Stop Calling Them VPNs!
This is a bit of a follow-up from a previous post on public (hotel) WiFi, and something of a pet peeve for myself that keeps getting on my nerves and I need to get off my chest: I’m tired of the marketing of various network aggregators and tunnels as “VPNs.” I’m conscious that it’s a bit of a “Granpa Simpsons Yell At Cloud” moment — but back in my days, the name Virtual Private Network referred to the idea of...
23 days ago
COVID, Part 2: The Air Purifier Saga
If you have been wondering why I have missed posts for the past month, the answer is that I caught COVID. Again. And it sucked more than the first time, but mostly for reasons that have little to do with the health itself. The first time, my wife and I caught COVID in London, when visiting the Olympic Park by Stratford, likely not on public transport, since we were wearing masks, but at the cafes or somewhere along the area...
about 1 month ago
Eircode: Perfect, Broken, Or In-Between?
This may be a bit of a weird post to write, seven years after leaving Ireland, and now that i’m a British citizen, but since it came up on Threads, and I thought this is a good opportunity to discuss the fact that people want to “take a side” in the strangest of situations, and appear to be unable to appreciate that what they see from their point of view is not necessarily the full picture. So first of all,...
3 months ago
IPv6 In Real Life: Network Access Controls
It is not a secret that I’m both an early adopter and a critic of IPv6, particularly its deployment and the strong, near-religious conviction from network engineers, that we’re all basically ready for IPv6, except for a few naysayers holding back progress. I tend to disagree as there is still an obvious amount of work needed to be done to allow a seamless experience for people who don’t want to know what IPv6 is in the first place. When approaching...
3 months ago
Again On Transports: Car Culture, Motors, And Me
Last year, I have discussed some of the limits of transports affecting people with diabetes, like me, but I haven’t really dug into my personal preferences in terms of transport, at least not much. As the post at least makes sufficiently clear, I’m not a car driver, and I’m not thrilled at the idea of becoming one (more to that later). The license limits I discussed in the post have little to nothing to do with the reason why I...
4 months ago
First Impressions Of A 3D Printer
Last year, after gnashing my teeth a bit, I decided to buy a 3D printer to have at home. I had designed 3D printed enclosures for some of my electronics projects already, but I ordered those prints from different services that provide SLS on demand, which is the kind of 3D printing that you cannot really do at home. And even though I have had access to an FDM printer at the office, the reasonable requirement of being present while...
4 months ago
20 Years Of Blogging
I have been thinking how to celebrate my blogging anniversary, since today, twenty years ago (May 31st, 2004), I wrote my first (Italian) blog post. The post is honestly not interesting at all, and it’s written like… well, like a teenager, since that’s basically what I was: 17 years old. Among the things that I was thinking of doing was the option of data mining my own posts to figure out which topics I covered most, whether there’s something stylistically...
5 months ago
Free Software Cooperatives Redux
Some years ago, I mused that what the world needed was Free Software cooperatives. The post was written on the back of BerliOS shutting down, and so the conversation that followed mostly focused on the need for hosting providers to handle source control and issue tracking, a problem that nowadays is covered by Codeberg — although I personally haven’t taken the plunge to migrate because I don’t think my workflows would be compatible with it, and I don’t have the...
5 months ago
Intentionally Permissive Licensing
A few months ago, when talking about licensing preferences between permissive and copyleft, a zealot decided to argue with me that I shouldn’t use permissive licenses for my software ever. Said character got obviously blocked, because I don’t have time for that, but I thought the topic deserves a little more nuanced coverage, particularly given I care — and be warned, this is a topic that is dear enough to me that I wrote about this extensively for the past...
6 months ago
On My Dislike For Advent Of Code
Note that I’m intentionally posting this quite far away from the usual time of the year that Advent of Code is relevant, to avoid biasing those people who might actually be interested in the event against it. This is not criticism of the event, is a personal opinion that I believe has value in being slightly more widely distributed. You may or may not have heard of Advent of Code before – often confusingly shortened to AOC – so if...
6 months ago
Code Reviews In The Workplace
I have touched upon code reviews practices in the past, as well as covering some of the requests I have previously listened to during code reviews, but I have so far avoided discussing directly how I engage with code reviews, both as an author and as a reviewer, which I think might be particularly interesting as a bridge between the corporate and Open Source worlds, which I have straddled for long enough. I could spend some time discussing the way...
7 months ago
Free Idea: Smart Home and Water Softeners
You may remember that some years ago I had a water softener installed, and I can report I’m very happy with it. The one part that has been a bit more annoying is that there is no obvious reminder when it’s time to go ahead and put in new salt blocks — most softener use some version of salt, the one I’m using uses 4Kg blocks as the preferred method, though you could use tablets as well. Since the consumption...
