Mauro's personal website

Entering the Church of Emacs

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 11:00:00 GMT

With a complete and very unexpected 180 degrees turnaround from my previous blog post, I've become an avid Emacs user. I've literally replaced any type of writing software with it. Except for actual development. I don't do much dev work lately but for it I'm still reliant on my Neovim setup as an IDE. I could just use Emacs for that as well honestly, I just haven't gone that far yet.

As I wrote before, I started by trying out Doom Emacs, and not liking it at first. Don't get me wrong, I now think that it's a great showcase of what modern Emacs can offer, and there's a lot of stuff to dig into it and even copy. But in general it really is just someone else's Emacs setup, and it feels like it.

So I wanted to start from scratch, but the way there is quite long and intricate. I therefore started by following System Crafters' great YouTube playlist "Emacs From Scratch", where David builds a complete Emacs configuration... from scratch, showcasing the whole process.

It was a great introduction and source of knowledge and understanding, but I soon discovered that most of the packages that David was using in the videos a few years ago have been mostly replaced by more modern versions, new packages that leverage Emacs defaults rather than adding too many extra layers of code and complexity, from what I understand.

Most of all I'm thinking about the stack for completion and selection that is now built on consult, vertico, marginalia and orderless, instead of the more "classic" ivy and counsel packages. And so I restarted...from scratch once again, by myself this time, with the acquired knowledge, and managed to get a working Emacs config that completely suits my needs without being (too much) over encumbered by useless packages and functionalities.

In the end I've completely embraced Org-mode for all my note taking, and general writing. I started to rebuild my Logseq system (that followed the PARA method) with Org-roam, but I soon migrated to the more apt (to my use case at least) Denote package from the good Prot. Unlike Org-roam, Denote doesn't use a database at all, it relies entirely on regex for searching, but its naming convention is so flexible it's just great, and worth the trade off. And I have yet to experience any lag or sluggishness anyway.

I've built a simple dashboard to collect at a glance all my journaling posts in a timely order, similar to Logseq. Also I made a general index that keeps track of all my current interests under the PARA method. It just works great, it's so powerful that the more I use it the better it gets. A feature that I use a lot from Denote that I couldn't make use of in Org-roam are dblocks (dynamic blocks), which are natively implemented in Org-mode, and on which Denote expands upon. I can have a semi-auto updating network of notes, references, and backlinks which is very useful.

Another package that I really like is elfeed, which is an RSS feed reader for Emacs. It's very minimalistic, and very clear, the most distraction-free RSS reader I've ever used, and again, like most things in emacs, quite customisable.

In a frenzy of trying things out inside Emacs, or like they say, to try and live inside Emacs, I gave a try also to an email client (mu4e) but honestly it's not for me, all my emails are in HTML, and I don't receive enough plain text messages to justify the struggle of reading parsed HTML emails inside Emacs. But I know that a lot of people find it useful and I can see why, if your workflow is around plain text emails.

I gave a shot at IRC clients as well, at some point. I don't use the IRC chats too much to be honest, but the client I ended up using, which for me worked out of the box, is circe. Honestly, it feels literally like a jump back in the early 2000s, if not late 90s, which is a bit too much for me. A lot of programs and workflows got worse, that's definitely something I can agree with. But a lot of progress has also been made into user interfaces and user interactions, we gotta give credit to that, I believe.

Something I wasn't expecting but that I enjoy a lot instead, is using proportional fonts instead of the usual monospace fonts used in command line applications. It took me quite a lot of set up and trial and error to get it working the way I like it, but now my Emacs looks and feels great. I still use a monospace font for code and code blocks obviously, but writing (and reading) with a proportional font is very nice, much more natural. Of course I rely on vim keybindings via evil-mode, like Doom Emacs does. I just can't live without them now.

Overall I've been using Emacs for over 6 months, and I love it. I didn't know it could feel so "modern" whilst being one of the oldest pieces of software out there. I just love it, and I don't think I could turn back now. It feels very "mine" and cosy to use. I also have to say that more than just a good piece of software, what I enjoy the most of Emacs is its philosophy and its community. I was able to know the work of so many inspirational folks out there, I just couldn't know the existence of without my journey through Emacs. From the already mentioned System Crafter's community lead by the awesome David, and Protesilaos Stavrou, to many other curious and smart minds that I discover daily via either the Emacs community on Mastodon, Reddit or the Planet Emacslife RSS feed.

By the way, here's my literal Emacs configuration, if you're curious about the packages I use, and some of my custom functions.

And that's it folks. This is how I finally entered the Church of Emacs!

Gallium - Learning a new keyboard layout

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 21:00:00 GMT

Last weekend I started learning a new keyboard layout. Just because.

I've been using colemak-dh for over a year now, probably a year an a half, and it's been definitely an improvement over qwerty in terms of ergonomics, that's for sure. But I'm curious about more modern layouts, how they feel, how I perform with them.

Looking at r/KeyboardLayouts there are a few contenders, but the most agreed upon are a couple that are quite similar: Gallium and Graphite. They are similar because they have been both created with some algorithmic analysis around the same time (about 2 years ago, so around 2023).

They are supposedly very "balanced", and they avoid some typical issues that other layouts have that make typing certain words a bit too convoluted (looking at "you" and "was" in colemak).

At a first glance it seems that they might have some issues of themselves, but no layout is perfect. In particular I can see a group of letters clustered together that would make typing certain words quite challenging (mostly words that include the couple "ph"), but I'll see how it goes. Lots of people are really liking these new layouts, despite this quirk.

I'm going with Gallium because there is a version of it specifically made for columnar keyboards (which I use), and also I've noticed the "j" and "k" letters in the same position as colemak-dh, not sure if it's a pro or a cons yet, but it feels safe. Especially for the vim motions.

Also I'm not a fan of the positioning of the apostrophe symbol in the Graphite layout, which is in the middle of the top row. Too alien for my taste. Graphite also has an emphasis on staggered layouts, which again, I don't really use except from my laptop from time to time. The emphasis is on using the hands in an angular position which is more comfortable on traditional keyboards. But I guess Gallium is similar in this regard? Again, I use split keyboards anyway, so I don't really care about this feature.

Once again I'm using keybr.com to burn in my memory all the letters, and it's kinda nice re-experiencing the feeling of scrambling my brain cells and my fingers' muscle memory. I wasn't expecting to say something like that, but that's it. Also, there's definitely something in the process that my brain has learned, because this time it feels less of a struggle, almost enjoyable.

I guess I like to test my neuroplasticity from time to time.

Doom Emacs & Org-mode

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 23:31:00 GMT

I've been (yet once again) trying Doom Emacs these days; in fact I'm still watching a great series of video tutorials on it.

But there are several factors that won't make me stick with it:

(Doom) Emacs is slow as hell.
Org-mode is very cool but I don't need yet another syntax for notes, markdown is good enough.
Org-mode is great but I don't feel the need to manage my life and tasks in such great detail, in fact pen and paper are more than sufficient for me at the moment.
The Emacs ecosystem is way too much to absorb, and I'm not even an "expert" at neovim (yet).
My neovim setup is so well refined, I just prefer it.
I'd just use Doom Emacs for Org-mode really, and it kinda feels like using a space ship to hammer down a nail.
(Doom) Emacs is slow as hell.

I tried the nvim-orgmode plugin, and it's kinda cool but it's not polished enough yet, I think; and also the documentation is not up to speed with the development of neovim or other plugins (blink-cmp), unfortunately. But I'm keeping it in my neovim config for the time being, I like the org-agenda view too much, I just need to open it up from time to time.

And again, having to deal with yet another syntax just for taking notes and todo lists seems a bit overkill honestly.

I'll stick with Vimwiki for now, and taskwarrior for my task management when I feel the need.

004 - Delish - CSS layout, back-end refactoring

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 14:47:00 GMT

Link to the project's source code.

Progress

It's been over a week since my last post here, as I was feeling like I didn't make enough progress to report.

I'm not sure how my brain works 99% of the time, because I indeed made progress. Possibly slower than what I feel it should have taken me, but still progress.

Let's move on.

CSS layout

I finally put my hands in the front-end and made some decisions:

I'm using CSS modules with ReactJS components.
I have one index.css file for the general layout (made with CSS grid, mostly).
Each component has its own component-name.module.css file, so the styling is scoped to it exclusively.

I used CSS grid to divide the screen into 3 columns, because I want to have a sidebar on the right, to filter the bookmarks with collections and tags. It's working nicely. Then I went on and tried something unusual to me, I used CSS grid to also define the header and body of the page. So far so good.

I wanted to add a screenshot here but I'd rather not at the moment, the UI is still quite messy, as it's a work in progress, it wouldn't make sense.

Back (and forth) to the back-end

The thing that consumed most of my time was once again the JWT authentication logic. I literally woke up in the morning and found my brain thinking about all the flow and how to make it better.

And so, by doing some research on the topic, I found out that I can encrypt any kind of data from the back-end into the JWT access token, and then decrypt it and make use of the data in the front-end.

I can simply just add the data with the serializer in DjangoRestFramework:


class MyTokenObtainPairSerializer(TokenObtainPairSerializer):
    @classmethod
    def get_token(cls, user):
        token = super().get_token(user)

        # Add custom fields
        token["username"] = user.username
        # ...

        return token

Now the username (in the example) is encrypted into the access token.

When the front-end receives the token we can decrypt it and get the username with a package called JWT-decode:

const data = await response.json();

setAccessToken(data.access);
const payload = jwtDecode(data.access);
setUserData({ id: payload.id, username: payload.username });

I was then able to completely remove the extra endpoint that I made only to fetch the current user data, which is now also completely encrypted in transit.

While I was at it, also thanks to the suggestion of Jasper on Mastodon, I realised that waiting for the server to send me a 401 error message and then proceed to refresh the access token, wasn't a very efficient pattern; and so I used a timer in JavaScript that just refreshes the access token every 4:50 (right before the 5:00 expiry date), to keep the UX clean. That made me also delete a couple of hooks in React that I was using to keep fetching the user data whenever the token was refreshed.

Everything is much leaner and cleaner now.

Filtering and query parameters

The next step was to build the logic for filtering the bookmarks based on whatever the front-end asks.

I remember learning about query parameters during Harvard's CS50w, but I've never really implemented their use in a real project. And so I went on and read the documentation of the browser's API for the URL constructor, and specifically URLSearchParams.

I'm not really planning on adding routes right now, to keep things simple, but if at some point I will (with React Router) it just makes sense to fetch data from the back-end with URL queries, as it's the appropriate standard pattern.

Next moves

I just need to keep cracking on right now, building components, implementing logic in the back-end when needed.

I'll keep the actual UI styling for later though.

Until the next one!

003 - Delish - JWT Auth System

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Link to the project's source code.

JWT based authentication system

I know, this is overkill. But again, I'm treating this project as an opportunity to learn and apply best practices at industry standard levels.

I've been digging into security concepts and systems and I realised that one of the best models for a secure authorization system of a web application is a JSON Web Token based system.

In a nutshell with JWT we get two tokens: an access token, and a refresh token. The access token has a short lifespan (in minutes), while the refresh token can have up to months, based on the security levels that are deemed relevant for the application. As in, a banking app might have a shorter refresh token to diminish the window of opportunity for risks.

After a user logs in he gets the two tokens, and for any http request to the server's endpoints the access token is sent with the request to confirm who's the user making the request, and if he's authorized.

When the access token expires (a few minutes), we get a 401 Unauthorized error message from the server.

At that point we can send the refresh token to the server, which, if still vaild (days or months), will get back a new and fresh access token.

All this happens "behind the scenes", and the user experience should be therefore pretty smooth.

Cookies and cream

Now there are several ways to implement a JWT based system, and each way can use different strategies for storing the tokens. The easiest way would be to leverage the browser's local storage. Convenient but definitely not the most secure method. After even more reading and try and error I decided that I wanted to implement what probably is the most secure method:

access token in memory only (ReactJS state)
refresh token in an HTTP-only cookie (unaccessible by JavaScript)

I had to refactor the Django back-end for this, by including the DRF-simple-JWT plugin, and adding the HTTP-only cookie to the POST requests for logging in, registering, and refreshing the access token.

Looping in ReactJS

I then proceeded to implement all the logic in ReactJS which turned out to be a bit against my initial scope for this simple CRUD app.

My self-set pre-requirements are (ideally) to start with the bare minimum and add complexity and abstraction only when needed; but implementing the JWT auth system forced me to add quite a bit of complexity right out of the gate.

For example, I tried to avoid it, but the easiest way to share the tokens and the user data throughout the React application is by using a context (as in useContext). Then having the React context in place, I realised that to make use of the access token for each and every http request (for the sake of DRY and my mental sanity, mostly) I'd probably need some kind of custom hook, and that's what I made.

Moving on

Finally I have all the authentication system in place now: I can register a new user from the UI, login, and logout. All by leveraging the JWT system in a clean and secure way.

My only gripe (or at least what it feels to me as a compromise), is that to maintain the user's state when refreshing the SPA, since the access token lives only in memory, I'm kind of abusing the refresh token. As in, a new one is issued at each (potential) refresh.

For now it's good enough I think. Time to move on to finally build the actual UI.

002 - Delish - Back-end Wrap Up

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Good progress in the last couple of days!

Now the back-end is in a good state and I can move on my focus to the front-end.

Link to the project's source code.

Models, routes, and scraping functions

Now that I've understood the workflow I have to say it's pretty easy to add and customise endpoints with DRF. I wrote all the models I need (at least for now), with generics classes, and created the corresponding URLs.

I then proceeded to rewrite my scraping functions to be able to get (from a given URL) the existing favicon, title, and possibly a description of the website. I used a few python libraries for this, specifically urltitle for the titles, favicon for the (guess what?) favicons, and a combo of requests and beautifulsoup for the descriptions.

Queuing tasks

Now the first time I developed this application I had one major issue that I didn't solve: sometimes the app will lock up the database, waiting for one of the scraping functions to finish its job.

Now that I'm a wiser man, I went on and looked for a solution to actually have something that I'd describe as "async" behaviour in the back-end for this tasks. It turns out I learned about schedulers / task queuers, which basically run some specific tasks in their own time and space, and update the database when they're finished (or when I decide).

Brilliant!

After some more digging I found the most minimal (and possibly easy) package for this: huey.

Pretty straight forward:

set it up for SQLite database (or whatever you need, even file-system or in-memory!) and use the decorator functions to mark tasks.

Huey then needs to run as a separate service, and it will trigger the functions and then write in the database when it's done fetching the data online. It works like a charm.

Linking ReactJs and Django

After that was all set up, my main concern was linking ReactJS to the Django back-end.

I knew already that I was going to have to deal with CORS settings in Django, a common issue even when dealing with vanilla JS before; it turns out there is a specific plugin in for this as well: django-cors-headers.

And so after installing the package and adding to its whitelist the http addresses of the Django server, the huey connection, and the default Vite development server I was ready to go (hopefully).

