You realize you’re close to reaching madness when you buy smart lights for the Christmas tree, configure them via a Docker container on your NAS, and use Homebridge to link them to HomeKit so you can change their colors like an idiot from your watch.

Coldplay - feelslikeimfallinginlove 🎵

Move slow and fix things - Veronica Explains - Mastodon

Usually, I don’t share my weekly logs here, but this one is different from the others, and I’m happy to share it in this timeline. Cold ❄️

My wife just said, you need to go outside with a camera, you couldn't make this light up. So I did, and I didn't - Steve Carter - Mastodon

First time trying a trackball mouse. Is it really better than a traditional mouse in terms of ergonomics?

The first time I’m pre-ordering something. It’s time to replace my old Apple Watch Series 4. Welcome, Series 10! ⌚️

MacOS Sonoma 14.6.1 update asked me to sign in to my Apple ID again and even required to create a new FileVault disk encryption key.

WTF. 😕

New spacebar! 🐤

After a long time I concluded something I never expected. I'm really happy!

If you're curious how much music I've accumulated over the years, well, I'd say a lot! 👀

I did a clean format of the Mac and now not even the Apple Time Capsule disk is recognized. Ouch, no more Time Machine.

Well, nothing, even the second disk is no longer accessible. Same story as a month ago. 😕

A small warning to those who use external disks encrypted with FileVault on macOS.

One of my disks was inadvertently disconnected several times and now it's no longer recognized, specifically I receive the error 'A problem was detected with the disk that prevents it from being unlocked.'

I tried various ways to restore it but all without success, in the end I formatted it with another device because the macOS Disk Utility was freezing. And this is just one part, before formatting it, I tried restarting the MacBook with the disk connected and I got a completely black screen with only the mouse cursor visible. As soon as I disconnected the disk, the macOS login screen immediately appeared.

Wtf?

I tried to view all disks from the terminal but even here the command remained indefinitely waiting, ctr+c to terminate everything.

The disk is new and DriveDx has never reported any issues, indeed the conditions are better than my internal disk soldered on the MacBook motherboard.

I've never experienced anything like this and all this made me reflect. The main problem is that I relied on FileVault, thus remaining dependent on macOS.

Having only one MacBook, I haven't had the opportunity to try connecting the disk to another device.

Moral of the story?

Fortunately, I have a backup copy of the entire disk, but I think I will completely eliminate the use of FileVault on all disks to switch back to the old VeraCrypt. This doesn't mean that all problems will be solved but at least I'll have the chance to try mounting the disks independently of the operating system.

Today is World Backup Day.

Another reminder of the importance of saving all your memories and what you care about.

Usually, I don't share all the music I listen to, but I'm curious to know if there's any other crazy person like me out there who listens to music of this genre.

Sometimes I fall asleep to this playlist.

It seems that the new macOS 14.4 update may lead to a change in the FileVault recovery key.

Quite strange, indeed.

Okay, maybe it's excessive, but is it normal "to get pumped" listening to old cartoon songs? 🎵

Gee, forget about the latest hits.

I've put aside local hosting completely for now and opted for iTunes Match. I've uploaded 2k songs and the synchronization went smoothly.

It seems like a really nice service, wish I had known about it earlier.

I wanted to try some self-hosted alternatives for music, and among the recommended ones is Navidrome.

Really not bad, it's working on a Raspberry Pi Zero W and can handle two simultaneous streams on different devices without difficulty.

The new version 0.16.4 of Restic addresses a bug in the compression library found in version 0.16.3.

Users employing maximum compression might experience damaged blobs. It seems that the recommended verification step is to perform a check with the '--read-data' option, which would download the entire repository.

I don't want to fall back into the rabbit hole of configuration as happened in the past, but I wanted to give Obsidian another try for managing long texts and small relationships between them.

Perhaps I've managed to find the right canvas for my thoughts.

For those interested, three extensions: Minimal Theme, Hider, and Style Setting.

Just finished the first run of Undertale Yellow, and it was truly a masterpiece!

I have a lot of CDs and music media that I have bought over the years, plus songs and tracks I’ve produced.

I’m starting to wonder if I really need to continue paying for my Apple Music subscription.

I think the Frugal subreddit is partly responsible for this thought.

Ouch, 26 billion records of data leaks. Interestingly, if all of this involved public keys generated by the use of passkeys, nothing would have happened.

Perhaps more interesting is that MySpace is still being used.

And now, even the offsite backup management is entrusted to an open-source project, Restic.

Crontab for scheduling and pmset for nightly backups.

