and kvetched about computers here many times but I’ve been rethinking my relationship with technology quite a lot over the past few weeks.

    Up until the past year or so, I’ve been what you would call a die hard Mac user and had been since around 2007. Apple was my jam. The house is filled with MacBooks, iPhones, iPads, Apple TV’s, Apple Watches, and HomePod mini’s.1

    I still have two Macs but one is at deaths door and the other is so slow it’s been relegated to being a lowly media server.  In the meantime, I’d been researching new machines and using my work computer, a Dell XPS running Windows 11, as a stopgap – and we all know that using your work computer for personal shit is never a good idea.

    While I’m somewhat interested in MacBooks, I’m no longer the fanatic I once was. Apple made some design and pricing decisions over the past few years that soured my taste. Touchbars, USB-C, shitty keyboards, $500 wheels, $1200 monitor stands … you get the picture. Some of their recent designs are good (well the MacBook Pros anyway), and the Apple Silicon chips are interesting. Yet while I was considering saving and getting a MBP, in the end I simply could no longer justify the prices Apple is asking for their computers. So instead of spending a small fortune on a new MacBook Pro, I started looking at the PC market.

    After years of deriding Microsoft, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Windows is actually really good now. Especially Windows 11. Sure, there’s cruft, legacy garbage, and weird design decisions hanging out in the background, but there is cruft, legacy garbage, and weird design decisions hanging out in the background of any operating system.

    The work Dell I’ve been using would be a really nice computer if it wasn’t so prone to hardware issues. At the beginning of of the year I had to run the gauntlet with Dell Support. Three motherboard replacements later and currently the trackpad doesn’t work if the laptop is plugged into power – and this is a $2500+ laptop.

    I also am partial to Lenovo ThinkPads but one of those would also run me a couple of thousand dollars.

    And then I got to thinking: do I really need to part with that much money just to get a computer, any computer, that can handle basic music production and light video editing?

    “Marketing, marketing, marketing. Everything is Better! Faster! Thinner! Lighter! New new new! Forget about what was out just a few months ago! Check out what we have right now! It’s better!”
    – Every Tech Company That Exists.

    So I started looking at the second hand and refurbished market.

    Here is what I found:

        1. Companies market to us in order to get us to buy new and stigmatize anything second hand/refurbished.
        2. Thanks to this, people rely on new items way more than we should which, in turn, is creating massive amounts of e-waste.
        3. There are way more second hand/refurbished options out there than I think anyone realizes.
        4. It’s all good stuff.

    So count me in. Here I am on my refurbished HP laptop and everything is going just fine.

    1: I’m severely disappointed with the HomePod mini’s.

    Pros:

      • They look good.
      • They sound great for their size.
      • They pair and work ok with the Apple TV. Sometimes.

    Cons:

      • Siri is just  as useless as it is on the iPhone and it’s the only way you can control the HomePods.
      • The setup and settings in the the Home app is non-intuitive garbage.
      • The Home app itself is non-intuative garbage
      • They only work half the time when mirroring a Mac to the Apple TV. 
      • When starting a movie on Apple TV more often than not, they’ll forget they’re connected and there is no sound for nearly two minutes. Then they’ll remember the ATV and sound kicks in.
      • They constantly lose connection with each other or the Internet.
      • They only work with Apple Music. As luck would have it, I was trying out Apple Music this summer and let me tell you, calling up music on the HomePods was shaky at best. It would ether play the wrong thing, or try and play it on the TV. More often than not, I’d hear “There is a problem with Apple Music please try again later”. I cancelled my Apple Music subscription because I found it in no way better than Spotify and it never worked as advertised on anything past my iPhone. It sucked on the HomePod and the Apple TV and my computers. The Mac app is merely ok. There is no dedicated Windows app so you either get iTunes or the Apple Music web interface (both of which are garbage). You know what Spotify has? An app for Windows, Mac, and Linux. And they’re all fucking great.

  • Another Major Shift

    After all my posts opining about Apple, macOS, Dell, and Windows, I’ve thrown my hands in the air and given up looking at new computer hardware. I have a ton of reasons which I’ll write about, but the main one is that I’ve become dismayed thinking about the amount of second hand computers that exist while companies churn out new product for ridiculous prices. As a friend of mine recently said: “I like the idea that Apple is making high performance chips that are low on power consumption but I can’t, and won’t spend that much money on a computer.”

    After looking into the second hand market, I headed to a local, mom and pop refurbished computer store and marveled at the WALL OF LAPTOPS they had on display:

    WALL OF LAPTOPS

    These are all second hand/refurbished. And they have more than these stored away in the back. They have old old computers, not so old computers, and newish computers. Give them an idea of what you’re looking for and they’ll hook you up. Why would anyone buy something brand new? Performance? The ability to run whatever is shiny and new?