A moment of truth

I decided to have the ReactJS app inside the same directory as the Django project, so that both are in the same version control repository.

I installed Vite and launched the scaffolding for a ReactJS template app. For the root URL of the API I made a simple status check message, and so in ReactJS I went on and added a call to the api-root and displayed the return message on the homepage. It works!!!

Now onto the front-end, wish me luck!

001 - Delish - Django Rest Framework

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

A journey through time and space

I'm back out of the Django Rest Framework rabbit hole, with some new knowledge and some progress.

I thought it was going to be a simple matter of learning a couple of libraries and classes, but it turned out to be much more than what I expected. There are so many layers of abstraction here that I needed to take my time to wrap my mind around them.

Link to the project's source code.

Making new friends on the road

It turns out, in hindsight, that using the DRF for my CRUD application here is definitely overkill. But, hey, this is a learning experience after all; and also I can see the potential of the DRF now for bigger scenarios. Probably, even if I keep building and adding features to this app, it could turn out that the DRF is good solution for scalability.

Anyway, I made this huge deep dive and come out with some new tools and workflows that make me feel much more confident about my back-end skills.

In particular I learned how to:

Implement a token-based authentication system with DRF.
Write a script in Django's management/commands to auto-populate the sqlite db for development (huge time saver).
Make http test requests via an .http file/script with the help of the Kulala plugin in Neovim (and the relative lsp and linter/formatter).
I've been introduced to django-silk, great tool for checking performance and debugging eventual bottlenecks in the API (again, overkill for my scope right now but great to know).
Write a serializer, use it into a view (either function or class-based), add it to the urls as an endpoint. All this with DRF.

Adventure awaits

Finally, I managed to implement the first endpoint for my app:

I'm now ready to move on, implement all the needed endpoints, and the logic for filling the bookmark model from a user's given URL.

Until the next time!

000 - Delish - Building in Public

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Intro

As I'm building my web development portfolio I decided to blog about what I'm doing while I'm doing it, also known as building in public.

What

My Capstone project for Harvard's CS50w was a bookmarks saving web application built with Django and vanilla JavaScript. It was very labour intensive, especially the front-end, which, against all odds and internet memes, made me really appreciate the existence of JavaScript frameworks. You can have a look at my presentation of the app here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Drs3QUh3-XY.

Why

For academic honesty reasons I can't share publicly the source code of my final project, that would also invalidate my certifications; and so I decided to rebuild the app from scratch, using my previous experience as a guideline.

Where

Here's the GitHub repository of the project.

I also intend to deploy the app somewhere once is in a working status.

How

Since building the previous app I've already gained different skills and knowledge, so although the functionalities are going to be mostly the same, the technologies I'm going to use are slightly different. Also, I wanna re-design the UI completely.

Architecture

I'll stick to Django for the back end which I'll treat simply as an API. For this reason this time I'm not gonna write all the JSON serializers myself in the http responses but I'll use the Django Rest Framework, which is perfect for the job.

For the front end instead, I'll save myself the torture of writing everything in vanilla JavaScript and I'll use this as a way to hone my ReactJS skills.

I'm not sure about the styling yet, I most probably stick to vanilla CSS, maybe using modules to keep it clean and readable. I'm thinking about using Tailwind as well, but I feel I'm learning much more if I use plain CSS. Tailwind is cool and all, but maybe next time.

MVP

The idea is to build a minimal app that can be expanded easily in the future with new ideas and functionalities.

As a starting base, the app will let the user:

Register a new account and login.
Save a URL as a bookmark.
Organise the saved bookmarks within "folders" called "collections".
Organise further with tags.
Toggle the read-it-later flag for each bookmark.
Filter the list of bookmarks by collection, tag, read-it-later, unsorted, untagged statuses.
Do a basic search by keyword.

The app will also be responsive, for desktop, tablet, and smartphone screens.

So far

I made some wireframes with Penpot to get a better idea mostly of the UX and of what models I need for the database:

This is just a guide and it might change later.

For now I started a new Django project, set it up, created the database models, did a first migration.

Next step will be setting up Django Rest Framework and defining the API end points and routes.

Until the next episode!

Bargaining for laptops

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

My almost 8 years old Gigabyte Aero 15x left me last week, and I found myself suddenly in need of getting another laptop. Since my finances are a bit tight nowadays, I went looking for some used Thinkpads on eBay.

I've never really used eBay before, but there are so many Thinkpads for sale, and those are sturdy machines that can get a beating. Also I've always wanted to get a Thinkpad. And so after a few days of going through listings I spotted one that looked promising. I might not be that good at eBaying, but this one was selling 5 pieces of the same exact laptop's model. It had photos of it in a cardboard box, with the cord of the charger all coiled up nicely on the side of the machine. The computer itself looked perfect. The seller had few reviews but all good, and the last one was from someone that bought one of the exact same laptops I was looking at, and described it as "perfect".

I'm not quite sure what's going on behind the scenes here, but my idea is that there are so many big offices and businesses that open and close in London that there's a lot of office supplies that go for sale on eBay or similar websites. So I thought I was gonna get a machine that had been barely used by some marketing guy staring at a spreadsheet all day, barely touching the keyboard, or something on these lines. The price was a little above what I was planning to pay for it but it looked like a good deal after all.

I pulled the trigger and ordered the laptop.

The shipping was super fast and a couple of days later I was unboxing the Thinkpad. My first impression was that they put a lot of effort into cleaning the laptop and preparing it all for shipping. I turned it on and they have installed and updated Windows 11, which was gonna be nuked very soon to make room for Arch Linux for me, but nonetheless I could see the care with which they prepared the machine, and I appreciated it. Until I noticed on the left border signs of usage: the black finish was eroded by the constant friction of a left hand, and I could see a bit of shiny metal along the edge.

I turned around the machine and on the bottom-front there were some very deep scratches, as if the laptop had been dragged on the street, or it survived a car accident...I wasn't pleased. Nonetheless I tested the hardware and the rest was perfect, I decided that it was good enough, that life was too short to complain about scratches, and proceeded to erase the SSD to install my OS of choice. It's a great little machine, a Thinkpad X1 Carbon gen 9, with some great hardware compatibility for Linux. It's incredibly light and sturdy. I like it.

After a couple of days I received an email from eBay that was reminding me leave some feedback on my recent purchase. And that's when it hit me:

although I was happy with the laptop, I couldn't shake off myself the feeling of having been treated with a bit of dishonesty. Specifically, the listing didn't mention in any way any kind of scratches, minor or major, it only described the machine's specs. Neither did the photographs, that showed clearly another laptop from mine (no sign of usage on the left front) and never showed the bottom of it anyway. And I paid a little extra because I thought it was in such a good shape.

Put in front of having to give feedback on the purchase I felt like writing to the seller to complain about it. I told him I could see the care with which they prepared the machine and shipped it, but I'd have liked to know of those nasty scratches before pulling the trigger on my purchase.

He sent me a message (with several autocorrect mistakes that he didn't fix) with some kind of apology, and since that was the last laptop he had of that model, he offered me £50 back as a compensation for the scratches, or, if I've preferred, wait a few days since he'd got more laptops incoming next week and he could replace mine. I went on his page, and there was still one of the same exact models listed for sale!

You see where I'm going here. I told him that since he didn't like to tell things straight I wasn't gonna trust him with "another laptop, maybe someday next week", and if I was to give a price to a compensation it was more towards £100. He started sending me screenshots of his conversation on Whatsapp with his "supplier", where he was asking for another laptop because mine was scratched and his "client" (myself) wasn't happy. I let him be, and then in the evening I received a call.

It was the seller, who offered me another model, in his view an upgrade, for a bit more money. I told him I was gonna hang, and that I wanted to have this conversation on eBay, to keep it on the records. The guy started to sound kinda desperate, I told him how I felt about not knowing of the scratches before sending him the money, and he apologised and told me that he could offer me £70 back and that that was his whole gaining on the sell so he couldn't do more.

I mean, we were bargaining for a price. He offered me £50 back, I asked for £100. I was willing to get down to £75, he offered me £70, and I accepted. He then started to blabber, calling me "bro" and asking me not to leave any review, please. Please bro! This is a practice as old as the world I think. But somehow this morning I couldn't help but feeling bad about it. I felt like the guy leveraged my emotions to bargain, and I hated it.

When I started writing this, I was aiming towards an ending about how capitalism is making us all bad people, struggling to survive and careless of one another. I realise now that, (although my argument against capitalism is still valid) I can see my experience with the eBay seller just as haggling for a price. But still I'd rather buy from a store, pay a premium, have a warranty and a brand new machine, if and when possible. But mostly I'd rather not have to bargain for prices with shady people. It's fucking 2025 and I'm getting too old for this shit.

In the end, I'm happy with my Thinkpad, and maybe I learned something from the experience, and I guess this is my feedback on the purchase, after all.

Navigating codebases with Neovim

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I'm confused about how people I see on the internet use Telescope or Fzf-lua inside Neovim to navigate their codebases.

I think my method is pretty straightforward so I wanted to document it here:

Toggle between two files

I've bound the TAB key to "CTRL + ^" (command: bprevious) which moves me to the previous buffer, so that I can basically toggle between two files instantly.

In general I work longer sessions with two files together, rarely more than that for too long (and if I do I might open a split).

Navigate the files directly

Then if I need any other file I can at first navigate the directories with oil.nvim (which is bounded to "-"), and open the files I need from there.

Or even just by using the standard vim command ":e", really, without the oil.nvim plugin, and leveraging the autocomplete for directories and files' names.

Fzf-lua pickers

Once I've got enough open files though, I use Fzf-lua to quickly find what I need:

If I double tap space (which is basically my leader key + space) I launch the Fzf-lua picker for all the open buffers of the current session (command: FzfLua Buffers). Then I just type two or max three letters and I usually get what I need instantly.
If I need a file from a previous session (or another codebase/directory), I use "leader + f + r" to launch Fzf-lua picker for recent opened files (command: FzfLua oldfiles).
If I need anything else and I'm not sure in which file it is (a function, or anything else really), I do "leader + f + g" to "grep" or fuzzy-find anything I type in the current codebase, again, with Fzf-lua (command: FzfLua live_grep).
Or even "leader + f + f" to fuzzy-find any file in the current directory (command: FzfLua files).

Conclusion

I don't even have to think about these commands anymore, they're just second nature. I'm sure people with a different type of workflow use different tools, but I see some folks using way more convoluted systems to navigate their codebases, and I'm not sure I understand them, to be honest. More power to them I guess!

Added /uses page

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I just added a /uses page to my website. It's a list of most of the software, services, and devices that I'm currently using on a daily basis.

I try to be as much as privacy-conscious as possible (without throwing my smartphone from the window, that is) so if you're interested in alternative services to the Big Corps offer you may find something useful in here.

Feel free to reach me either via email or Mastodon if you have any questions or suggestions!

I started self-hosting

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

During the Christmas break I finally managed to put my hands on the Raspberry Pi 5 that I received as a birthday present about six months ago. I always wanted to learn to self host some useful apps and services, and what better use of a mini computer like the Raspberry Pi? Some would called it the start of my own homelab, which I would agree with.

After installing the OS on the pi and configuring some basic stuff like the ufw firewall, it was time to go and read some of Docker's documentation, because apparently this is the new trend in self-hosting hosting: containers.

Which, in hindsight, makes a lot of sense, particularly for this use case, I think. Containeraisation makes trying out different apps and services quite easy.

In fact, I tried a bunch of different apps, some of them stuck with me, and some others definitely didn't.

What stuck

Linkding

A bookmark manager with a minimalist design but very powerful and efficient. I'm quite addicted to it now, and I've migrated all my bookmarks from Raindrop to Linkding, which made me re-think my tagging system as well, with a more minimalist approach. Great!

Miniflux

I might have found my endgame RSS aggregator. I tried also FreshRSS but I found its UI/UX dated and clunky, which made me have a look at Miniflux. Like Linkding, Miniflux as well proposes a minimalist approach, and I quite enjoy it. I always had some issues with RSS readers, I somehow find them distracting. Miniflux feels like a breeze of fresh air.

I've also modified the Catppuccin Mocha custom CSS to my likings, mostly a different look for the cards of the articles. I'm keeping the code (and a screenshot) here if you're curious.

Jellyfin

A media manager and player. Now my home media server is taking shape. I put on it my collection of ripped blu-rays, and also my music stash of all the records I buy on Bandcamp, in .flac format, of course.

The idea is to use it both on my iPhone and our Apple TV. So far it's working fine, except for a couple of issues.

It would be great to be able to stream my music on my phone on the go, and there's an app for iOS that specifically addresses this use case, Streamyfin. It looks great, but unfortunately at the moment it has some issues and can't play any music file. There's a GitHub issue for this, and it will be hopefully addressed soon.

The other issue I have with using Jellyfin is the app for the Apple TV.

The one that's even promoted on Jellyifin's website is Infuse, which works and looks fine, but wants my money. Can you imagine paying $9.99 a month to play your own content from your own server? I can't, I'm afraid. I'll be looking for a valid alternative.

Beszel

Just a shiny tool that works as a server monitoring. I use htop most of the time anyway, but I wanted to try it. Graphs are cool!

Thanks but not thanks

The apps that didn't make it to the great docker purge were two read-it-later apps. Mostly because after using Linkding I realiesed I don't really need a read-it-later app at all. I can just save the bookmark and then maybe use Firefox or Safari built in readers if I fancy a cleaner layout to read a long article.

So Wallabag spinned for a bit on my server but it also felt very clunky and old, in many UI/UX ways. I briefly tried Readeck as well, which is an upcoming alternative to Wallabag, and while feeling better than Wallabag in many fronts, it still felt undercooked.

To expose or not to expose? VPN is the answer!

I debated whether or not use my public domain to access my apps on the go, and I decided not to. I don't feel like exposing my home IP address is a good move overall, considering it's not just mine IP address but of my partner as well. I know there are ways around it (reverse proxy and stuff) but I decided to go for the VPN route and ended up with the easiest solution which is Tailscale.

Everything works great! By only installing their app on my iPhone I can access all my self hosted apps, and even ssh into my other machines, if I ever fancy to do so.

In the future I might migrate to NetBird or even to Tailscale's self hostable control server Headscale, for the sake of self-sufficiency and open-sourcery.

So far so good, a great learning experience, and a brilliant new procrastination activity.

Cheers!

Welcome to my NEW personal website

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

You're officially reading this blog post on my brand new personal website!

I need to thank my partner Flavia for helping me with the design, which is inspired by the work of Dieter Rams, mostly for the colour palette and the minimalism. I really tried to choose some good fonts for readability, since a blog at the end of the day is meant to be read, and I hope you like my choices. It's using Inter for the titles (a classic choice), and Cambo for the rest of the text, a humanistic serif font.