7 months ago
Service Announcement: Expect Stochastic Posts Drops
It appears that, much as I have been trying to stick to a relatively consistent schedule, the universe does not want to agree. While for the majority of last year I believe I managed to maintain my fortnightly schedule, and I felt well placed to continue so this year, I do expect instead things will get patchy particularly close to my 20 years blogging anniversary, May 31st, 2024. I say expect because as I’m writing this, it is just February,...
8 months ago
On The Nostalgia For Shovelware Magazines
I have covered nostalgia before, and honestly I’m not among those who find the whole “good old days” should come back (I might have labeled those people, a time or two, as Computer Conservatives and I stand by that naming), but that does not mean I’m totally immune at looking back at how carefree and happy I was as a kid, compared to now. I am, though, aware that the reason why I’m less happy now has less to do...
8 months ago
No, I Don’t Miss Google Reader
I have said this before a number of times, but let me repeat it on the blog explicitly as well: I’m not missing Google Reader despite having been a very active user of it back in the days, and being a blogger for 20 years now. But maybe I should give a bit more context on what I’m talking about, since Google Reader was shut down over ten years ago by now, and a lot of people who might be...
8 months ago
Hotel WiFi, VPNs, And Security
This post is brought to you by a Mastodon post, from Italian blogger Paolo Attivissimo back in October, complaining about the ease with which he can identify the names of other people around him when connected to a hotel WiFi. It’s a perfectly valid concern, particularly when considering that WiFi is pretty much table stakes for public venues nowadays, despite the widespread 4G/5G phones and tablets, as modems in computers are if possible less common than they were ten years...
9 months ago
The Right To Repair Is Not For You
Yes, it’s a particularly incendiary title, but I think it deserves to be, particularly as too many people in multiple of my bubbles appear to be at the very least excited if not ecstatic, at the idea of any kind of Right to Repair particularly as applied to electronics. Unfortunately, I have seen very limited space discussing the limitations, and the possible drawbacks, of such a requirement. First of all, let me address the elephant in the room here: for...
9 months ago
LLM As A CASE Tool
Preamble and disclaimer: I work at Meta, a company that has been famously working on AI for a long while. I do not, though, work on anything related to AI myself, don’t understand most of the implementation detail, and I don’t have any of the prerequisite knowledge to be able to get into the dirt of it. What I write here is my own, personal opinion and does not represent the opinion of my employer or my colleagues. And while...
10 months ago
I Want My Tetris Fix
Like many people my age (I’m almost forty, hard to imagine for someone who didn’t expect to survive the year, and wasn’t planning to reach thirty after leaving the hospital!), I grew up playing Tetris and various variants of it. Unlike many American (or, I’d guess, Japanese) kids though, I didn’t play it on the Gameboy, since that was way too expensive for my family. I instead played it on those terrible “Brick Game” style handhelds, sold on those order-by-mail...
10 months ago
Professionalism And The Software Industry
A couple of months ago I had a longish, nuanced, healthy discussion on Mastodon about professionalism in software development, and I thought it would be useful for me to summarise most of my views on the matter in a blog post, because that’s what I do after all. As usual, this post reflects my personal opinions, not those of my employer. I have touched upon professionalism once or twice, though I never really tried to discuss directly what I see...
11 months ago
Example Code Should Be Exemplar (The Nathaniel’s Nudge)
In my decade working in bubbles, one of the things I definitely learnt better than I did in open source is doing reviews. Part of it is because review tooling has gone a long way from mailing lists, despite what hardcore real programmers think, but the most impact was from working with a lot more people who knew what they do. Nathaniel is one of those people, and someone I miss working with quite a lot. He and I worked...
11 months ago
Windows 11: Dev Drive Within Storage Spaces
Earlier this year, Microsoft announced Dev Drive, a tuned filesystem for development on Windows 11. Since I’ve been using a Windows machine on and off to work on various projects, and the feature has been made available this past October, I thought I would give it a good try, particularly because according to them it provides a significant boost to both Git and Python, which are the two main components of my development workflow nowadays. Unfortunately, the use of my...
12 months ago
Free Idea: dnf Prometheus Exporter
This port is part of a series of “Free Ideas“, ideas for projects that came to my mind as being useful to me and in general, but for which I have no time, energy, or skills to work on. If you’re interested in implementing any of the Free Ideas from my blog, please be my guest! I’m also going to try something different this time around, and will write in more details about it at the end of this post,...