Last, I've created a small script to quickly access all backups without having to remember commands and configurations.

Thanks Restic!

I think I've reached the height of madness when my friend said “it's like feeling at home” and I immediately thought of the Debian system.

In my opinion, the most useful invention in the world is noise-canceling headphones.

They manage to eliminate the Sunday screams of the neighbors, replacing them with relaxing music.

It's a pity not being able to use them in any situation without others realizing.

Restic features like dry runs and snapshot mounting blow my mind. I'm starting to love this software.

January 2024, and I finally managed to delete Telegram.

Unfortunately, WhatsApp here has the same weight as iMessage in the United States, but at least I have gone from two platforms with doubtful privacy to one. Signal would be the ideal solution for everything, but as always, privacy is the last of the average person's problems.

Am I the only one who feels "uncomfortable" when faced with dozens and dozens of messaging apps?

A curious post on the homelab subreddit that I want to share:

I've discovered a peculiar comfort in the constant, low-level hum of my server fans. This soothing backdrop not only masks annoying external sounds, effectively raising the noise floor from 30 dB to 65 dB, but it has also become essential for my sleep.

I had never seen anything like this before.

I always charge my iPhone around 11 PM, but this time it completely drained and when I turned it on the next morning I find the battery at 65%.

wtf.

iOS 17.2.1 (21C66)

We're honest, the real wrapped isn't from Spotify, but from your website!

Ready for the next year 🚀

A simple GitHub action that allows checking all the broken links on a website. It uses Lychee for verification.

In my case, there are a total of 40 links to fix.

This image contains 500GB.

Rip small backup drive. ⛅️

A reminder for those who use hard disks to store their data:

Periodically check the disk's health!

The fact that your data is "copied correctly" doesn't mean the disk is free of issues.

Each disk may have a limit of reallocated sectors to still be considered valid by the manufacturer.

It's time to replace crappy SMS for Apple's two-factor authentication.

macOS has a great tool for renaming large quantities of files, but lately I've been using Transnomino. It allows you to manage files using their metadata or other information.

Love it!

Another reminder that most cloud services are not equal to backups.

The latest news about Google Drive is evidence of this. Always make at least one backup of things that matter to you, and if you truly value all your files and memories, then follow a 3-2-1 strategy.

You feel old when you discover that your website uses fonts for Internet Explorer 6 compatibility.

Evidently, making headlines is more important than building a good product these days.

An excerpt:
“The application immediately turns around and sends the JWT back to another Sunbird service hosted on a load-balanced Express server which does not implement SSL, so requests can be easily intercepted by an attacker.”

For lovers of text-based games, there’s a "game" that teaches how to use standard commands in a Unix shell!

Happy to read about Apple's future support for RCS, but the real step forward would be to standardize a single integrated communication method across all devices while maintaining a level of privacy like Signal and others.

It's obviously a utopia, but the idea of having 5 to 8 messaging apps on every device makes me feel uneasy every time.

It's interesting how Black Friday has turned into a week, and where product prices magically increase beforehand to make the discounts appear larger.

If you're buying on platforms like Amazon, it can be useful to use tools like Keepa to track the complete price history of each product and understand if there's actually a discount.

I love when my MacBook Air also becomes an Apple TV. 😎

Those who use Apple Music can listen to episodes of the Apple Music Today podcast where every day they briefly tell the story behind each song.

Today's episode features Zoe Wees with the song Control, really nice.

Think you've seen it all?

Perhaps you forgot about the ingenious way liquid exits spills on some ThinkPad keyboards.

"In case of a spill, water cleverly passes through the keyboard holes and the fan-blades guide it out of the fan inlet on the bottom and outlet on the rear. the fan assembly is smartly isolated from the system with a sponge, ensuring your device stays safe and sound."

I love these things!

Source Lenovo Japan

And in the meantime they have completely eliminated the application on Apple Watch saying "Don't worry, it will be back soon".

For a couple of days I've been finding the VTDecoderXPCService process at the top of the RAM usage list. After running a spindump, it appears that WallpaperAgent is responsible.

I've tried playing with the wallpapers, but even with static wallpapers, the situation doesn't change.

Anyone else having similar experiences?

Sonoma 14.0.

Update I think I have found a solution:

1. Set static wallpapers for a moment
2. Deleted all the files present in “/Library/Application Support/com.apple.idleassetsd/Customer” (some of these will be automatically recreated)
3. Forced quit the VTDecoderXPCService process by selecting it from the CPU table and not Memory (why this, I really have no idea)
   
   

After that, the process has been at 59MB for two days. Let’s hope.