I'm gonna write a proper Colophon I think but for the curious folks I built the website using the framework Astro and styled it with vanilla CSS. For the moment the website is hosted and deployed using both GitHub and Netlify, which is a choice I'm not very fond of, but it really helped me shipping the website fast. It's not ideal because I'd rather not rely on corporations to store and use my own data, but for the moment that'll do, I'll move to something like Mythic Beasts in the future.

If anyone was following via RSS unfortunately they'll have to fix the URL to my feeds because it has changed.

Now my excuses not to blog are very scarce...It's nice to use something made by hand by yourself. I'll try to keep up the blog posts on a proper pace!

Thanks!

Mauro.

Sunday morning ramblings - London, Canary Wharf, the IndieWeb

Sun, 26 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Yesterday was a sunny end of May Saturday, and we walked for about 20 Km. From Blackfriars Station we followed the river Thames, and the river of tourists, towards East on the South bank. We arrived at Borough Market, which was extremely crowded. It reminded me of my first covid vaccine (which for some reason I ended up getting very close to that area) when the market's stalls were all closed and there were very few people walking around, an eerie experience. The contrast with yesterday's overly crowded and overflowing streets was stark indeed. I ended up ordering a chicken and prawns Pad Thai, a classic for me, and it was probably the best Pad Thai I've ever had so far in London.

After grabbing a flat white at the colombian coffee roasters in the market we continued our swim through the crowd towards East. Passed in between London Bridge and the Shard, we climbed up the stairs of Tower Bridge and quickly made our way out of the human flood whilst aiming for one of our favourite areas of London: Wapping.

It's always nice walking around the basins, home of many birds and their nests. The walk from there towards Shadwell Basin and eventually Limehouse is an uncanny experience - a parallel reality between the noisy tourists area on the left side, and the silent backyards of many residential buildings facing the canal on the right.

We got to Limehouse and had a quick look inside The Grapes, an historical local pub now owned by the actor Ian McKellen aka Gandalf the Grey. It was full of drunk and happy people, with their skins reddened by the alcohol and the late May's sun.

Breathing the sea-like salty air of the river we finally arrived at Canary Wharf, where we spent the rest of our evening. It's such a unique place, so controversial in its nature but still fascinating. It looks like a sci-fi cyberpunk area on an island in the middle of the river - glass and steel, huge skyscrapers and lovely designed walks and green areas around the various basins and canals. On a Saturday the area has those weird vibes of an emptied business district, full of young professionals out and about, enjoying their long awaited weekend.

Every time I find myself in Canary Wharf I experience this sense of awe for the architecture and the unique vibes of the area and this sensation of perceiving the reality around me as a backdrop to my existence, as if I'm so much disconnected from it. A similar feeling you might get into amusement parks like Disneyland and the likes. This never fails to fill me with contrasting feelings of excitement and melancholy. Excitement for finding myself in such a surreal place that is in fact real, and melancholy, I guess for the fear of looking behind the thin curtain of skyscrapers and monorail stations and finding absolute emptiness.

With all this still fresh in my mind, this morning I was reading about the web, the indieweb, the small web, of which I am a lover (and a participant, impostor syndrome permitting), and I visualised this metaphor: the web right now is like this immense sprawl of a city made of these gigantic buildings owned by faceless corporations, Google, Meta, Amazon, Twitter, etc. The vast majority of people generally live this city as just these buildings, which inside are very ingeniously designed to offer the most efficient (and sterile) experience. Like hanging out in oversized malls that offer apparently everything you might want at your fingertips, but ultimately just a very strict selection of products and experiences, chosen functionally by the rules of marketing, advertising, and consumerism.

But if you look closer, if you are curious and brave enough, you will notice how Internet-City in fact is not just those obnoxious corps buildings and malls. The Electronic City is all around, in the shadow of those giants. The city in fact is not just the buildings, but all the space in between them as well, made of the most diverse people and experiences, and stories, and places. You can do whatever you want there, and build your existence (as in personal websites, blogs, services) freely, however you like it.

<figcaption>A view of Canary Wharf.</figcaption>

2024, May 23rd

Thu, 23 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update from May 23rd, 2024

💻 Work/Study

Currently focused on building my new skills as a web developer.
I'm finishing Harvard's CS50w, gathering ideas for the "capstone" final project.
Learning React and Astro, while planning to rebuild this website from scracth.
As a brilliant procrastination strategy in the last couple of months I've retrained myself to touch type with a different keyboard layout, specifically Colemak-DH. I'm at 50 wpm on average right now, and it is SO MUCH more comfortable and ergonomic than Qwerty. No regrets!

💪 Body

I've been training with weights at the gym pretty consistently, three times per week since February, learning a lot in the process and feeling much better.
Running-wise, after keeping a good streak of 100k per month this year, in May I had to slow it down because of some soreness in my right glute. Turns out, alternating gym and running 6 days a week at (almost) 44 years of young age could be asking a bit too much to myself.

🧠 Mind

🎵 Listening

Recently I've got into this synthwave/crimewave/industrial rabbit hole, and I'm discovering so many good artists. My favourite has to be IRVING FORCE though. And also Street Cleaner is pretty good.

📖 Reading

I haven't been reading much recently, I'm halfway through Cory Doctorow's - The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

🎞️ Watching

Really enjoyed the first season of the Fallout TV show.
Now I'm back at finishing 30Rocks, such a good show for light entertainment.
The latest film I watched was Perfect Days by Wim Wenders. A brilliant film, more akin to poetry than to prose, loved it.

🕹️ Playing

I've finally got into Cyberpunk 2077 and I'm liking it so far.
I keep trying to get into Total War strategy games but I just can't for some reason, they feel pretentiously complicated for what in fact they are. Also I find the Warhammer fantasy theme quite lame tbh.

🔭 Looking forward to...

Hopefully the good season! It's been a long and wet winter here in England.
Going to Italy for a couple of weeks next month.
I've bought yet another keyboard! A Ferris Sweep this time. Can't wait to literally put my hands on it.

<figcaption>Matching couple!</figcaption>

Links Dump - March 9th 2024

Sat, 09 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Another interesting week on the Cybernetic WEB™ of our futuristic age! (Writing this for posterity, so they'll think we were living the Sci-fi dream. Alas.).

Music 🎵

Bleachers - Modern Girl
Julian Lage - Speak To Me
A Kind of Timeless Jazz Masterpiece // A nice piece about Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue".
Nadine Shah - Topless Mother
Ex-Easter Island Head – Norther
Olof Dreijer - Coral
Milkweed - Folklore 1979

Long Reads 📰

Secularization Comes for the Religion of Technology: Or, how to make sense of techno-optimist manifestos, the Open Ai/Altman affair, EA/e-acc movements, and the general sense of cultural stagnation // Brilliant essay about technology as religion
The growing popularity of degrowth // Dear capitalism, go small or go home.
Why we must seize leisurely interludes from work’s confines // I could ask an AI assistant to give me a snappy oneliner to describe this article, the truth is I still have to read it myself, but it looks interesting.

IndieWeb 🏴‍☠️

IndieWeb Carnival: Roundup // So many interesting write ups and blogs and people in this single post that it's not even fair! For future further digging.

Tech ⚙️

Special report: how design agencies are actually using AI in 2024 // I still have to read this. For the lols.

Tools 🛠️

This week I've been on a bit of a binge of fonts specifically designed for programming and terminal emulators. In the end I'll stick to my dear JetBrainsMono, but these look nice too.

Intel® One Mono
MonoLisa - font follows function
Hermit
Coding Font by Typogram – Find Your True Love of Coding Fonts // Interesting tool to pin down your favourite coding font.

Web Development 🌐

The Art of PostgreSQL // For future reference, I'm gonna need this soon, I suspect.
Interesting ideas in Observable Framework // Another JS framework?? Another JS framework.

Software 💻

ibhagwan/fzf-lua: Improved fzf.vim written in lua // I completely replaced Telescope with Fzf-lua in my Neovim config. So much snappier, and so many features and possibilities of customisation. I love it.

Links Dump - March 3rd 2024

Sun, 03 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I want to start publishing links to articles, music, videos, games, etc. that I find of interest during the week. It could be a weekly blog post, or maybe not. We'll see.

Let's get started with some fresh new music.

Music 🎵

Visual 🖼️

Esoteric Forms Emerge from Wood in Aleph Geddis's Enchanting Geometric Sculptures

Long Reads 📰

How First Contact With Whale Civilization Could Unfold // If we're gonna be able to speak to whales, what are we gonna talk about?
Box110: We Just Haven’t Been Capitalisming Hard Enough – The Bounding Box // We spent so much time thinking if we could that we didn't think if we should.

Self-growth 🌱

from creativity to activity // Another inspiring journal page from Winnie Lim's blog

Gaming 🕹️

Alter Ego - What if you could live your life over again?

Tech ⚙️

EMO: Emote Portrait Alive - Generating Expressive Portrait Videos with Audio2Video Diffusion Model under Weak Conditions // Imagine the movie "Her", but with visuals on top of audio. Yep, that's 2024. And we're doomed.
Lenovo’s concept laptop is real, transparent, and ready to impress // Looks cool, but what could be a cool usecase for it apart from larping Minority Report?
Hacker News Blogroll // Endless resource of cool tech blogs! And now with a random button!

Tools 🛠️

2024 Habit Calendar // Pretty cool that you can print it out.
RsS iS dEaD LOL // Find RSS feeds from your Fediverse followed people.
ShuraUS-ASCII // Slick looking Thinkpad inspired mechanical keyboards from Japan.

Web Development 🌐

How to block AI Crawler Bots using robots.txt file // Gotta block em all.

Software 💻

o0th/tmux-nova: tmux theme // My new favourite tmux theme.
iamcco/markdown-preview.nvim: markdown preview plugin for (neo)vim // Pretty much an essential plugin to write long form markdown documents.
otavioschwanck/arrow.nvim: Bookmark your files, separated by project, and quickly navigate through them. // My new favourite Neovim plugin! Much better than harpoon to navigate multiple files.
Jan | Open-source ChatGPT Alternative // One of the many alternatives at this point, but still interesting to keep an eye on.
CantuCodes (YouTube Channel) // This guy (neo)vims! Nice short videos covering Neovim plugins.

Re-framing oneself

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

For some reason I resonate with this blog post by Winnie Lim so much. I don't know if it's our age or just a sign of times, but I had a similar realisation in the last couple of years, and an eventual breakthrough.

As in, I found myself too attached to some ideas of myself that were crippling me. And also, these ideas of myself were attached to some concepts that were inherently biased or distorted. Specifically the concept of what creativity is, and therefore what a creative person does, and therefore what being a creative person looks like, and therefore a having a model to try and match. This is wrong, in the sense that my ideas about creativity (and all the consequential) are too narrow, too specific, not based on reality but on something else.

What is this something else then? I have a few guesses:

I believe it has to do with the media, most of all. The way that (social and traditional) media sell us ideas to sell us stuff. That's the biggest lens distortion of our times.
Another good guess is the schooling system, in the sense that from an early age we've been taught what creativity is in a certain way, by teachers and their teaching methods, which might not be the best for everyone.

Freeing the concept of "creativity" from the stereotypes, labels, and biases felt like freeing myself from Myself. It would be very worth trying to apply the same principles to other parts of myself that I intuitively feel need to be changed or refreshed. Because it works.

And also it would be a good idea to keep this technique of re-framing always in mind, even for other concepts, other people, other places.

On a higher psychological level, all this has to do with the ego, I believe. And with the psychological trap of identifying myself with my ego.

As it could be obvious to anyone that ever did a bit of introspection, or self analysis, (or meditation) we tend to identify ourselves with our own thoughts, while our thoughts will happen almost independently from our will, most of the time. As emotional reactions more than willful thinking.

And so in a way, I believe we are not our thoughts, let alone the idea that our Egos have of ourselves.

Again, it might be obvious but I feel I am many things at once (as I believe everybody else is) and trying to narrow myself into a single identity/idea is just hurtful and counterproductive. And kinda childish, if you ask me.

Setting up VimWiki in Neovim

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

To Logseq or not to Logseq

In recent years I've been trying many different solutions for my note taking needs. The app that I've been using the most has been Logseq, which I still use and like, but has some kinks and pain points that are not being actively addressed by the developing team recently:

Logseq is an Electron app and it's becoming quite slow.
There are still occasions where I lose some data (although, I sync my graph in a git repository so I'm safe 99% of the time).
They're taking a long time to implement some quality of life features (like being able to use checkboxes properly, for example).

I'll most surely keep using Logseq, but I feel the need of something a bit less cumbersome for some of my note taking needs.

In particular, since I started my coding journey, I spend a lot of time in my terminal and text editor, which is Neovim. After learning the vim motions I started to use them everywhere and I really miss them when writing notes. And so I decided to give a shot at ViwmWiki, which is a note taking plugin for Vim/Neovim that creates local text files and an interlinked structure of notes, with some nice features.

The process of installing and configuring VimWiki properly in my Neovim set up though, wasn't always straightforward, and so I'm gonna document some solutions and workarounds here, for future reference.

Translating the Vimscript commands into Lua

This will:

Set the default VimWiki's directory to ~/Notes directory instead of the default ~/vimwiki.
Set the default syntax to markdown (instead of the default .wiki format, more on this later).
Replace the spaces in the file names with underscores, to avoid any possible issues.
Turns on the auto re-indexing of the tags database when I close the program.


vim.g.vimwiki_list = {
  {
    path = "~/Notes/VimWiki",
    syntax = "markdown",
    ext = ".md",
    links_space_char = "_",
    auto_tags = 1
  }
}

To activate the syntax highlighting for code blocks instead, I use this:


vim.g.vimwiki_syntax_plugins = {
	codeblock = {
		["```lua"] = { parser = "lua" },
		["```python"] = { parser = "python" },
		["```javascript"] = { parser = "javascript" },
		["```bash"] = { parser = "bash" },
		["```html"] = { parser = "html" },
		["```css"] = { parser = "css" },
		["```c"] = { parser = "c" },
	},
}

To make so that the settings are loaded properly by Neovim, at the start of the plugin, we can make use of the init option in lazy.nvim. Here's my vimwiki.lua:


return {
	"vimwiki/vimwiki",
	init = function()
		-- Default directory, syntax and file type,
		-- symbols for spaces, auto re-index tags db
		vim.g.vimwiki_list = {
			{
				path = "~/Notes/VimWiki",
				syntax = "markdown",
				ext = ".md",
				links_space_char = "_",
				auto_tags = 1,
			},
		}

		-- Disable header levels keybindings so oil.nvim will work
		vim.g.vimwiki_key_mappings = {
			headers = 0,
		}

		-- Syntax highlighting for code blocks
		vim.g.vimwiki_syntax_plugins = {
			codeblock = {
				["```lua"] = { parser = "lua" },
				["```python"] = { parser = "python" },
				["```javascript"] = { parser = "javascript" },
				["```bash"] = { parser = "bash" },
				["```html"] = { parser = "html" },
				["```css"] = { parser = "css" },
				["```c"] = { parser = "c" },
			},
		}
	end,
}

After figuring out the init section of lazy.nvim the previous workaround is meaningless.