12 months ago
Smart Plugs Tricks: Air Fresheners and Washing Machines with Home Assistant
You may remember I bought my first smart plug some years ago to control the Christmas tree that my wife and me bought and set up. At the time, I had been thinking of what other good uses a smart plug could be used for. It wasn’t until I bought the SP111 to run ESPHome that I realized I could use it to control the subwoofer for the home theatre, in a fit of almost utter laziness (not wanting to...
about 1 year ago
Tidbit: Writing A PWA For Link Tagging
After having given Google Analytics another try and having given up on it (both in terms of GDPR complexity, cookie law compliance, and general AdBlock update within my readership), I have more recently started running a “first party analytics” tool called Matomo. Since Matomo does not share the data with anyone but myself, this makes things a lot safer to run with decent compliance, and since I drop any identification of individuals, I can say I respect my readers privacy...
about 1 year ago
NHS: The Good, The Bad, And The Blood Boiling
Given it’s not a secret that I have some history of health problems, you can imagine that I end up with a fair amount of experience of different healthcare systems: the Italian SSN, the Irish HSE, and more recently the English NHS. And like many others I have a very nuanced view of healthcare because of this. To make the obvious very apparent, I am totally a believer in public healthcare — it’s the primary, though not sole, reason why...
about 1 year ago
Personal Infrastructure Update: WordPress on Docker
You may remember that two years ago I decided to self-host WordPress on Gandi after Automattic made it impossible for me to write blog posts on my normal Windows setup. While this setup mostly worked fine over the past couple of years, I have been hitting some of its limitation from time to time, so I eventually decided to go from the half-managed setup with Gandi to a fully self-hosted setup with Hetzner, and since this is now completed as...
about 1 year ago
WordPress Kills The Blogger Star
This appears to be a regular late-summer column on my blog, as two years ago I had to break my regular pattern due to a WordPress bug which even as a paying customer was not going to be fixed any time soon — leading me to switch over to Gandi’s Simple Hosting. I have already argued that the death of blogging has less to do with Google Reader shutting down, and more the fact that all blogging platforms turn to...
about 1 year ago
Remote Debugging With GDB; part 3: SWD
As part of my Gone With The Wind side project I found myself using something that I hadn’t used in many years: GDB with remote debugging, which is something I have done many times in the past, both on servers and on embedded system, and last described in 2010. In this case though, I’m going to be attaching to an MCU as part of a development kit. Which particular development kit only counts up to a point: as I wrote...
about 1 year ago
And Finally, FreeStyle Libre 2 Support
You may remember that over three and a half years ago, I started looking in Abbott’s FreeStyle Libre 2 reader protocol, which turned out to be encrypted between the device and their software, as a clear attempt at messing with reverse engineers — I say that because the protocol does not require you to confirm the connection on the device, which means that it’s clearly not done to protect the private data on one’s glucometer from malware or other attempts...
about 1 year ago
USB Power Delivery For Hobby Projects
I’m no stranger to quirky USB power systems; indeed I have ranted about USB chargers for over ten years already, well before most people would have heard brands such as Anker, or technology such as GaN (well, maybe on NCIS), though to be honest I didn’t hear any of that either at the time. Like many of my usual half-thought-out projects, I could see that this (eventually) would become an important topic, but I had no idea how that would...
about 1 year ago
Gone With The Wind: Donation Drive For Diabetes UK
If you have been following me on socials, you probably know that I’ve taken August off from dayjob (mostly out of exhaustion — it’s been a complex three months, satisfying, but tiring), and I started looking at a number of side projects to get my mind back to a productive state. It seems cyclical, either because of me or because of the work I’m not sure. Because one of the major drains on my energy lately has been motivation, I’m...
about 1 year ago
Acrylic Lamps: Finally Working
You may remember that, by now, over three years ago I spent some time investigating the type of acrylic lamps that are easily found on Amazon and AliExpress — which are effectively the same that Techmoan reviewed six years ago. Originally, I wanted to design and publish a board that would fit in the bases I could buy already made, but besides the constraints being harder to work with, I stumbled across multiple problems that ended up wasting quite a...
about 1 year ago
Diabetes and Transports (London Edition)
When I write about diabetes, I’m usually writing about technology, since I wrote my own tools to access glucometers’ data, and reviewed quite a few already. This time I’m taking a more personal view and talk about the way diabetes can affect one’s life. Please note that while I don’t expect anything that I’m getting to here to be particularly disconcerting, there’s still the risk that those more sensitive find this type of discussion harder to read and process, be...
over 1 year ago
TrueNAS: Restricting SMB Share Visibility
This is a service post that, like many before it, is meant to mostly leave a note to myself on how to do something that took me a while to sort out, and also possibly provide a breadcrumb for others, assuming that search engines manage to throw out the algorithmically generated SEO spam. A Little Context: Home Assistant NAS Support The most recent Home Assistant release as of me writing this, 2023.6 has introduced support for network-attached storage, to hold...