My first experience in opening a mechanical keyboard switch?

I got scared because everything jumped out along with the spring that I also lost, so I would say it was an excellent experience!

Why do I see “join our Discord server” everywhere I turn?

No, it's not cool.

It's a shame that Halloween is not celebrated in my country, I really wanted to play dead in the garden to procrastinate a bit.

Finally I can listen to horrible music pump me up during a run without finding it in the recommended Sunday nights that I want relaxing music.

"Apple will soon let users disable Apple Music’s Listening History only when a specific Focus Mode is turned on."

If you want people to be better, fry them. 🍟

You can say whatever you want, but this watchface goes beyond the concept of perfection.

I love it!

I was wondering, except for a few cases, does it make sense to install Debian primarily for its stability and then use the Sid repositories? Isn't that contradictory?

Yesterday with the sweatshirt I felt cold, today in short sleeves because of the heat; but for most people it’s normal. 🙃

It's interesting how what may be a simple “cartoon” for many, can hold much more.

Among the quotes I’ve saved over the years, I’d like to share one:

"Nothing ever goes as planned in this accursed world. The longer you live, the more you realize that the only things that truly exist in this reality are merely pain. suffering and futility.
Listen, everywhere you look in this world, wherever there is light, there will always be shadows to be found as well.”

Uchiha Madara, #Naruto -ナルト- 63

My dear Magic Mouse, you have performed excellently in your job, but it's time to start with good ergonomics.

If you are forced to use a timer to limit your social media usage, perhaps setting a timer is the least of the problems you should address.

Often, constraint causes more harm than it solves.

I’m not sure if it’s a ‘new’ feature, but I’ve changed the language on iOS and macOS from Italian to English, and I can still use Siri in Italian.

A few years ago, when I tried, Siri’s language couldn’t be changed, and it followed the system language.

How cool is that? 😸

- Craig Federighi’s voice

Tom Walker - Leave a Light On (Live Session) ❤️

Intriguing the unboxing video of Microsoft's Surface Laptop Studio 2.

The design or engineering department seems to have completely overlooked the close proximity of the audio jack connector to the power connector.

I know that the power connector can be inserted in the opposite direction to work around the problem, but has anyone really considered moving the audio jack or placing it on the opposite side of the Surface?

Maybe I'm going crazy, but yabai and skhd duo for macOS is fantastic! 🚀

A smart way to use “AI" ?

Automatically generate ALT text when images or videos that are public on Mastodon are attached.

Chill evening with Commander Keen 4.

It's funny how a 1991 game has more difficulty than most games today. Excluding some games, many others maintain a design that limits player frustration and, consequently, the sense of satisfaction in achieving a goal. 😕

If you're curious about how much space a portion of Sonoma's screensavers can occupy, well, it can go up to about 22GB. In this case, the folder includes random landscapes.

The path to delete them is “/Library/Application Support/com.apple.idleassetsd/Customer”.

Almost four years and it's still unforgettable.

"No matter what happens, we'll be ok"

Unpopular opinion:

The series Futurama should have more success and appreciation compared to The Simpsons. Futurama shines for its ability to explore deeper emotions and more sincere love stories.

Damn, I really want to rewatch all the episodes.

You know those days when you absolutely don't want to do anything, but by the end of the day, you feel like you've been productive? Yes, this is that day.

Good nothing to everyone!

“Henry Thoreau said that we don’t own things; things own us. Every new object, whether it’s a home, a car, a television, or a fancy phone like that, one is something more we must carry on our backs.”

Stephen King, If It Bleeds.

Just finished watching Mr. Harrigan’s Phone. Luckily, FaceTime didn’t exist yet.

Minecraft and Hans Zimmer together?

Yes, and it's absolutely stunning!

If you think annual major updates of macOS are too frequent, consider Canonical with Ubuntu.

Should major update releases really be every year or even every six months?

Damn, I look forward to Apple's release of Journal at the end of the year. I think Journal + the new Health App features are a great pairing.

I was looking for a way to check the compatibility of Homebrew formulas with macOS Sonoma. 🍎

But I couldn't find anything, not even commands to get the required information without enabling dev.

I ended up creating a shell script that uses the JSON API.

The script could also be done in two lines but I love having a perfect table!

A couple of years ago I was following a MUJI Hut project on the constriction of mini houses.

Am I the only crazy person who loves this genre?

A little reminder for those who use iCloud and most cloud services.

Cloud doesn’t mean backup, at least for most.

If you buy 6 or 12TB plan on iCloud to "save" all your memories you should stop and define a real backup strategy first.