A pesky code snippet

~~Most important of all, I had to find where exactly to put this code in my Neovim config, because for some VimWiki quirks already not completely clear to me, it won't work at all if I put them in my settings.lua file, as I'd like to.

As of now, my modular Neovim configuration works like this:~~


init.lua----
|   |   |   |
|   |   |   keymaps.lua
|   |   |
|   |   settings.lua
|   |
|   autocmds.lua
|
plugins.lua
    |
    init.lua   <--- PUT IT HERE!
    |
    LSP/
    UI/
    coding/
    navigation/
    treesitter/
    utilities/

~~I had to put the VimWiki config files right after calling LazyVim to load my plugins, in the init.lua file that loads all the plugins modules, otherwise Neovim won't read it at all.~~

Markdown it all

I started playing around with VimWiki while keeping its original file format and syntax, but honestly it feels quite wasteful to learn and use yet another syntax that I will only ever use for VimWiki and nothing else. Writing notes in markdown is much better, it's kind of a standard nowadays, I already use it everywhere, and also it will come in handy in case I want to translate some notes into HTML, since with markdown the browser can do it for me. No need for any extra steps, post-processing or plugins whatsoever.

MDwiki

Speaking of which, I found this little "program" (it's literally just an HTML file) called MDwiki, that can open all my VimWiki notes and structures in the browser, and render it clearly. All I have to do is put the file MDwiki.html in the root directory of VimWiki and launch a local server (for example I'm using alive-server), and the wiki will show up (locally) in my browser. Obviously, all the notes must be in markdown for this to work. Pretty neat!

Convert from .wiki to .md

Since I had already used VimWiki for a couple of days and I didn't want to redo all my structure (I use PARA by the way) and manually convert the few notes I wrote, I needed some kind of script for the conversion from .wiki to .md. It took me some trial and error but I'm happy to say that we have a winner here:


#!/bin/bash

set -euo pipefail

# files to change extension from to md format
readarray -d '' mv_files < <( \
  find . \( -iwholename '*diary/*.wiki' \
    -or -iwholename '*unorganized_things/*.wiki' \
    -or -iwholename '*design_docs/*.wiki' \
    -and -not -iname 'diary.wiki' \
    -and -not -iname 'index.wiki' \) \
    -print0
)

for file in "${mv_files[@]}"; do
  md_file="${file%%.wiki}.md"
  mv "$file" "$md_file"
done

readarray -d '' files < <(find . -name "*.wiki" -print0)
for file in "${files[@]}"; do
  md_file="${file%%.wiki}.md"
  sed -r -e 's/\{\{\{$/\{\{\{bash/g' -e 's/%%/TODO: comment/g' "$file" | pandoc --from vimwiki --to commonmark_x -o "$md_file"
  sed -r -i -e 's/(\[.*\])\(([^#]*)((.*) "wikilink")\)/\1\(\2.md\4\)/g' \
    -e "s/\\\'/\'/g" \
    -e "s/\[\]\{\.done[0-3]\}/\[ \] /g" \
    -e "s/\[\]\{\.done4\}/\[X\] /g" \
    "$md_file"
  rm "$file"
done

The only things I had to fix were a table and some backslashes around some files, but the rest worked flawlessly. Maybe I can tweak the script in the future. I didn't wrote the script, I found it on this blog article.

Tags system and Telescope

I use tags in my other systems quite extensively and I like to have a tag "system" in VimWiki as well. Too bad it's quite limited for now. Tags are added by surrounding a word with semicolons :work:, and can be chained together, if multiple: :work:programming:python:. The major issue though is the search system: it's just bad, and slow.

What I ended up doing is using Telescope, which I have already installed in Neovim, with fzf and ripgrep for some sweet extra speed.

And then I found this plugin for Telescope on GitHub, which makes for an even better integration, so I can use specific keybindings to search directly only inside my VimWiki notes, either just for notes' titles or live grep all the notes' content, no matter the CWD. Alas, it looks like the development of the plugin is not active anymore but I wish they'd implement tags as well!

Shortcuts and commands

Here's a table of shortcuts for VimWiki commands and a few more to deal with the Neovim speller (which is nice to have):

Command	Description
<leader> ww	Open VimWiki
<leader> wi	Open VimWikiDiary
<leader> w <leader> i	Generate day's links in the Diary index page
<leader> w <leader> w	Open Today
<leader> w <leader> y	Open Yesterday
<leader> w <leader> m	Open Tomorrow
<leader> fv	Telescope: search VimWiki's notes titles
<leader> fw	Telescope: live grep inside VimWiki directory

Command	Description
"n", zg	Add words to the spell checker
"n", ]s - [s	Jump to the next misspelled word
"n", z=	Gives suggestions for correct words
"i", <c-x> s	Gives a list with suggestions

That's all folks!

How I took an Harvard's Computer Science course

Fri, 15 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

After a few first months into my journey to become a developer and change my career, I stumbled upon a blog post and a YouTube video about this course called CS50.

CS50's Introduction to Computer Science, more specifically, is one of Harvard University's courses with the most students' enrolled. Apparently, in the actual physical world of Harvard, a lot of students take it as one of their first courses in their first year of university, independently from their field of study.

So it happens that the course has been developed in an very well structured online form as well, and it is free. It's divided into 11 weeks with 11 individual lectures, 9 labs and 10 problem sets, one at the end of each week, and a final project. The lectures themselves are incredible. Professor David Malan is a force of nature: passionate, great communicator, great presence on stage, kind but scientifically accurate. There's a lot of information thrown at you, but rarely overwhelming.

What a journey. Overall (not considering various life and work detours in between) it took me a little over three months to finish it, but apparently I'm now officially into the 1% of people that actually started and finished the online course.

I'm very, very glad I took CS50, so much so in fact that I've now started CS50w, which is the advanced continuation of the first one, specialising into web development.

But back to my last journey now.

A rocky start

I was a bit sceptic at the beginning because although I am indeed new to the field, I already took a couple of courses and I've always tinkered with computers anyway (even professionally if you can believe it), and I thought maybe I needed something a little more advanced. Well, never scepticism has been more wrong.

The course starts with some very baseline introduction to programming with this visual system called Scratch, which wasn't very fun or useful to me personally but I can see how it would be to someone completely new to the field. And then, as if nothing ever happened, we've been thrown into the world of the C programming language, by virtue of which we've been taught the key concepts of: data structures, algorithms, recursion and memory allocation. There was quite a bit of information about how computer works as well (hardware), which I found fascinating and very well explained.

After 5 very long weeks of solving problems with C, including writing programs to search and sort data, recovering data from ruined flash cards, manipulating images with various (hand written) filters, evaluating the complexity of the language of books, building vote systems, and more (all while managing pointers, stack and heap memory, etc.), one very fine day we started week 6 and boom.

Now that you know C, let me introduce you to Python!

From zero to hero

This was one of my favourite moments, not because I particularly enjoy Python or because I was particularly relieved of not having to work with C anymore (I very much liked it!) but because I was finally starting to see where all the underlined effort was really directed to. All those weeks they didn't just taught us how to program in C, they taught us some very fundamental concepts and mental models on top of which we were able to very quickly start to use another programming language.

That boost of confidence is something that really sticks with me even a few months later, and I'd really want it to be there forever, honestly.

Just to give you an idea, the Python's week problem set was a complete rewrite of ALL the previously done problem sets from C to Python. And so what looked at first like a daunting task, turned out to be a very useful and satisfying exercise of translation and optimisation.

Progressive enhancement?

And from there, with the same pattern of quickly but surely building on top of the same fundamental concepts, each week has been a different tool for a different use: first SQL to query databases, then straight into HTML, CSS and JavaScript, to build web pages, finishing with Flask, a Python framework, to build web applications. For that week we had to complete an application that allowed users to check the price of a particular stock, buy and sell from their portfolio, all including an authentication system and calls to a finance API.

If you had told me I was gonna be able to do that 4 months ago, I would have laughed in your face. But the whole course was so well organised and organic, everything made sense in hindsight, there was so much support from the extra short videos and also the Discord community, that I was able to do it with my own two hands.

My final project

It turned out, I liked the finance web app so much that I decided I wanted to do something similar for my final project, more specifically I wanted to do something with an API, a front end and a back end, in Flask.

It took me about two weeks from start to finish, I've been close to quit and change everything from scratch about three times, but I managed to build exactly what I had in mind: a Steam videogames picker application that you can read more about here.

After finishing it, I had to write the document (readme file) and also record a short screencast of myself presenting my project, which looks like something petty against all the various programming problem sets I had been through by that time, but it was indeed an experience and an exercise in itself for me.

Conclusion (or not?)

And there you go folks! I now have my very own Harvard CS50 certificate, of which I am very proud.

But most of all I have gained the very deep confidence that I really like programming, solving problems and building things that maybe, one day, someone might really find useful.

And now, onto CS50w's Web Programming with Python and JavaScript.

Adventure awaits. HUZZAH!

Lastfm Albums Charts - August 2022, August 2023

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

As all good things must come to an end I decided to stop posting my album charts here, it's been a nice ride though! Updates on my monthly plays from Lastfm.

August 2023

A month of hot weather, lots of programming, yelling at the screen and classic hard bop jazz. What a ride. Glad the Autumn is coming, my favourite season.

1. Miles Davis - Ascenseur Pour L'échafaud 2. Mort Garson - Journey to the Moon and Beyond 3. Nina Simone - I Put a Spell on You 4. Kaidi Tatham - The Only Way 5. Neil Young - Chrome Dreams 6. Alfa Mist - Variables 7. Bill Frisell - Four 8. Brandee Younger - Brand New Life 9. Wayne Shorter - JuJu 10. Django Reinhardt - Retrospective 1934-1953 11. Jaime Branch - Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)) 12. Aerosmith - Greatest Hits 13. Miles Davis - Tutu 14. Nala Sinephro - SPACE 1.8 15. Nina Simone - Pastel Blues 16. Wayne Shorter - Adam's Apple 17. Wayne Shorter - Schizophrenia 18. Bill Brewster - Late Night Tales Presents: After Dark - Vespertine 19. Duke Ellington - Money Jungle 20. Bonnacons of Doom - Bonnacons of Doom 21. John Coltrane - The Avant-Garde 22. Miles Davis - Wlakin' 23. John Coltrane - Olé Coltrane 24. Wayne Shorter - The All Seeing Eye 25. Megadeth - Rust in Peace

July 2023

A somewhat slow and fast month at the same time for me, not my brightest moment. Miles helped me a lot through it, though. And quite a few new jazz releases. Most of all, one of my favourite artists in recent times just released another good record, Kaidi Tatham - The Only Way. My summer's banger without a doubt.

lastfm Albums Chart July 2023

1. Kaidi Tatham - The Only Way 2. Alfa Mist - Variables 3. Miles Davis - Birth of the Cool 4. Ricardo Dias Gomes - Muito Sol 5. Meshell Ndegeocello - The Omnichord Real Book 6. Bill Evans Trio - Waltz for Debby 7. Nubya Garcia - Source 8. Pat Metheny - Dream Box 9. Tony Allen - Tony Allen JID018 10. Miles Davis - Sorcerer 11. Orrin Evans - The Red Door 12. Overmono - Good Lies 13. James Holden - Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities 14. Kaidi Tatham - Don't Rush the Process 15. Kode9 - Escapology 16. Miles Davis Quintet - Workin' With The Miles Davis Quintet 17. The Human Abstract - Nocturne 18. James Ellis Ford - The Hum 19. Bill Evans Trio - On a Friday Evening 20. Yussef Kamal - Black Focus 21. Bill Evans Trio - Portrait in Jazz 22. Gilroy Mere - Gilden Gate 23. Nina Simone - You've Got to Learn 24. Speakers Corner Quartet - Further Out Than The Edge 25. Miles Davis - Miles Smiles

June 2023

Half of this month of June was spent in Italy on holiday, I mostly listened to music saved locally on my iPhone, so not much new stuff.

1. The Human Abstract - Nocturne 2. Alfa Mist - Variables 3. James Holden - Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities 4. SAULT - 11 5. Megadeth - Rust in Peace 6. Megadeth - Countdown to Exxtinction 7. Queens of the Stone Age - In Times New Roman... 8. Bill Evans Trio - Waltz for Debby 9. Jimmy "Duck" Holmes - Cypress Grove 10. Jasmine Myra - Horizons 11. Jaubi - Nafs at Peace 12. Ozzy Osbourne - Tribute 13. Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works 85-92 14. Alfa Mist - Bring Backs 15. James Ellis Ford - The Hum 16. Squid - O Monolith 17. Immortal - War Against All 18. Miles Davis Quintet - Workin' With The Miles Davis Quintet 19. Aphex Twin - Syro 20. brainwaltzera - ITSAME 21. Tony Allen - Tony Allen JID018 22. African Head Charge - A Trip To Bolgatanga 23. Bill Evans Trio - Sunday At The Village Vanguard 24. Caterina Barbieri - Ecstatic Computation 25. 36 - The Lower Lights

May 2023

Finally the sun is here. Time for some Megadeth I guess. And jazz, lots of jazz.

1. Alfa Mist - Variables 2. The Gaslamp Killer - Legna 3. Ben Prunty - Into The Breach Soundtrack 4. James Ellis Ford - The Hum 5. Megadeth - Rust in Peace 6. Overmono - Good Lies 7. Brian Eno - Film Music 1976-2020 8. James Holden - Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities 9. きゃべつ - Bye Bye 10. Cleo Sol - Mother 11. Combo Chimbita - IRE 12. Kaidi Tatham - Don't Rush The Process 13. Bokani Dyer - Radio Sechaba 14. Brian Eno - Before and After Science 15. Megadeth - Countdown To Exxtinction: Live 16. Alfa Mist - Bring Backs 17. Daft Punk - Random Access Memories 18. Sadist - Firescorched 19. Sun Ra Arkestra - Sun Ra & His Intergalactic Solar Arkestra: Space Is The Place (Music From The Original Soundtrack) 20. Chet Baker - Chet 21. Craven Faults - Standers 22. Miles Davis Quintet - Workin' With The Miles Davis Quintet 23. SAULT - 11 24. Squarepusher - Be Up a Hello 25. Jaubi - Nafs at Peace 26. Megadeth - Rude Awakening 27. Modern Cosmology - What Will You Grow Now? 28. Thelonious Monk - Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane 29. Bill Evans - Undercurrent 30. Dodheimsgard - Black Medium Current 31. Misha Panfilov - The Sea Will Outlive Us All 32. Overmono - Cash Romantic 33. Salami Rose Joe Louis - Akousmatikous 34. EABS / Jaubi - In Search of a Better Tomorrow 35. Miles Davis - Miles Smiles 36. Mother Iguana - Eyeball Planet

April 2023

A mix of old nostalgia stuff and some new spins in April as well. The new Metallica is awful as usual.

