I found out about Micro.blog platform thanks to Jeff Triplett a few months ago and I even decided to give it a try, but to be honest, having already a main blog, made with Hugo, which is hosted for free on GitHub Pages, I couldn’t really justify spending another month for a micro blogging...

   After having thought about this for a while, I finally decided to start sponsoring some of the open source projects I regularly use. I set aside a monthly budget and I evenly divided the amount across the projects. Who am I sponsoring So far I’ve started sponsoring these projects people in no...

   Inspired by this post from Nicola Iarocci, I decided to check my own bash zsh history: git cd nox pip ls pytest brew code curl pyenv Even for me, my biggest usage of the terminal is because of git You can produce your own list by using this command: history ...

   I’ve always wanted a dog actually... my family had one years ago, but since I wasn’t directly involved with him, I never felt him as my own . Life and sometimes laziness had not allowed me to own one in the past living abroad, moving back to Italy but living in a small apartment etc... so...

   I recently found out thanks to this article from Juha Matti Santala that not only you can power a RaspberryPi device through the USB C of an iPad but that you can also get an ethernet connection through it Requirements an USB C iPad I used an iPad Air th gen a USB C cable I used the one that...

   This is my user manual. If we are working together or planning to , please read it carefully. You will learn how to deal with me productively and avoid misunderstandings. I initially wrote this for my current colleagues, but I thought it could be a good idea to make it public for everyone else I...

   If you work in software development, chances are high that your company is using open source software to build their products. Nowadays open source software is nearly everywhere: it can be included in your operating system, in commercial software or it can be responsible for hosting your website or...

   If you are using Tailscale in some of your devices, you also need to use Tailscale own DNS server to resolve the names of the devices in the network. If you are also a user of ControlD DNS, and you want to use it with Tailscale, you can finally do it Configure a new Endpoint on ControlD First of...

   If you have ever used a flight tracking app like Flightradar or FlightAware you might have wondered how they get the data about the airplanes in real time. All these services use an existing network of ADS B receivers to collect data about the airplanes in the sky. What is ADS B ADS B stands for...

   I recently started using Umami a privacy first, GDPR compliant solution for this website analytics but I immediately found out that their free plan was not enough for my needs k page views per month . Since it’s completely open source, you can self host it anywhere you want. I was initially...

   Recently I was planning to self host a service I’m using and I was immediately stuck on a decision: should I just buy a Raspberry Pi or rent a VPS Requirements Let’s starts from the basic question: what specs do I need to run this service Reading around, it seems that something with GB of RAM...

   This morning I randomly found this post from Miguel Grinberg: It’s Time For A Change: datetime.utcnow Is Now Deprecated. The main point is that Python utcnow method is not timezone aware, and Python . is deprecating it. Therefore, you should start migrating your code to use now instead....

   Recently I finally restarted to read indie blogs more regularly. To do that I’m using NetNewsWire, a free and open source RSS reader for macOS and iOS and every time somone posts an interesting article, for example on Mastodon, I make sure to follow the RSS feed of that blog. In a few weeks, I’ve...

   If you are using a cloud storage service like Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc., you should be aware that your files are not encrypted by default. This means that the cloud provider is able to access and, in some cases, even share them with third parties. In case your cloud provider gets hacked...

   If you own a website and you don’t want AI bots to crawl it and you are already using Cloudflare, you are in luck. Cloudflare has recently added a new feature that allows people to easily block AI bots from crawling their website. Setup To enable this feature, you need to login to your Cloudflare...

   The robots.txt file is a simple text file that tells web robots like search engine crawlers which pages on your site to crawl and which not to crawl. It’s a standard that has been around for a long time and it’s still used today. Some examples of rules you can put in a robots.txt file are: ...

   Reading news and blog posts can be quite time consuming if we manually go to news websites to check if something new is out or if we spend all day checking social media, waiting for people we follow to post their latest article. An efficient way to fetch new content is to follow the news sites and...

   When you have to compare dates in a SQL query, you often want to ignore the time part. For example if you have two very common fields like created at and updated at and you want to know if they are the same day, you have to truncate the time part. How to do this depends on the database you are...

   In the last days I had the opportunity to participate to an internal hackathon organised by the company I work for. We had to build a project based on an SDK and the needed skills to build it were those of a frontend developer. Being a backend developer and having very basic almost none ...

   Every now and then, my Mastodon or LinkedIn timelines are full of messages either praising or condemning the use of AI tools for coding. Are they good or bad then As usual I think the truth is in the middle, or to be more precise: it depends on how you use them. Context In the last couple of years...

   I recently started using iA Writer to edit my MarkDown files on iPad and I’m honestly quite impressed by its simplicity. With the latest version they introduced a feature called Authorship which basically helps you to keep track of external contributors. For example, suppose you asked a friend or...

   For my job Software Developer I make a daily use of tools like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT. I want to explore alternative solutions which can be hosted autonomusly, without relying on an external service. Disclaimer Before I continue, let me clarify that these are tools which makes my job faster,...

   I recently discovered a new tool called Ollama, which allows you to run Large Language Models LLMs locally, without the need of a cloud service. Its usage is similar to Docker, but it’s specifically designed for LLMs. You can use it as an interactive shell, through its REST API or using it from a...

   Recently I reviewed my backup strategy and started using a new open source software and a cloud service to keep my data safe. Before this my only backup was keeping my data in the cloud specifically I use pCloud , but I started thinking: what if they shut down What if I loose access to my account...

   As you may have noticed, the blog has a new look. I recently migrated from Pelican to Hugo and I am very happy with the result. I’ve known Hugo for a long time, but I never had the opportunity to use it in a real project. With a little help from a couple of friends, I was able to complete the...

   Once you have written and published an article, it’s very likely that you will want to share it on social media or send to your friends on a messaging app. One method to make the link more attractive is to include a cover image that will be shown in the link preview. How do you set a cover image...

   It’s a not a news anymore that Google, the search engine which once was the best available, doesn’t work anymore for a lot of users. Its results are full of ads, they are not optimised for users, nor for advertisers and sometimes they also include malware. Their main goal is to boost ad revenue. So...

   A few years ago, I migrated from my Wordpress based blog which I self hosted... yeah... I know... no comment to a static generated using Pelican one which is hosted for free on GitHub Pages. This setup, believe me or not, is cool. I’ve all my blog posts written in MarkDown, versioned on and...

   I wanted to learn how to use OpenAI API in Python, so I decided to make it fun and created an interesting experiment: what would happen if I let two GPT powered bots talk to each other Let’s find out Prerequisites If you want to run this experiment locally you will need the following things...

   OpenAI is a research organization that develops and promotes friendly AI for the betterment of humanity. One of its most popular projects is the development of the GPT Generative Pre trained Transformer series, which includes ChatGPT, a large language model trained to generate human like text...