More than the whole update, I'm in hype for the watch face with Snoopy!

Five years and it's still amazing. ◢ ◤

Is it normal that I have to block every outgoing and incoming connection of PDF Expert to avoid the pop-up of the upgrade to version 3 that I don't want?

All that would be needed now is a CRT monitor, mouse with trackball, and one of those nice plastic keyboards with the questionable yellowish color.

Perfection.

Now, my little friend, you are complete.

Everyone’s excited for the Apple event, while I look at my iPhone 12 mini and wonder if there will still be devices with its simple and compact dimensions in the future. 😕

Enrolled since 2016, I still have the Devrant stress ball they sent me.

Unfortunately, I don't use the social platform much anymore, but it was fun.

Plus, the color matches my HomePod, and this is true luxury fashion!

Why is everyone against the new GitHub homepage?

I find it nice, and I can’t wait for them to add GitHub Dating so I can have matches with those who develop efficient algorithms and code in C on the first date.

I've decided to start reading Berserk again.

Kentarō Miura's artwork is impressive; I think it's the only manga that truly manages to immerse the reader in the concept of a nightmare.

I take advantage of Chrome's tendency to remind Mac users to delete all files left by Google Chrome.

Search in:

/Library: LaunchAgents, LaunchDaemons, Application Support, Caches, Preferences.

~/Library: LaunchAgents, Application Support, Caches, Preferences.

All folders and files starting with "com.google..." and "com.google.keystone..."

I uninstalled Chrome in 2022, but a couple of months ago, I found references to it.

This is not a test, also because it's done in a VM and with a beta distribution.
I just wanted to try, and I take this opportunity to share.

• Debian 12 Bookworm
• Ubuntu 23.10 Mantic Minotaur

ARM, only installation and apt update/upgrade with a reboot.

As I mentioned, just curiosity. If I were to choose Debian for life, I don’t agree with Canonical’s choices regarding snaps, but I expected worse from Ubuntu.

I'm not a fan of Ubuntu, but I have to say that the Mantic Minotaur wallpapers are really nice!

Unfortunately, we are in an era where personal assertion often occurs more through aggression, domination, and brash attitudes, rather than through kindness.

And Mastodon does a good job of building a community based on friendliness and respect. It's true that you can never completely eliminate hate, but you can control it.

If I had known this earlier, I would have joined this platform since 2016.

Do you believe I've never played it?

In a discussion today, a friend had bought a book to learn how to use a software. I smiled, thinking of one of my favorite quotes by Donald Norman:

"If you have to explain how to use something, the design is probably wrong."

This doesn't mean that books helping users should be eliminated; in fact, many of them are essential. But certainly, there's a subset of these that wouldn't even exist if developers focused more on the product's usability.

As soon as I finished the installation, I received an email certifying and attesting that I can use the phrase "I use Arch btw". 🐧

I remember when I had a Galaxy S4, and people would always ask me how I could use a screen so big.

Now I have an iPhone 12 mini, and those same people ask me how I can use a screen so small.

What's the moral of this story?

Don't give too much weight to people's opinions, because they don't always have a basis in truth.

I hate when people come to me saying "you only take two seconds".

It's true, it will take me two seconds, but it took years of practice to get to those two seconds.

Sometimes hearing this phrase makes the effort seem insignificant.

Sunday, the segmentation fault explained by my dog:

• The pillow represents the allocated and managed program memory.
• Our little dog represents the running program.
• The soft little behind of the dog is the memory error.

Roughly.

Meta: "Messenger with end-to-end encryption for everyone by year's end."

Privacy and Meta, well, that's already a real knee-slapper. 🙃

Several years have passed and I still think how much this idea is one of the most beautiful ever seen. 🤯

The neovim and lazygit integration is something absolutely fantastic

The data set of Mastodon instances will always tend to grow.

You can choose to clean up the posts after a certain amount of time, but what if you want to keep everything and not be a burden to the instance offered by others?

Sometime I think about it, does it make sense to build my own locally managed instance at home?

Does an instance made up of a single person or a small group of people make sense?

I've been listening to audiobooks for two weeks before falling asleep. They are excellent for those who don't have "easy" sleep.

For now, listening to two audiobooks:

• Napoleon Hill, in particular topics such as self-control, enthusiasm, and others.
• A book on Henry Kissinger’s artificial intelligence.

Apparently in addition to buying likes for various social networks you can also spend them on GitHub, Oh Man.

Among the "news," WhatsApp will allow you to share high-resolution images and not only compressed.