over 1 year ago
Migrations and Attention Budgets
Please note, this blog post talks about concerns that are mostly known about in big companies (mainly Big Tech), rather than in smaller realities or in FLOSS. While some of the issues I’m going to be talking about have parallels in some of these, you probably would be lost wondering what it is that I’m talking about if you never experience those massively bigger reality. I sometimes envy you. People are busy. It’s a truism, but if you work supporting...
over 1 year ago
Dell XPS 9360 and ChromeOS Flex
You may remember that a few years ago, before moving to London, I bought a Dell XPS 9360, originally coming with Ubuntu — and a WiFi card that wasn’t great. The laptop served me well for quite a while but, over the years, ended up disappointing me. More than my previous Dell laptop. At some point, tired of dealing with a flat battery every single time I tried using it, I decided to put Linux aside and use Windows 10...
over 1 year ago
La Settimana Enigmistica Digitale e la loro nuova app
This is the first post in Italian on this blog in over ten years, mostly because it only really applies to readers who would be understanding Italian in the first place. Please see the summary on Mastodon, if you’re curious. Sono praticamente cresciuto con La Settimana Enigmistica. Non riesco ad immaginare nessuno, in Italia, che non conosca almeno di nome questa rivista, che viene pubblicata da quasi un secolo, ininterrottamente. Quand’ero bambino, mia madre compilava le parole crociate ogni settimana,...
over 1 year ago
IPv6 In Real Life
I have built quite the reputation as an IPv6 contrarian over the years, particularly as I yearly criticize FOSDEM for describing their dual-stack network as a “legacy” network. As I keep reminding people, I’m also a relatively early adopter of IPv6 at home (with related annoyances), and I have eagerly tested and debugged issues with services having (partial) IPv6 support, such as OVH back in the days. So if I’m denying that IPv6 “has won” and is the “current” protocol...
over 1 year ago
Hardware Review: Onyx Boox Nova Air C
You may remember that a couple of years back I bought a 10″ eInk Tablet made by Onyx, named the Boox Max Lumi, inspired by Alec from Technology Connections as a way to write text without having a bright display in front of my eyes in the evening. While I have not used it now in a few months due to… well just not having the energy to blog that late at night in the first place, I’m very fond...
over 1 year ago
eBooks Are Still A Mess In 2023
I can definitely consider myself an early adopter of eBooks and reading devices. Indeed, most of my journey through this particular turn of life has been documented on this blog, from when on a whim (and with basically all the savings I had at that point) bought a Sony PRS-505, and struggled to find content for it. For the past ten years, I ended up settling for the Amazon Kindle ecosystem, well understanding the problems connected with the vendor lock...
over 1 year ago
How I Learnt To Stop Worrying And Take The Debt
This is a second-attempt at writing about the usefulness of debt, both financial and technical, after my first attempt fell totally flat due to COVID brain (at least that’s my hope it was just COVID brain.) If you feel you read some of this before, that’s why. One of the things I’m doing different this time is that I’m separating my discussion of household debt from technical debt. As I wrote before, I grew up in a household that had...
over 1 year ago
On Being An Opinionated Employee In (Big) Tech
Obvious disclaimer: what you are about to read is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of my employer, my management chain, my family, or my friends. Despite having already posted a take somewhat related to layoffs, following the layoffs performed by my own employer (Meta), and not believing I have much to add in the analysis of the current economic and labour market situation, since it definitely isn’t my area of expertise, I realized I do...
over 1 year ago
Home Automation — An End Of The Year Special
With 2022 heading to a close, I can have a bit of hindsight of how the past year looked like, from the point of view of my home automation solution, and a bit of a look into the future of how things might change. I think it’s useful because this is the first year since we moved into this apartment when we actually went out fairly regularly, so having a bit of a thought how things worked out (or didn’t)...
almost 2 years ago
A View On Cashback And Rewards Programs
If you follow me for many years, you probably have noticed that I have a penchant to openly discuss various rewards and cashback programs. I have previously been told that this feels off-character for someone who also generally writes about security and software development, as the common view is that these programs are a privacy invasion — but as I already explained I don’t see it that way and I indeed tend to identify and otherwise leverage these programs when...
almost 2 years ago
A FreeStyle Libre Retrospective, Nearly Seven Years Later
I have diabetes, not that it is a secret. As many other people with diabetes, I have been trained to prick my finger multiple times a day to test my blood sugar (glycemia) since I left the hospital. The finger-pricking routine involves drawing just enough capillary blood to load into a test strip (or cartridge) for it to give you an instantaneous reading. It’s a time-tested method but also one that has a lot more drawbacks than you may think....
almost 2 years ago