1. James Holden - Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities 2. Green Day - Nimrod 3. Brandee Younger - Brand New Life 4. µ-Ziq - 1977 5. Alfa Mist - Variables 6. GoGo Penguin - Everything Is Going to Be OK 7. Miles Davis - Birth of the Cool 8. Sunrot - The Unfailing Rope 9. Mastodon - Leviathan 10. Nicole Yun - Matter 11. Ital Tek - Timeproof 12. Miles Davis - Relaxin' With The Miles Davis Quintet 13. Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works 85-92 14. mejiwahn - Beanna 15. Miles Davis Quintet - Workin' With The Miles Davis Quintet 16. Boards of Canada - Music Has the Right to Children 17. Kaidi Tatham - An Insight To ALl Minds 18. Earth - Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light II 19. Green Day - Dookie 20. Guns N' Roses - Use Your Illusion II 21. Metallica - 72 Seasons 22. Shabaka - Afrikan Culture 23. 65daysofstatic - Available Data 24. Miles Davis - Milestones 25. 65daysofstatic - Mimik

March 2023

This month again went to show off my usual mix of jazz/metal/electronic/videogames/random stuff. AKA I'm not sure where to go but I go there with style. Also, the spring still looks like a distant mirage over here.

1. Boards of Canada - Tomorrow's Harvest 2. Megadeth - Countdown to Extinction 3. Boards of Canada - Music Has the Right to Children 4. 65daysofstatic - No Man's Sky: Music for an Infinite Universe 5. Haken - Fauna 6. Ben Prunty - Transmission from a Hidden World 7. Alfa Mist - Bring Backs 8. Ben Prunty - FTL 9. Gilroy Mere - Gilden Gate 10. At the Gates - Slaughter of the Soul 11. Bonobo - Fragments 12. Cafe Music BGM channel - Coffee Music ~Studio Ghibli Jazz & Bossa 13. Ezra Collective - Where I'm Meant to Be 14. Ben Prunty - Into the Breach Soundtrack 15. Leon Vynehall - Nothing is Still 16. Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works 85-92 17. Bill Evans - Undercurrent 18. Bill Evans Trio - Sunday At The Village Vanguard 19. Herbie Hancock - Empyrean Isles 20. In Flames - Foregone 21. Joe Zawinul - Zawinul 22. Luke Vibert - Machine Funk 23. Makaya McCraven - In These Times 24. Shabaka - Afrikan Culture 25. Wayne Shorter - Speak No Evil 26. Aerosmith - Get a Grip 27. Bill Evans Trio - Trio '65 28. Marlene Ribeiro - Toquei No Sol 29. Transgressive - Extreme Transgression 30. Duke Ellington - Money Jungle 31. Miles Davis - E.S.P. 32. Overmono - Cash Romantic 33. Burial - Untrue 34. The Black Angels - Passover 35. Wayne Shorter - Juju 36. Bill Evans Trio - Waltz for Debby

February 2023

It was a videogame 8-bit soundtracks kind of month. And also the month I discovered Woods of Ypress and got myself into a doom hole. Fair enough. Let's move on with the Spring, please.

1. Ben Prunty - Into the Breach Soundtrack 2. Woods of Ypress - Woods 4: The Green Album 3. Ben Prunty - FTL Soundtrack 4. Shores of Null - Quiescence 5. Autechre - Tri Repetae 6. Boards of Canada - Tomorrow's Harvest 7. Yo La Tengo - This Stupid World 8. Chris Christodolou - Risk of Rain Soundtrack 9. Alfa Mist - Bring Backs 10. Faten Kanaan - Afterpoem 11. Kelela - Raven 12. Burial - Untrue 13. Pigs pigs pigs pigs pigs pigs pigs - Land of Sleeper 14. brainwaltzera - ITSAME 15. 65daysofstatic - No Man's Sky: Music for an Infinite Universe 16. Marco Zenker - Channel Balance 17. Shores of Null - Black Drapes For Toorrow 18. Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works 85-92 19. Judas Priest - Painkiller 20. Shit and Shine - New Confusion 21. Home - Odyssey 22. Opeth - Damnation 23. Alice in Chains - Jar of Flies 24. Yazmin Lacey - Voice Notes 25. Cleo Sol - Mother

January 2023

This month as well has been hectic music-wise. Turns out when I'm studying I have less mental energy to porper listening to music. When I code it's just a background. Still some blasts from teh past nonetheless. And very few new albums. A slow starting year indeed.

1. Hudson Mohawke - Cry Sugar 2. Kamelot - Karma 3. Louie Vega - Expansions In The NYC 4. brainwaltzera - ITSAME 5. 99LETTERS - Kaibou Zukan 6. Skee Mask - Pool 7. Ezra Collective - Where I'm Meant To Be 8. Rachika Nayar - Heaven Come Crashing 9. Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes 10. Heilung - Drif 11. Glyders - Maria's Hunt 12. Shores of Null - The Loss of Beauty 13. Various Artists - Artificial Intelligence 14. Sault - 11 15. Juni Habel - Carvings 16. Miles Davis - Someday My Prince Will Come 17. Pole - Tempus 18. Shit & Shine - New Confusion 19. Autechre - Confield 20. Hania Rani - Esja 21. Rich Ruth - I Survived, It's Over 22. Alison Cotton - The Portrait You Painted of Me 23. Kaidi Tatham - Don't Rush The Process 24. Otus - Torch 25. Stratovarius - Survive

December 2022

December has been a weird one as I've been traveling and away from my desktop (and music gear). Lots of throw backs into power metal, 90s music, mixed with relistens of this year's favourites. To a 2023 full of good music.

1. SAULT - 11 2. Various Artists - Artificial Intelligence 3. Makaya McCraven - In These Times 4. Guns N' Roses - Use Your Illusion 5. Shit and Shine - New Confusion 6. Duval Timothy - Help 7. Aphex Twin - Syro 8. brainwaltzera - ITSAME 9. Gamma Ray - Land of the Free (Anniversary Edition) 10. Loraine James - Building Something Beautiful For Me 11. Decius - Decius Vol. I 12. Haken - Virus 13. Kamelot - Karma 14. Leon Vynehall - Nothing Is Still 15. Surprise Chef - Education & Recreation 16. The Human Abstract - Nocturne 17. Aphex Twin - Surfing On Sine Waves 18. Neil Young - Harvest (50th Anniversary Edition) 19. Skee Mask - ISS007 20. Huerco S. - Plonk 21. Plaid - Feorm Falorx 22. The Utopia Strong - International Treasure 23. Duval Timothy - Meeting with a Judas Tree 24. Kaidi Tatham - Don't Rush The Process 25. Shit & Shine - New Consusion (duplicate, thanks Lastfm)

November 2022

It's definitely been a SAULT month, considering they released 5 albums at the same time and they're all good, it was quite predictable. This month almost no jazz, with the exception of Bill Frisell (a delightful album, but when did he made a bad one anyway?) and a re-listen of the latest Sun Ra Arkestra which is growing on me. Lots of electronica that kept me company during this cold month of studying and working at my computer most days (and nights). Some 90s nostalgia for good measure.

1. SAULT - UNTITLED (God) 2. SAULT - 11 3. Ezra Collective - Where I'm Meant To Be 4. Plaid - Feorm Falorx 5. Aphex Twin - Drukqs 6. Decius - Decius Vol. I 7. Boards of Canada - Geogaddi 8. SAULT - Earth 9. Bill Frisell - Four 10. Misfits - Static Age 11. Pole - Tempus 12. STR4TA - STR4TASFEAR 13. Sun Ra Arkestra - Living Sky 14. Depeche Mode - Songs of Faith and Devotion 15. Makaya McCraven - In These Times 16. Martha - PLeasee Don't Take Me Back 17. My Bloody Valentine - Loveless 18. Suede - Autofiction 19. Guns N' Roses - Use Your Illusion 20. Röyksopp - Profound Mysteries III 21. Ólafur Arnalds - some kind of peace — piano reworks 22. Run Logan Run - Nature Will Take Care Of You 23. SAULT - Today & Tomorrow 24. Skee Mask - ISS007 25. Loraine James - Building Something Beautiful For Me 26. Coldcut & Mixmaster Morris - @0 27. Darkthrone - Astral Fortress 28. Aphex Twin - Cheetah EP 29. Duval Timothy - Meeting with a Judas Tree 30. Aphex Twin - Collapse EP 31. SAULT - AIIR 32. The Cure - Wish 33. brainwaltzera - ITSAME 34. brainwaltzera - Medal Headz [G.B.D.F] - EP 35. Floating Points - Someone Close 36. Jaimie Branch - FLY or DIE LIVE

October 2022

1. Surprise Chef - Education & Recreation 2. Makaya McCraven - In These Times 3. Loraine James - Building Something Beautiful For Me 4. Charles Stepney - Step On Step 5. The Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness 6. Various Artists - Blue Note Re:imagined II 7. Brian Eno - Another Green World 8. Brian Eno - Small Craft on a Milk Sea 9. Clark - 05-10 10. Kaidi Tatham - It's a World Before You 11. Sun Ra Arkestra - Living Sky 12. Caterina Barbieri - Spirit Exit 13. Kaidi Tatham - Don't Rush The Process 14. The Comet Is Coming - Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam 15. Brian Eno - FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE 16. Kokoroko - Could We Be More 17. Leon Vynehall - Nothing Is Still 18. Alison Cotton - The Portrait You Painted of Me 19. Moin - Paste 20. The Utopia Strong - International Treasure 21. All Them Witches - Nothing as the Ideal 22. Jasmine Myra - Horizons 23. Duke Ellington - Money Jungle 24. Moundabout - Flowers Rot, Bring me Stones 25. Opeth - Pale Communion 26. The Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dream 27. Witch - Witch 28. Hagop Tchaparian - Bolts 29. Hank Mobley - Soul Station 30. Wayne Shorter - Speak No Evil 31. Miles Davis - Miles Smiles 32. Oren Ambarchi - Shebang 33. SAULT - Air 34. STR4TA - STR4TASFEAR 35. Angles - A Muted Reality 36. Guns N' Roses - Use Your Illusion I

September 2022

1. Stereolab - Emperor Tomato Ketchup 2. Brian Eno - Film Music 1976 ~ 2020 3. Stereolab - Pulse Of The Early Brain [Switched On Volume 5] 4. Charles Stepney - Step On Step 5. Hozan Yamamoto - Beautiful Bamboo-Flute 6. Makaya McCraven - In These Times 7. Sunda Arc - Tides 8. Eliza - A Sky Without Stars 9. The Utopia Strong - International Treasure 10. Clark - Playground In A Lake 11. Sault - UNTITLED (Rise) 12. Brian Eno - Another Green World 13. John Coltrane - Giant Steps 14. The Vernon Spring - A Plane Over Woods 15. mejiwahn - Beanna 16. The Black Angels - Wilderness of Mirrors 17. Nina Simone - I Put a Spell on You 18. Shawn Phillips - Second Contribution 19. Hot Chip - Freakout/Release 20. New Pagans - The Seed, The Vessel, The Roots and All 21. The Comet Is Coming - Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam 22. Hania Rani - Esja 23. Julian Lage - View With A Room 24. Leon Vynehall - Nothing Is Still 25. Sarah Davachi - Two Sisters 26. The Heliocentrics - Fallen Angels (the Singles Collection) 27. EABS - 2061 28. Wojciech Rusin - Syphon 29. Black Mountain - Destroyer 30. Kaidi Tatham - Don't Rush The Process 31. Nala Sinephro - SPACE 1.8 32. Poliphony - Poliphony 33. Duke Ellington - Money Jungle 34. John Coltrane - Blue Train: The Complete Masters 35. The Heliocentrics - Telemetric Sounds 36. Alison Cotton - The Portrait You Painted of Me

August 2022

1. Kokoroko - Could We Be More 2. Kaidi Tatham - Don't Rush The Process 3. Jasmine Myra - Horizons 4. mejiwahn - Beanna 5. Wayne Shorter - JuJu 6. Bud Powell - The Amazing Bud Powell: Vol. 1 7. Black Mountain - Destroyer 8. Wayne Shorter - Adam's Apple 9. Jaimie Branch - FLY or DIE LIVE 10. Tom Misch - What Kinda Music 11. Boards of Canada - Tomorrow's Harvest 12. Klaus Schulze - Deus Arrakis 13. Miles Davis - Filles De Kilimanjaro 14. Kode9 - Escapology 15. Neil Young - NOISE AND FLOWERS 16. Oneida - Success 17. Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works 85-92 18. Chick Corea - Light As A Feather 19. Alva Noto - Insen (Remaster) 20. Charlie Parker - Charlie Parker With Strings 21. Gwenno - Tresor 22. Marcus King - Young Blood 23. Black Mountain - In the Future 24. Black Mountain - IV 25. Black Mountain - Wilderness Heart 26. Brian Eno - Before and After Science 27. Devil - Time to Repent 28. Duke Ellington - Money Jungle 29. MICHELE RABBIA - Lost River 30. Billow Observatory - Stareside 31. Goat - World Music 32. Opeth - My Arms, Your Hearse 33. The Flaming Lips - Embryonic 34. Alison Cotton - The Portrait You Painted of Me 35. Makaya McCraven - Deciphering The Message 36. Miles Davis Quintet - Workin' With The Miles Davis Quintet

The Online Tech Community in 2023

Fri, 07 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

In the last few months I've switched over to many online tech/developers communities of various kind. From Reddit to YouTube, Discord, HackerNews, etc, I'm now following a bunch of new channels since I'm changing my career.

What I've found is that usually people are quite open and welcoming. If you demonstrate a good attitude as a learner, veterans will gladly help you (probably as in any other field?). Most of all, a lot of these folks are VERY passionate about their jobs and about computer science in general, which is really reassuring for a newcomer like me.

And that's the good side.

What I wasn't expecting (but maybe just because I'm too naive, really) it's the following:

Same tools, opposite views

A shit show of alt-right YouTubers doing Linux content videos. So odd how we're using the same software for the "same" reasons of privacy and freedom but with such opposite political and ethical views. I guess it stands as a sign of the "open" nature of open and free software after all...

Nietzsche is my prophet

A bunch of thirty-something (but even younger) developers with an horrendous nihilistic view of life: greedy for money and status, obsessed with crypto and the last new shiny thing, giving out the worst kind of advice. So much so in fact that it feels to me like they're kind of trying to sabotage other people to their own advantage. My best guess overall is that they're just insecure. Rich, entitled hipsters scared to shit and trying their best not to lose their status, aka future boomers, really.

God is dead, AI is the new God

A lot of them are discouraging others from learning programming because the AI already has made jobs irrelevant: "I used ChatGPT at my last corporate job, it was basically copy and paste all day, man! If you wanna stay relevant now you just have to make your own YT channel, build your thing with crypto...yadda yadda".

The Hustler way-of-life

An overall absolute lack of ethics and values in these individuals that is quite concerning. The world is a jungle if you think it is, really. There's no reason to drag all humanity into your black hole of survival instincts. Is "hustlers" the word maybe? You do you, and I'll do me, I guess.