This makes me think of all the people who spend more than necessary on a smartphone because it has the best camera and then modify and send the photo through these messaging services.

We are bombarded with advertising in the purchase of always better products and then fall into the illusion that they’re really better.

Thanks to Thomas Ricouard for including the "minimalist" icons I created in his app.

There're no gradients, just the precise essence of white (# FFFFFF) and black (# 000000).

In addition, the translation into Italian has been improved!

Ouch, please uninstall the NightOwl app.

"NightOwl app enables Users to share internet traffic by modifying their device’s network settings to be used as a gateway for internet traffic. Additionally, the User’s device acts as a gateway for NightOwl app’s Clients, including companies that specialize in web and market research, SEO, brand protection, content delivery, cybersecurity, etc."

Me when I hear: "don't worry, it'll work, it's a trick I saw on TikTok"

So now Zuckerberg is going to rename Threads to Twitter, right?

I LOVE these things!

"When Clean Energy Charging is enabled and you connect your iPhone to a charger, your iPhone gets a forecast of the carbon emissions in your local energy grid and uses it to charge your iPhone during times of cleaner energy production."

Simple explanation of why Twitter changes its name:

"Twitter is going bad how do we fix it?"

"We call it X and so it will no longer be possible to say that Twitter is doing badly"

Among the books that I have read with pleasure are those of Mitnick.

Although years have passed and computer systems have had a big evolution from every point of view, Mitnick has always shown that only one person is enough to deceive every security measure.



His social engineering techniques have shown and will continue to do so, that, in most cases, the weak link in an IT structure is the human being.

So Musk first fires almost all Twitter employees, some even almost without warning, and then he complains that Meta has hired them to develop Threads.

There’s no getting around it, Musk has only led to the failure of what was, in part, one of the social networks with great potential.

Good job Musk.

I'm trying out Fedora 38 with GNOME and, I have to say, that with just two extensions and a change of icons, it's beautiful!

You immediately understand that we're talking about a Meta/Facebook app:

"Instead of an ad, here's an animal."

oh man, I love these things!

So, after a while, I wrote a new blog post to talk about Linux and its philosophy.

My idea is to migrate to a world that embraces open source and free software culture.
This is just the beginning but like everything, there is always a place to start.

How did I miss these beauties on Reddit

Sometimes I remember why I love mankind

We have reached 100% 🥳

What is done in these cases?
Shall we sing happy birthday to the server?
Do we burn everything for the meme?

Mh, maybe we should leave everything as it is for now.

stevejobsarchive has released the book Make Something Wonderful for free.

A curated collection of Steve’s speeches, interviews, and correspondence. In these pages, Steve shares his perspective on his childhood, on launching and being pushed out of Apple, on his time with Pixar and NeXT, and on his ultimate return to the company that started it all.

Free, available in EPUB for any device, better than this.

For those feeling nostalgic for 1995 there's 3D Pinball Space Cadet for Linux .

This way you can play an old memory but on an operating system that has style.

Musk wants to open source Twitter code so people can trust it.

Aka "I fired all the engineers and so I hope that by making the project open source there will be someone to fix everything for free" 🥲

In the end, Meta also adds the blue check to anyone who pays for the subscription.

Now there's no longer the concept of verifying someone to direct people not to fall into fake or anything else but it's just a race towards subscriptions getting a check mark, that as anyone can have, loses all meaning. 🙃

These days I've been thinking about DeGoogling my website.

I use two things: Fonts and Analytics.

Today I worked on fonts. In particular, I saw an open-source project that allows Google fonts to be hosted on the site without having to have a reference with it.

Great, I have eliminated many lines of code and now also the CSS of the font goes through the asset minification of Hugo.

Let's face it, eternal discussions about which browser is the best when at heart the answer is Lynx.

So you can get the satisfaction of visiting your site and look like a stupid in the eyes of people.

So, it's Sunday, and after reducing the interactions I wrote my last tweet before deleting the app.

It's true that every company reevaluates its staff but not like Twitter has done in recent months.

I hope all these laid-off employees find a new job that they're as passionate about as Twitter was in the beginning.

All Apple rumors about the possible measurement of blood sugar through Apple Watch sensors in a non-invasive way are always welcome.

To date, they are relatively few devices of the genre, those present are quite annoying or need specific patches to combine.

If Apple managed to combine these features without increasing the size of the Watch and making the measurement reliable would be a turning point for many people.

Sometimes you have to take risks. 😎

Just kidding, don't do it, put a nonsense emoji in the review comment.

A nice project on GitHub, it allows to have the summary of some statistics of your repo!