    Well …

    I ended up purchasing a refurbished HP EliteBook  850 G3. The model is around six years old and came with an i7 6600u, 16GB of memory (which I upgraded to 32GB thank to an extra stick of ram I had lying around) and a 512 SSD. Supposedly the CPU is not Windows 11 supported but who cares?

    In another twist, I decided to flatten the hard drive and give Linux a run for its money.

    After doing some research, I settled on Fedora Jam as it’s geared towards music production and so far so good.

    I’ve got my Tascam US16x08 running using ALSA – which came with Fedora Jam and needed no configuration – and it all works with Mixbus32c. I have to say that, so far, Mixbus runs so goddamned smooth on Linux, which makes sense considering it’s based on Ardour.

    My usual go-to and longtime favorite DAW is Reaper, and it turns out they have a Linux build.  I managed to get it installed and running but, at first, it would not pick up the Tascam. I kept at it over the past few days and now it seems to be running just fine – although under JACK rather than ALSA. I mean ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    Music aside, I’ve managed to set it up Fedora as a full-on desktop environment running KDE Plasma and with all my usual apps (Firefox, Spotify, FocusWriter) as well as a good number of Open Source alternatives. The most pleasing surprise is a video editor called Kdenlive. it’s got just the right amount of features that I used in DaVinci Resolve and Premier Pro to make it just right without excessive bloat.

    I’m also loving how well a new release of Linux runs on six year old hardware. When I first brought the laptop home, and before I nuked the drive, I gave the Windows 10 install a spin and it was a little sluggish. Fedora, on the other hand, is running like a dream.

    Linux has come a long, long way since I seriously tired it last. I know it will never overtake Windows or macOS – I mean, it’s been poised to take over for as long as I can remember – but wow, it’s so much better than I remember.

    So far so good.

  • It’s Alive!

    At the end of February, I posted about my beloved 11″ MacBook Air finally giving up the ghost.

    This morning I was reading that the last of the 11″ MBA’s were being added to the obsolete list and I started thinking about the error icon I saw:

    bork bork bork

    I looked it up. And found that it was most likely an issue with the SSD. For a goof, I pulled the laptop off the shelf, removed the back and and found …

    There was no screw holding the M2 SSD in place. How in the … ?

    My best guess is that when I took that machine apart a couple of years ago to  replace the battery, I forgot to put the screw that secures the M2 drive back in place. And in the time between then and now, the SSD managed to wiggled itself loose.

    I have this tiny, external drive that holds a 128GB M2. I took it  apart and removed one of the screws holding the M2 in place. I then went to the Mac, re-seated the SSD, put in the screw, put the back cover on.  plugged it in, hit the power button and …

    The Mac is humming away running a software update. Who knows how much longer it has, but I’ll take it.

  • Ashes To Ashes

    Midsummer 2011, I purchased a base model 11″ MacBook Air; 1.6 Intel Core i5. 4GB ram. 128GB SSD.

    This past week I went to turn it on. It gave me this:

    bork bork bork

    I held down the power button until it turned off. Hit the power button again and…

    … nothing.

    So this was it. It didn’t go put with a whimper. It just decided to pack it in.

    For ten and a half years, this little MacBook Air:

      • Was my portable recording unit across two bands; countless demos and jams were recorded using GarageBand and Reaper.
      • Powered MainStage at home, rehearsals, and on stage.
      • Was my backup when my work computer freaked out (and, at one point, used for a full year because a company I worked for didn’t provide computers).
      • I’ve written who knows how many blog posts on it.
      • Was my teleprompter when recording video.
      • Was very decent at photo/image editing thanks to Pixelmator.
      • Has traveled with me to many countries. It was so small I just tossed it in the front pocket of my carry-on; I didn’t need an extra laptop bag.

    In all those years the MacBook didn’t have a single issue. I did replace the battery in 2019; it wasn’t dead, it just wasn’t holding a charge for any more than an hour and and that just comes with age and heavy useage.

    That’s value.

    RIP little MacBook. You more than earned it.

  • Deep Breath

    It’s been over a week since I got the Dell back. It’s still going strong except for the issue where the touchpad stops working when the laptop is plugged in.

    Told Dell Support I’d live with it after they offered yet another motherboard replacement. I just can’t right now with that. The XPS has decent battery life so I’m pretty ok with using the touchpad when the laptop is not plugged in and a mouse when it is.

    I then started thinking about my wanting one of the new MacBook Pros and cooled my jets a little. As mentioned previously, the XPS is a very decent laptop when it’s working. Also, the new MacBook Pros are very expensive and it’s money I can’t justify spending right now.

    In the end I opted for a minor (and much cheaper) compromise: I ordered two 32 GB sticks of G.SKILL DDR4 which will max out the RAM on the XPS. I have a year left on the Dell ProSupport Plus so I’m going to tough it out and if the issues get any worse than the current touchpad shenanigans, then I’m going to milk every last second of their time and resources.

    I really believe that Support is the Achilles Heel for any company not named Apple.  I’m sorry, but the having Apple Stores puts them in a class by themselves.