OK, I think I'll get back into my cave learning programming and studying CS because I just enjoy it.

Bye.

2023, April 1st

Sat, 01 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update from April 1st, 2023

It's been a while! (again...)

Oh well, so much has happened since the last time I wrote here.

Changing career

At the end of October 2022, I've decided to change career completely. At the young age of 42, that is. I've been working on myself a lot, and that helped me understanding that really, I need a change and I need to do what I feel it's more relevant to me. And also that I'm truly passionate about and, most of all, that is aligned to my values. Most of all I don't want to have anything to do with the advertising industry ever again, in any form or flavour. I guess I'm burned out after about about 12 years of grinding keyframes but also I have various ethical and ideological reasons I could talk about. But I'll spare you the discussion for the time being. I really want to build stuff that people would actually use and find useful, that's my main motivation right now.

And so I started as a half joke but I ended up studying full time HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The HTML/CSS part was easy enough as I wasn't completely new to the languages. Although it would be hard to master. Then I dived into JavaScript (and into programming in general). That wasn't a joke at all... It took me a few months of hard work but the 25th of March I got my freeCodeCamp JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures certification, finally! Honestly one of the hardest achievements in my life. And this is definitely just the start...

My motion design skills are not going to disappear over night, so probably I'll find a way to converge the two skillsets at some point. For now I need to go all in the developer way of life. I'm aiming to become a proper Front End developer. Wish me luck because I really need it.

By the way, I've also enrolled at Harvard's famous computer science program called CS50. It'll be a walk in the park I'm sure.

Mastodon

In October Elon Musk had to finalise his deal with Twitter and bought it for good. It resulted in an exodus of people from Twitter to Mastodon.

And so the server I've been administrating for fun for the last few years became kind of my (unpaid) full time job for a few weeks. It was great to see so many people interested in Mastodon and mograph.social finally!

I had some hectic days (and nights) in which I had to deal with something like a new account request every 30 seconds! Also I had to set up all the proper donation systems, upgrade the server's resources, write a proper code of conduct and more specific rules...a lot of work! As of right now the storm has definitely calmed down, but a few people are happily hanging out on mograph.social and I'm so proud, honestly. Also, a few generous folks chipped in the various donations' systems and as of now the server is financially self-sustainable.

I love the Mastodon community!

GNU Linux

And since I'm finally free from that pile of burning trash that is the Adobe suite and I'm not forced to use that mass of spying clunky software that is Windows anymore I got back full time into another one of my passions which is GNU Linux!

I did a looong journey since last December, on several machines:

Ubuntu --> Pop_OS! --> Regolith --> Manjaro --> I use Arch, by the way. With i3. Yeah, I know.

This wasn't all just for fun (oh well maybe), I've been learning to set up my machines for development as well. I've also uploaded my dotfiles on GitHub, if anyone wants to have a look at my customisations!

I also embraced the way of Vim and made my own custom configuration of Neovim, which I love to use for anything now.

Listening

Since now most of the time I'm busy either studying (reading, watching tutorials) or coding I have less time for active listening and new music discovery, unfortunately. And so not much new music for me recently, I guess I'm enjoying the records and bands I've discovered in the last couple of years for now. Anyway, I keep track of all my monthly listening here.

Reading

To be honest I've been mostly reading about programming and computer science recently. As for fiction I'm halfway through Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers. It's the novel that Tarkovsky used as a base for its famous movie Stalker. So far so good.

Watching

We've been watching quite a few TV shows: The Last of Us was a good one recently (although that ending...), The Handmaid's Tale I really liked as well. But the most intriguing one has definitely been Severance. Just not to miss the office that much. Right now we're watching Succession; usually not my genre of TV shows but I have to admit it's pretty well written and directed so far.

In terms of actual movies the very highlights have been Hot Fuzz (so much (British) fun!) and probably Her. I needed to watch it considered the actual AI progresses and constant news. I really liked Phoenix performance, and the visuals were quite good actually. I loved the weird futuristic LA mixed up with some Asian metropolis. I couldn't believe the movie was made in 2013, it definitely aged well both visually and conceptually.

And that's it for now, until the next time.

<figcaption>What a bully! Self-portrait of me and nasty Jessy</figcaption>

Favourite Music Infinite Blogroll

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

An infinite roll of some nice new bands/musicians and album releases while I discover them.

April 1st 2023

James Holden - Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities

A transcendental electronic journey beyond any genre classification. A freak lucid dream of positive only vibes. Gorgeous.

January 30th 2023

Glyders - Maria's Hunt

A minimalist rock&roll album that still grooves hard thanks to its warm fuzzy tones and its swinging rhythm section.

First gem of this new year discovered.

November 20th 2022

SAULT - 11

They actually released 5 full different albums this week. So far this one is my favourite.

November 10th 2022

Ezra Collective - Where I'm Meant To Be

A warm embrace in this cold weather.

October 20th 2022

Education & Recreation - Surprise Chef

October 13th 2022

Loraine James - Building Something Beautiful For Me

October 7th 2022

Makaya McCraven - In These Times

February 7th 2022

A Place To Bury Strangers

I saw A Place To Bury Strangers live in 2017, they were opening for The Black Angels in Brixton. I remember I was completely blown away, such an energetic performance. Their new album has come out a few days ago and it's probably one of their best, at least to my taste. But today on YT, while watching their latest music videos, I found another great KEXP live session from 2018.

Mesmerized once again.

January 27th 2022

Combo Chimbita

Today I was listening to the latest Bandcamp Weekly episode and there was an interview with this band of Colombian New Yorkers called "Combo Chimbita". Their latest album is out tomorrow and it was today's album of the day on Bandcamp. Their music was interesting, not usually my genre so I was a bit cautious to be honest. Then I've searched for "Combo Chimbita live" on YouTube and I found this KEXP live session that absolutely blown me away!

Her voice and presence are stunning, from another space and time really. Synths, electric guitar that ranges from surf rock sounds to open distortion, South American rhythms. A powerful mix of modern and old that shines in the live performance.

Brilliant.

Top 10 new albums of 2022

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Without any doubt 2022 for me has been the year of electronic music. I found myself exploring so many new genres and artists and labels, it's been very refreshing and rewarding. I dived into IDM, ambient, house and techno like I had never done before, and I believe it shows in my top 10 here. Although I've been listening also to a lot of classic jazz as well this year, in terms of new releases, here we go:

10. Combo Chimbita - IRE

An haunting mix of latin rhythms, rock, psychedelia. Lots of talent pouring out of this record but definitely the high peak of the performance is the incredible voice of Carolina Oliveros. Heart warming, ass shaking.

Favourite track: Yo Me Lo Merezco

9. Shit & Shine - New Confusion

A new devastating release from Shit & Shine. It scracthes my brain just in the right spot. Super saturated sounds, constant tension and very few releases, umconfortable but still very engaging. You angry or annoyed? Maybe both, thanks for asking.

Favourite track: Annoyed

8. The Utopia Strong - International Treasure

I'm not sure how to describe this music. It's transcendental, both in quality and genre definition, and I love it. Psychedelic? Yes. Ambient? Yes indeed. Krautrock? With a personal original twist and so much good taste. A magical sonic journey, one of my favourite Rocket Recordings releases of all times indeed.

Favourite track: International Treasure

7. Lorraine James - Building Something Beautiful For Me

Nocturnal, introspective, glitchy minimalistic rhythms and super warm, tasty, fuzzy synths. And then in the middle of it all a post-rock explosion with the track Enfield, Always. Boom. Banger right there. An absolute beautiful listening experience. She builded something beautiful for us all, after all.

6. Makaya McKraven - In These Times

Some very interesting compositions, very often of a cinematic quality. Like a truly modern "jazz" orchestra with some fine arrangements and great improvisation moments. A feast for the ears. Yes please, I'll have some more.

Favourite track: In These Times

5. Mary Halvorson - Amaryllis

Mary Halvorson is a brilliant guitarist and composer surrounded by great musicians. They run along this river of notes and rhythms like there's no tomorrow, with a constant sense of purpose and creativity that keeps the songs well tight together. Brilliant album overall, so many layers to discover with every listen, often on the balanced edge of classical compositions and free jazz explosions.

Favourite track: Amaryllis

4. Huerco S. - Plonk

The music of Huerco S. has a very physical, material quality, you can almost feel the textures on your skin. I found myself lost in the electronic landscapes of this album quite often this year, and I still can't stop listening to it. Misterious and captivating, cold like steel and warm like volcanic rocks, so alien and yet so familiar.

Favourite track: Plonk II

3. Kaidi Tatham - Don't Rush The Process

Another banger release from The King this year. Sailing the grooves of black music with piratesque skillfulness and heaps of good taste. Once again, I'm sure mr. Hancock is really proud, and with reason.

Favourite track: Don't Rush The Process (ft. The Easy Access Orchestra)

2. SAULT - AIR

SAULT released 6 albums this last year. A bit unfair, because they are all really good. Nonetheless AIR is the one that so far I listened to the most. And it's just great. AIR is like the soundtrack of an imaginary movie that I'd really want to watch. Incredible symphonic orchestra with a breathtaking choir arranged together with Morriconian quality. As always though, my personal highlight is the angelic voice of Cleo Sol that just melts me every time. A masterpiece for me.

Favourite track: Time is Precious

1. Brainwaltzera - ITSAME

That's it. My definition of 2022 in music. A mediterranean Aphex Twin. A misterious as much as talented electronic forger of sounds. A totally joyful braindance of an album that holds tight to the IDM tradition while looking forward to a very intimate and personal expression of life experience. I didn't really know before this year of how much human and warm electronic music could be. Now I know, and I just love it.

Favourite track: ITSAME [group hugg]

2022, September 9th

Sat, 24 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update from September 24th, 2022

All good and dandy on this side of the pond. I've got covid in May and had a couple of rough weeks but I've been fine since then.

I'm currently in the process of refreshing my showreel with some of my latest work and a few personal projects - my goal is to apply for a permanent position somewhere as soon as possible. A bit tired of freelancing, especially from home.
In the meantime I've been obsessed with Logseq and I've been rebuilding my PKM system with it. So much fun! (and procrastination...)

Traveling

On the (recent) holidays side, we've just got back from a short 3 days stay in Bath. Hotel with a SPA and all the bells and whistles - quite relaxing if you ask me.

<figcaption>Cucumber water for customers only!!!</figcaption>

I had no idea what to expect from the city of Bath but it was a really nice surprise: beautiful architecture all around, very lively atmosphere, so many nice place to eat and have a drink. A touristy place? Yes, indeed. But with its very clear spirit and identity.

<figcaption>Mirror mirror on the wall, who's the smoothest of them all?</figcaption>

Music

One of my most consistent activities in the last few months has been listening to music:

I had a huge deep dive into electronica this year, which I've never been into that much but now I'm loving. Mostly classics from WARP Records (Aphex Twin, Autechre, Squarepusher, etc.) but also some more ambient stuff and moody techno from Germany (Skee Mask most of all).
Also Brian Eno has been a staple in my playlists.
Jazz is always a constant of mine, recently - a lot of classics from Miles Davis to Coltrane and Wayne Shorter which they will never finish to amaze me.
Some of my favourite contemporary artists have been SAULT, Kaidi Tatham, Jasmine Myra, Nala Sinephro.
Overall there's SO MUCH good music coming out recently that it's very hard to keep up - but I do my best, nonetheless.

Reading

I also got back into reading recently, since I've bought myself a Kobo Libra 2. I've always been a bit sceptic about it but I must admit it's so nice (and convenient) to read books on an e-reader.

I've managed to finally read "IT" by Stephen King this summer - I had it in my reading list since I was 12, I guess. It was all right, good all Stephen King. Yeah. let's not talk about that scene...
I've been also on a mission of reading some classics of the British and American literature and I discovered William Faulkner. A bit hard to get into, I must admit, but quite unique and rewarding (I've been reading his short stories, I'm still collecting my strengths and wits to begin one of his novels).
Also Philip K. Dick has been taking me company with his sci-fi short stories. Some of which are from the 50's but you wouldn't say, they've aged quite well!

Until the next update, which at this pace could be in the next year...

Moving to Qobuz

Fri, 10 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT

I've been using Deezer as my music streaming platform of choice for the last year. I moved from Spotify mostly because after I've tried Deezer HiFi FLAC streaming I could noticeably hear the difference in sound quality with my equipment (and ears) so I had to move to a better quality streaming service. At the time I've tried a few and decided to go with Deezer mostly because it felt as the best alternative to Spotify in terms of user experience and catalogue offer. I've been mostly happy with Deezer - I've never missed any album or artist, sounded good, the app worked fine. My biggest complaints with it have been about their customer service and the occasional hic up of the service (like when all my saved albums disappeared for a day only to come back the day after in my favourites section without being bookmarked, so I had to re-save about 350 albums manually in fear of losing it all again). They have also been quite obscure with their changes in pricing that cost me a few extra £ just because they didn't tell me I could switch my plan to a (new) cheaper one for the same exact features.

Annoying.

A few days ago though I gave Qobuz a second try. I already gave it a shot last year for a month but it didn't impress me for some reason - I remember in particular the iOS app was a bit too much on the crashy side of things. Also I couldn't find some albums. Now Qobuz has a new trial offer which gives you 3 months for free and so I went with it again.

So much better!

This is clearly a service made with music lovers in mind, first and foremost:

The desktop app (Windows 10) is great - I love how, for some albums, they have the full CD booklet available one click away. And a good looking full screen mode doesn't hurt either.
The desktop app (on Windows 10) can see all your audio devices and let you even choose what driver to use. You can easily play bit perfect Hi Res music with WASAPI Exclusive mode in just a click. Awesome!
The sound quality is amazing and it's great to have Hi-Res versions of a lot of albums.
There are nice filters for the favourites library that actually work. You can easily search inside your library as well.
You can check out labels pages with all their latest (and oldest) releases.
The home page is always filled with interesting new releases that are actually good and not some hip hop trashy super star that paid to be on the homepage (hello Tidal).
I still have to find any missing artist or albums so they have definitely improved the offer of their catalogue.
There are no podcast - I use different services for those, I don't feel the need of cluttering my music app with extra fluff.
There are a lot of interesting articles on each artist or album page.
I still have to try their discover algorithm but honestly I rarely ever use those to find new music, so it doesn't matter too much to me.
The iOS app seems to work much better than a year ago, no crashes at all so far.

After these 3 free months I think I'm going for the yearly subscription plan, it will be a bit over £10 per month this way which is a great price point considering I was paying £12 p.m. to Deezer.

Overall I highly recommend Qobuz.

