After seeing many similar experiments, I am testing a way to show and comment on this blog’s articles using Bluesky network. In the best case, it will make the comment section more lively. In the worst case, I would had learned something new.

In the last couple of months, Bluesky, one of the many post-Twitter attempts to reshape the landscape of social networks, is living its best moment. Powered by Twitter’s blunders and by the continuous alienation provided by his power-hungry owner, Bluesky doubled its user base from around 10 millions users to the current 24 millions. It is time to annotate some of my thoughts.

I love Calibre and I love to curate my digital library. But what about my physical books? How do I fill their gaps in my Calibre database? Luckily, there is a very easy way to track them using Calibre as well.

Why do we feel attraction for the past? Why do we look at the ‘old web’ with dreaming eyes? Why do we see old protocols and feel the lure of the past? Why do we feel nostalgia for old technology? In this article, I explore my reasons behind the retro-computing nostalgia.

I often use SingleFile to archive the page I like. One day, I’ve found out that Readwise was injecting 2Mb of JavaScript in each page. That is a lot of wasted space. Luckily, there is a (not simple) way to filter out custom tags from archived pages.

I tried to jump on the Mastodon train several times; however, I was never really convinced by it. To be honest, I was never really interested in any open-source clone of popular commercial social networks. And like me, 99% of the non-technical people I know. Why? A quick answer for a bloody hot August.

Unlike many, I am usually fine with the subscription model: I understand why it is useful for the developers and I think that, if priced correctly, it is not bad for the users for the vast majority of use cases. However, I often ask myself if the model will be sustainable when the big majority of the apps will be subscription-based.

This year I joined and won the NaNoWriMo challenge: write 50000 words for a novel in 30 days. I did it. Now the nerd side need to splat on this page all the accumulated stats.

The Novel

I think it is the proper way to do it: I need to talk about the novel. The novel is, of course, in Italian and it is unfinished. With 52k words I reached barely the beginning of the third act, more or less. Many things need to be rewritten, characters disappeared in thin air as soon as I discovered that I don’t need them… stuff like that. The usual way to do a first draft.

Now that I finally completed my PhD studies, I started rethinking about my path up here. This is a path I started a long time ago. For some reason, this was the path I traced for myself since my childhood. When I was 10 (or earlier, I don’t really know for sure) I answered for the first time the question: “what do you want to do as a grown up?”. And the answer was “I’ll make games” (“I’ll make Mario’s game”, to be very precise).

I am removing comments from this blog. There are several reasons for this decision. First, it is hard to find value in comments anymore. In 3 years I think I have collected something like 10 comments. Most of my interaction with readers and other people happens on Twitter, in the Facebook comments or in the Reddit threads. Second, the existing main solutions for comments are unappealing.

The default WordPress comment system is very spam prone and hard to manage. On the other hand, Disqus looks like a more technologically advanced solution. Unfortunately, in practice, it is a resource hog, it forces you to have your experience shared among different domains, and, in other words, a giant tracking system. I do not want to force my readers to load a third-party potentially tracking system every time. Even because it make hard to me to enforce a serious privacy policy for this place.