Headphones comparison - From DT770 Pro to Hifiman Sundara

Thu, 21 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT

About a year ago I took the leap and bought myself a Schiit stack (Modi 3+, Magni Heresy, Mani) to listen to music from my PC (I have a growing library of FLAC files and a subscription to Deezer HiFi) and to my LP collection through an AT-LP120XUSB with an upgraded shibata cartridge (AT-VMN95SH). As I live with my partner and we're both working from home, I need to use headphones 90% of the day and at the time I had a pair of Audio-Technica M50X which I've always found very uncomfortable and never really liked how they sounded, so much so I had to resort to an EQ (which I'd rather avoid usually) - I just bought them because of the internet hype I guess. I then went on and after a more accurate research I bought a pair of Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro 80 ohm. I remember I was instantly blown away - great soundstage, unbelievable deep bass and overall a much better listening experience and comfort than the M50X. I've been happily using the DT770 for about a year now. Until I got back into the rabbit hole - I wanted to upgrade my headphones and really wanted to try something different this time. So I started to look into open back headphones and also the planar magnetic drivers technology. It didn't take too long until I could hear the internet screaming at me: Hifiman Sundara! I got a pair from Amazon. And this is my experience after about a week of use.

Out of the box the Sundaras looked quite good, a nice upgrade from the plastic frame of the DT770 although the headband felt a bit flimsy. Alas, the cable was horrid though - way too short and way too rigid, I've bought a new one like two days after.

Although on the paper the Sundaras are slightly heavier than the DT770 when I put them on my head they felt like they were made of feathers - much more comfortable, with less pressure on the top part of my ears too. Great.

Then I plugged them into my Magni Heresy and pressed play on Foobar2000. I wasn't impressed at all. Definitely a bit more details - I could hear things I've never heard before in songs that I've been listening to for about 20 years - singers breathing in, sax players hitting with their fingers on their instrument, some quiet few extra notes at the end of a solo. But then I wondered - do all these little extra details make a real difference to my listening experience? I wasn't so sure.

For some reason I felt the Sundara's sound lacking. I couldn't put my finger on it but I was missing something, and I could feel my brain constantly reaching forward to hear something that was supposed to be there, but wasn't. And so I found myself with my hand on the volume knob way too many times, turning it up. I started to do some A/B listening tests with the DT770 and my impressions were so much better with my old headphones. In particular I was missing the soundstage, which was odd considering the Sundaras are open back, they were definitely more airy, though. And obviously the sub bass growl of the DT770 wasn't there. At this point I was sure I was going to send the Sundaras back. In particular I felt like even if they were an upgrade, certainly not a 3x upgrade, based on the price tag alone.

Little by little though I started to notice the different qualities of the sound - the bass wasn't so deep as the DT770 but definitely present and clearer. The mid frequencies felt a lot in my face but so much more warm and musical. The trebles were more detailed without being too harsh on my ears. I also noticed that the Sundaras were doing better with some genres of music and worst with some others - they really impressed me a lot with jazz and classical music, they were decent with rock, not so much with metal though. And awful with electronic. I could hear the fake nature of the samples used in some songs, somehow - they sounded artificial in a way I had never noticed before. Still the soundstage wasn't there and I started to feel the Sundaras shouty, too much in my face, especially the vocals.

Until one night I went to bed after a long listening session and in the silence of my bedroom I could hear my ears ringing as if I had been at some loud live gig. I realized that I was definitely listening to music at too high volume. The day after I forced myself to keep the volume down on my Magni and boom. Something clicked in my head. I could hear the soundstage opening and I could appreciate the quality of the music so much more. I then did a last A/B test with the DT770 - holy hell, they were harsh! I had become a Sundara's lover. Most of it all, I could really tell the different sound signatures - the V shape of the DT770 (low and high frequencies up and mids down below) against the very crisp and clear neutral shape of the Sundaras.

I've read around about breaking in the headphones, even on the Sundara's manual they suggest 150 hours of breaking in. I honestly align myself with the skeptics here as I trust the measurements and they've never shown any relevant change after any break in period. But I think I've witnessed myself a brain break in - I was so used to the sound signature of the DT770 that it took me a few days to understand basically how to listen to a different pair of headphones, so much that I couldn't appreciate the obvious higher qualities of the new pair.

Also I think I've already experienced a bit of the diminished returns effect, even at this relative low price tag point. I'm in love with the Sundaras now but for three times less the price the DT770 are a no brainer suggestion for anyone interested into an entry level pair of quality headphones.

All considered though, the listening experience with the Hifiman Sundara is undeniably better - so much more musical and open (and also comfortable and less fatiguing) that it's hard for me to look back now.

<figcaption>The Hifiman Sundara</figcaption>

Album Review // Skee Mask - Pool

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT

An experiment in music "review". I typed down my impressions of the songs while listening to them in a very free way, and some short final thoughts on the overall album.

Track by Track

01. Nvivo

The intro is like being sucked into a soundscape. Then it stops and this intricate beat pattern starts. So groovy. There's some sort of riff or melody as well, but not predominant. It's like a bass playing in the background somehow, it's so tight to the drums that it's barely audible. In one word: tight. In the background the soundscapes sucking in and out continues. It never stays still, constant change throughout the whole track. Very close to some Aphex Twin stuff. A braindance for sure, but also an actual dance floor song. Here comes the bouncing steel balls hi-hat sounds. And laser zaps! A tasteful intro to a tasteful album. 5/5.

02. Stone Cold 369

A huge bass pattern comes from the distance, menacing but so tasteful. Almost like a real electric bass lightly slapped. The ambient sounds grow around the riff in circles. This is basically an ambient track made of synth noises. Captivating soundscape overall. A real sense of texture and physicality on this track. A joyful church organ like major chord shows us the exit. 5/5.

03. LFO

This one starts out pretty industrial. There's an actual harmony that guides the piece. the beats are made of static discharging sounds. Very deep and soft bass line. almost soothing. There's an interesting contrast between the harshness of the beats and the softness of the other sounds. Great soundscaping work here as well. The song is in constant evolution although it's just a repeating pattern of three notes. 5/5.

04. Rdvnedub

Flanged sound of an obsessive beat pattern. An echoed synth breaks the wall of beats. Some nice enveloping effects keep the track interesting. The rhythm sets in a more distinct pattern that feels like it will do good on a dancefloor. Interesting overall, albeit a bit repetitive. 4/5.

05. CZ3000 Dub

Ethereal soundscape and 4/4 kick drum. Very dance oriented track. Makes you bob your head. This could be out of Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works 85-92, easily. One of the best tracks on the album for sure. Simple but beautifully crafted. 5/5.

06. DJ Camo Bro

I love the broken up sound of the pads in this track. The beats as well are fantastic. Very upbeat song in its own way. Hypnotic and energizing at the same time. One of my very favourites. A masterpiece of drums programming really. 5/5.

07. Collapse Casual

Weird intro like from an old movie. Nice drumming, groovy and catchy. Otherworldly echoes in the background. Quite a tense atmosphere. Glacial, like being inside a beached metal ship. There's kind of a jungle feeling to the beats. Not my favourite on the album but still well crafted. 3/5.

08. Breathing Method

This is a relentless beating monster. Again, like jungle but more minimalistic. Haunted by echoes that sound like weird screaming voices in the background. At some point an actual sample from a rapping voice appears. Ominous atmosphere overall. I like the drop at halfway of the track. Sometimes those screams remind me of Firestarter from The Prodigy. An ominous triphop/jungle minimalistic song. Nice. 4/5.

09. Ozone

This is more of an ambient track. Somehow a resting place after the previous song. Relaxing and bright. At some point a very barebone drumming starts. 4/5.

10. Rio Dub

Another ambient track with what sounds like some jazz sparse drums in the background, more like brushes on a snare. Also there's some kind of bass line as well. Everything is suspended in the air. You can almost see the smoke. Some robot voices push the Blade Runner atmosphere even further somewhere along halfway of the track. This is the best ambient piece of the album, but I still prefer other songs. 4/5.

11. Testo BC Mashup

This is weird. I can hear a distorted sample of an Italian radio that says "Colosseo" at some point. The beats start inside this dreamy soundscape. Impressive. Phenomenal drumming that reminds me of Aphex Twin once again. This could be on RDJA. At half of the track there's a crescendo and the tempo picks up like it's flying away. So good. Really nice beats samples. One of the best tracks on the album, indeed. 5/5.

12. Dolan Tours

Deep drum kick in between dreamy pads. Nice beats a la Aphex Twin again. Calm and tense atmosphere at the same time, very enjoyable. Really nice sounds again. A constantly changing song that turns around these very open repeating pads. 5/5.

13. Absence

Beatless ambient track - sounds of static electricity and pads in the background. Quite creepy. 3/5.

14. 60681z

Clap and heavy kick drum, pretty intense rhythm and synth riff. Nice atmosphere - when it gets a bit boring some extra elements get in. Dance oriented anyway - or as a sort of ambient track with beats. Really nice drumming overall. Towards the end there's like a synth solo which is interesting, albeit a bit random. 4/5.

15. Crosssection

Another beats driven song. Some interesting sounds, like a vocoder creeping in. There's an actual simple harmony in the background. Pretty groovy track. Overall the song sounds like it likes to keep its cool. And it is indeed pretty cool and chill. Upbeat in its own way. 4/5.

16. Harrison Ford

(retro)Futuristic. Intense groove, claps and old school synths. Nice openings behind the main groove, ethereal soundscapes in the background. Trippy kind of mellow braindance. There's even what sounds like an electric guitar solo at some point. Marimbas as well, very cool sound choices. Everything sounds so crisp and fresh too. It's always the same small pattern but everything around it changes constantly - also its own sounds change quite frequently. One of my favourites. 5/5.

17. Pepper Boys

Claps and groove. Very interesting drumming that makes you wanna dance. Very cool openings and closings in the sounds - overall ethereal pads again, creating a sense of open background which is so refreshing and contrasts well with the groove that's leading in front of the song. Another one of my favourites. 5/5.

18. Fourth

Starts as an ambient track, background noises and a kick here and there. Reverse pads gives this summer night feeling. A simple structure creeps out all the layers. It sounds almost like a very minimalistic hip hop track. The sounds choices as always are excellent. Great texturing work. It feels more like a painting than a song. Towards the end comes in something that sounds like an acoustic drumkit playing a few bars of the groove. Very evocative track. 4/5.

Final Thoughts

An overall great album. Many different kinds of tracks, never boring. From ambient soundscapes to dance floor hits to intricate braindance compositions. A very tasteful selection of sounds and samples - an airy and precise production that conjures these huge evocative mindscapes. Some creepy interludes and sci-fi moments have been put into the mix that contrast well with the more techno songs. A very visual album overall, cinematic. A black and white play of shadows and lights. The work of a virtuoso that never indulges into his technique for the simple sake of it, but who's instead focused into crafting these magnificent soundscapes and relentless beats. It really grows on you with every consecutive listen. One of my personal favorite electronic music records of all times. 5/5.

About NFTs

Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 GMT

I have been aware of the blockchain technology for a few years now, reading about it in the book Radical Technologies by Adam Greenfield mostly and I found it definitely fascinating and with quite an undisputable potential.

What I wasn't aware of was the rising of this thing called NFT.

Blockchain and NFTs

Non Fungible Tokens are basically whatever piece of digital artwork or information authenticated on a cryptocurrency blockchain (usually the Ethereum blockchain). What happens is that something that is intrinsically technically reproducible ad infinitum (such is the nature of digital things), can become unique or at least scarce. An NFT is an actual receipt that points to a URL that holds that digital thing on somebody's server. This receipt then lives on a blockchain that makes sure that any block of data it contains is mathematically unique and can't be compromised or tampered without compromising the whole chain (which is basically a huge database).

I'm not here to tell you how much the blockchain technology is most probably bad for the environment (compared to the power consumption of the banking systems), or how much it's still unsecure, not privacy oriented, not really distributed nor decentralised, how much it's creating its own silo on the web and I could go on. If you're interested in all that I strongly suggest you to have a look at this pretty long (and pretty popular and really comprehensive) video by Dan Olson:

NFTs and Motion Graphics

Another coincidental reason for which I've been aware (more than necessary probably) of the NFT phenomenon is because of my job and my interests, therefore my web frequentations - the motion graphics industry in the specific.

The big bang of the NFTs was the selling of a piece for about $69 million USD. The piece was a digital collage made by the digital artist Beeple with his 5000 pieces of artwork. He created all this 3D rendered images in exactly 10 years (5000 days) of uninterrupted daily work in Cinema 4D, the currently most used 3D software in the motion graphics industry. He was already well known because of his resilience with what many of us motion designers have tried but so many have failed keeping up, making a piece everyday.

What happened is that after Beeple became an actual millionaire, the FOMO was real on the internet. Instagram and Twitter especially saw a huge wave of motion designer and 3D artists doing their best (sometimes worst) effort to become part of this "revolution".

Let's get straight to the point here - let's not be naïve more than what is necessary:

we're working as motion designers because it's a job. A job that pays the bills, and maybe (hopefully more often than not) in the process we enjoy what we're doing. So I'm not surprised that people follow the latest trends to make money, because that's what it is in the end, and it will always be until this capitalist economic system exists as it is.

No. This is not the issue. Greed is the issue. And also the fallout that rains on everybody else's heads.

The FOMO goldrush

Because of this collective FOMO (and consequential run towards the NFT dream) most of the internet spaces that are used by people like me to stay up to date with the state of the art and to be inspired by others' talent, have been flooded by a huge sea of sameness. A big discharge of what is now just noise to my eyes in the form of dull, repetitive and copied and pasted renders of 3D heads with weird textures, displaced pieces of random geometry with attached long conceptual very unneeded explanations, and so on. One could argue if it wasn't already the same at least for the last couple of years (if not more) before the advent of NFTs, especially on Instagram. Yes, indeed. But what it's worse now is that all of these Non Fungible Artists are now trying so hard to be part of the phenomenon that they look like they're part of some kind of creepy internet cult.

You can tell them from miles away:

Colourful stylised profile picture which is either a monkey, a prosperous cyber lady, a cute cat or derivatives.
They've added the extension ".eth" to their nicknames.
They post regularly on Twitter and every morning they type "GM" (as in, you know, good morning) and GN before bed (as in, you've guessed it, good night). I've come to know they do this because is part of the larger cryptocurrency community and it means something like, "I'm still here holding onto my crypto money because I believe we're gonna be the future (and rich)".
They have changed their way of communicating on the internet and now they all sound like salesmen that want to sell you their crappy shiny car.
They are desperate for attention and they really care about being part of their "community".

And more, but you've got the point.

I've seen so many people on Twitter, that I used to follow since about 10 years or more, falling for this - in this pathetic attempt to be part of something that is there just for the money involved. It's true that a few artists have become much richer thanks to this phenomenon recently. But they were usually already famous artists and designers (and rightfully so). A very few that weren't already well established had their chance, they took it and now they've gained their share of popularity (and money). But what is the percentage of this lucky people to the whole? - A very small one if you ask me. It's like "playing guitar and wanting to become a Rockstar's" chance.

In the process, us, casual neighbours and random viewers have to deal with all the noise and shit.

Conclusions

So to conclude I will add my very personal opinion, as of early 2022, of the cryptocurrency technology in general:

Cryptocurrencies might be an innovative and inevitably diffused new technology very soon, but as of right now and even more so for the NFTs phenomenon, it's just a huge scam. It's a huge Ponzi scheme fueled by the interests of the people that have already invested their own money in it and want you to do the same so they're investments can grow stronger. It's always sad to see what the thirst for easy money, greed and the illusion of quick richness can do to a community.

As always feel free to hit me up on Mastodon, Twitter or send me a good ol' email.

2022, February 17th

Thu, 17 Feb 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update from February 17th, 2022

Still living in SE London with my partner Flavia and our cat Jessy.

<figcaption>The traditional Christmas photo with lasagna.</figcaption>

Still freelancing from home since March 21st 2020.
I'm not actually actively looking for new clients though, I'm just working for my regulars when they need me - in the meantime I'm studying various things to improve my career. Such as...
Currently hard at work learning Houdini. I'm doing great progress, I don't feel like I'm a beginner anymore. Although, it's not super easy to kickstart my own projects with it (yet).
Quite a lot of Octane tinkering - Redshift is still my main render engine but I finally managed to learn Octane as well.
I took the online course "Design Bootcamp" from School of Motion to tackle once and for all my imposter syndrome. It was very intense but very much worth it.
Working on various ideas for personal projects to develop further.

For all the rest

I'm dedicating way too much time into developing this blog. I think I'm addicted now.
I'm very much interested in PKM (Personal Knowledge Management), productivity, Zettelkasten method, PARA method (both of which I'm currently using), and the fantastic software that I'm constantly typing on for everything Obsidian.
After a bad 2021 with injuries to both my ankle and my knee I'm finally back on track with running on a regular schedule. Actually last week I hit a personal record time on a 10K run at 54:49. Pretty good if you ask me!

Currently listening

Looking forward to Desertfest London 2022, I've got the tickets in 2019. Hopefully this will be the year...
Lots of electronic and IDM recently, mostly the classics Aphex Twin, Burial, Four Tet.
For all the rest have a look here, and here, and here.

Currently watching

Watching for the first time The Sopranos, such a great show, I don't know why I haven't watched it before honestly. No spoilers please!

Currently playing

Not much gaming for me recently but when I do play I'm mostly into roguelikes such as The Binding of Isaac and Dead Cells. // Elden Ring!

Currently reading

Sitting on my bedside table:

David Stubbs - Mars by 1980
Mark Manson - Everything is Fucked

Music consumption habits in 2022

Tue, 15 Feb 2022 00:00:00 GMT

About a year ago, the second year into the covid-19 pandemic, I decided (and frankly needed) to get back into actively listening to music. What I mean by that is not only using music as a background for other activities but actually spend the whole focus of my attention for sometime everyday to the act of listening to music. Something that I used to do regularly while growing up, especially in the pre-internet era, and that I've been missing a lot.

I divide my interest for music in two different (but related) activities:

Research and Discovery of new (and old but "new to me") music
Pure listening enjoyment

Research & Discovery resources

The main source of new music to me is, without any doubt, Bandcamp. I use their website extensively, from their curated articles/lists to their podcasts and their suggestions algorithm - it's a continue flow of interesting music of all genres.

There are also some other music website that I tend to browse regularly:

I'm always on the look for good music writings and this list tends to vary with time.

I also receive (way too) many newsletters, mostly from labels and record stores. Although they clutter my mailbox quite a bit I definitely find some interesting albums in there and they help me keeping up with some reissues that I might otherwise miss.

I like to listen to some radio stations from time to time. Mostly BBC6 but also Worldwide FM. In general (and if you know, you might have noticed a pattern here) I tend to follow anything that the man, Giles Peterson, suggests or produces, recently.

And now for the actual listening experience

Since I've got myself a Schiit stack and a pair of Beyerdynamic headphones (and realised I can definitely hear the difference between lossless and lossy audio files) I switched all my digital music consumption to FLAC files (lossless format).

Lossless vs lossy

My opinion on whether or not lossless or lossy file formats make an actual difference to the listening experience is varied:

I believe that most of it is purely personal, it depends on your physical hearing abilities and actual listening training/experience.
It also depends a lot from the sources - the way the music is mixed and mastered which varies a lot, especially from genre to genre. With something like crust punk or some metal subgenres I don't think it really matters because the production in these cases is often inherently low-fi. Which isn't a bad thing in itself (it's a matter of aesthetics of some music genres) but don't expect to hear a difference in sound quality if you try to listen to Burzum in a high definition 24bit FLAC format. But for music that is (meant to be) well recorded and produced the difference is much more noticeable in my experience. For example I find a huge gap in quality when I listen to lossless (or even better analogue, well mastered) formats for jazz, soul and classical music.
The equipment used is very important as well: If you listen to anything via Bluetooth connection for example, lossless or lossy it doesn't make any difference at all, since the BT connection will compress the sound anyway. The quality of the headphones or speakers makes a whole lot of difference as well, although there's a lot of personal preference involved. In the end, I believe there's a sweet spot for the quality and cost of the audio equipment: too much cheap quality hardware won't let you appreciate any difference in sound, but after a certain threshold, too expensive equipment becomes overkill, the value for money in terms of sound quality just drops.
And last but not least, I won't deny that there must definitely be some placebo effect at play in here - but hey, isn't the experience of reality inherently subjective? So if that's the case, who cares?

Streaming services

I moved from Spotify (which has been teasing an HiFi service for over a year now without actually shipping it) after almost a decade, to Deezer, which offers FLAC quality at a decent price and has a large catalogue similar to the competition.

I use the streaming services to be able to access whatever album I find (old or new) in a high quality digital format, mostly for listening on the go on my iPhone (strictly with a pair of good wired earphones). I don't consider anymore the streaming services as a source of music discovery as I don't like very much their music discovery algorithms - I tend to find them repetitive, dull and quite a cold experience overall. I very much prefer curated (by humans) playlists, if I have to chose.

Anyway if I really like an album, I buy it. Streaming music to me is mostly a try-before-you-buy affair right now.

On a separate note: I also am a nostalgic user of Last.fm, scrobbling strong since 2006. I like Last.fm mostly for the ability to track my listening habits, the fluctuations in my taste and sometimes it's just useful to find something I listened to in the past that I can't recall on the spot. It used to be a great music community, it's now, sadly, mostly a dead web space for internet trolls.

Local music library

I have a local music library on my hard drive that consists of FLAC files only, most of them bought on Bandcamp, some ripped from actual CDs I own, some others coming from download codes of LPs I've bought.

To listen to my local library on Windows 10 I'm using foobar2000 with the Eole theme.

Physical music collection

When I really enjoy an album or I want to support an artist that I like, I usually buy the LP (what they call "vinyl" nowadays) and when, for whatever reason, the LP is not available I get the album on CD (rarely). I've been doing most of my shopping online recently, but I enjoy going to the actual record stores in person whenever possible.

My favourites stores in London are:

Phonica (Soho)
RoughTrade (Shoreditch)
Casbah Records (Greenwich)
Sleeve Notes Records (Richmond)
Sister Ray (Soho)

Sometimes for online-buying-only I use Bleep (mostly for electronic music, of course).

I can also buy directly from the labels or (most of the time) through Bandcamp.

When it's convenient (mostly to avoid shipping fees, which well, I already pay monthly to be honest with the Prime subscription) I use Amazon, but I really try not to as I'd rather support actual record stores.

A few times I've bought LPs from random sellers/stores on Discogs as well, although I tend not to because if anything goes wrong with the vinyl not all vendors offer a nice customer service for returns, it's a bit of a hit and miss experience and there are not guarantees, as far as I know. I'd rather avoid.

Playing and listening equipment

The afore mentioned Schiit stack is comprised of the following components:

Mani - turntable phono pre-amplifier
Modi - DAC (digital to analogue converter) connected to my desktop PC
Magni - headphones amplifier that also goes out (preamp) to my external speakers
A generic (but sturdy) 3-way audio switch I bought on amazon, for switching between my turntable and my PC with the turn of a knob

To spin my records I'm using an Audio-Technica LP120X turntable with an upgraded "shibata" stylus, the AT-VMN95SH, that makes a whole lot of difference, honestly. In the rare occasions that I'm able to listen to my music without headphones I have a pair of Edifier R1700BT connected to my system. Not the most audiophile of the setups but for my actual needs is perfectly fine and probably even more than enough - It sounds pretty good to me!

Conclusions

If you made it to the end and are interested in the matter, wanna share some good music or have any related questions feel free to hit me up on Twitter/Mastodon or to send me an email.

Until then, happy listening!

<figcaption>My actual setup</figcaption>

Top 10 new albums of 2021

Mon, 27 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMT

10. Dos Santos - City of Mirrors

I love the surf rock hints mixed within the overall Latin sounds of this record. Catchy songs, melancholically South American. I just love the dreamy atmosphere this album creates.

Favourite track: A Tu Lado

9. IDLES - Crawler

This new IDLES LP is much less immediate than the previous ones. But fuckin hell it is a grower. Much more musically explorative, same old iconic and urgent lyrics. One of their best works for sure. The production is a punch in the face. In a good way.

Favourite track: Meds

8. STR4TA - Aspects

FUNK FUNK FUNK FUNK FUNK FUNK FUNK FUNK FUNK FUNK FUNK FUNK FUNK FUNK FUNK FUNK FUNK FUNK FUNK FUNK FUNK FUNK FUNK FUNK

Favourite track: Aspects

7. Sault - Rise

Brilliant. So many good ideas so well developed. Crystal clear production, fantastic sounds. Soulful, urgent, fierce and confident.

Favourite track: Strong

6. Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Philharmonic Orchestra - Promises

This one might be a bit overrated to be fair, but in the end it is such a nice piece of music. Sanders' improvisation is brilliant, a great bridge to the spiritual jazz tradition. The minimalistic approach of the whole LP is very enjoyable, with some great emotional peaks, like when the London Philharmonic Orchestra kicks in in all its grandeur.

Favourite track: Movement 6

5. Emma-Jean Thackray - Yellow

Great arrangements, a sunny atmosphere, positive vibes, great musicians. What not to like? Yeah maybe the production is a bit on the dull side but still, this album is packed with so much good stuff that I can honestly live with that. Emma and her band are even better when improvising live! Have a look here

Favourite track: Venus

4. Jaubi - Nafs at Peace

Psychedelic, mysterious, passionate. This LP shits on the heads of all those hipsters "psych" bands out there, any day any time. Traditional eastern instruments mixed with jazz/western instruments crafting some improvisational pieces out of this world.

Favourite track: Raga Gurji Todi

3. Low - HEY WHAT

This was a very late discovery for me this year but what an absolutely brilliant album. I love the contrast between the melodic vocal parts and the multiforme texture of sounds. From the grinding out of limiter screams, to the soft guitars, there's an eerie balance here that is just a pleasure to experience.

Favourite track: Days Like These

2. Alfa Mist - Bring Backs

A nocturnal album, yet colourful, explorative but rooted into traditions. I like to think of this album as one of the most representative soundtracks of contemporary London. One of the best soundtracks, of course.

Favourite track: Run Outs

1. Kaidi Tatham - An Insight To All Minds

Definitely my most spinned album of the year. Super groovy, smooth and warm sounds, great modal atmospheres (that could be on par with some of the best Hancock stuff), various rhythmic and genre explorations, never a dull moment for an interesting listening experience from start to finish.

Favourite track: An Insight To All Minds

A brief Mastodon guide for newcomers

Sun, 02 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT

This is a quick reference guide for brand new Mastodon (and Fediverse) users who may be feel like they're screaming into the void when they first join mograph.social (or any other instance for that matters).

Mograph.social is a Mastodon server that is part of a much more vast network of other servers called "The Fediverse".

You have chosen to subscribe to this server because, most probably, you're interested in motion design, animation or VFX (or anything else in the field) and now you'd like to connect with like-minded individuals, start conversations, join conversations, socialise in general (hey, isn't it what social media are for, after all?)

Here's a few helpful things to know:

Slang

If you're coming from Twitter this is a brief nomenclature that might come in handy:

Toot (R.I.P.) = Tweet
Boost = Retweet
Favourite = Like

Timelines

You have 3 different timelines on mograph.social:

Home
Local
Federated

The Home timeline will show all the posts from the people you follow, weather they're on mograph.social or on any other server. Consider this your "curated" timeline, similar to your home feed on Twitter.

The Local timeline will show all the posts from the people on mograph.social. This is a good way to have a feel of the community and to join mograph-related conversations.

The Federated timeline will show ALL the posts from ALL the accounts that ALL the users on mograph.social are currently following. A way to have a peek outside our server and join the vast Fediverse community.

Of course there are also direct messages, and a column for all the notifications.

First steps

#introduction

It's good netiquette in the Fediverse (and a useful first apporach) to post a short introduction about yourself and tag it with the hashtag #introduction. If you use other hashtags in the introduction post as well, it would be even more useful for people to find you and eventually follow you. You can also consider pinning your #introduction toot to your profile, it's a good way to extend your bio info section.

Create your profile

You can add a profile picture and you can also write a short bio in your profile. There are even some custom fields where you can put any kind of informations like links to your website or blog or whatever you like, really. Please also consider specifing the pronouns you'd like to use for yourself.

Hashtags

You can search Mastodon by hashtags and then you can pin the resulting feed to a new column on the interface. This way you'll be able to keep an eye on the feed and discover some more interesting people to follow, or join some conversations even on different servers.

Useful tools

Trunk is a community curated list of Mastodon accounts organised by topics. Following some people on one or more of the lists can be a good way to bootstrap your Home feed.

If you want to have a peek inside some other Mastodon servers and maybe find other people to follow you can use MastoVue.

Mobile apps

For Android devices I suggest Tusky and Fedilab. They work great with multiple accounts as well. Tusky is more minimal and snappy, Fedilab has a lot more features (that you may need or not). I'd recommend getting the apps from F-droid instead of the Play Store. In any case, the apps are both great and constantly developed so considering a donation to help their development is not a bad idea at all.

On iOS I'm currently using Toot! and Mercury , the first one is paid and the second free. Both has their pros and cons. There are a few more apps to try out on iOS that you can check here.

Sometimes I just prefer to browse Mastodon directly from Safari as well, to be fair. The mobile version of the website works great.

Regarding the official Mastodon apps on both Android and iOS - while definitely more good looking and polished from a UX/UI perspective than most of the other apps, the decision not to include all the different timelines (for the sake of simplicity towards new users I guess?) makes the official apps paradoxically the worst choice especially for newcomers, in my opinion. They're actively developing them though, so hopefully they'll change their minds and fix the issue soon.

Tips & Tricks

If you're not keen of the default multicolumn interface of Mastodon you can switch to a more similar to Twitter single column view. Go to Preferences --> Appearance and then you can untick "Enable advanced web interface".
Post interesting toots and people will follow you.
Interact with strangers.
Be curious.
Ask questions.
Try out new things.

Your faithful admin @mauro