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Few days ago I received (finally) the Apple Studio Display that I have ordered and I found some tips that I’ve rarely found in other reviews. So, I want to write about these less known features: Use ‘Hey Siri!’ with the Mac in stop I found that you can enable Ehy Siri! also on the unsupported Mac and it can also be triggered when the Mac is sleeping, the display will wake up, execute your command and after going to sleep. Watch the short video below: Ambient light sensor is not on the center near the camera Usually the ambient light sensor of the Mac/iPhone is in the center near the camera, but not on the Studio Display that, instead, is in the upper left corner. The color profil... Read More

I recently updated my Raspbian Buster to Bullseye on the RaspberryPI I use as DNS server with Pi-Hole. But unfortunately something went wrong, or at least I thought I made something wrong during the update process, because when the Raspberry PI rebooted, the attached Pimoroni HyperPixel 4” display was blank. I mean, the backlight was on but there was nothing on the screen. So I tried to ssh in to it but the ip was changed itself. I don’t know what happened but I caught the opportunity to switch to another Linux distribution that I’ve always wanted to try: DietPI. Obviously I had all the backup so I wasn’t particularly angry. So I went to DietPI website, downloaded the installer, flas... Read More

I had made some workflows that automatically moved my routers backup to a backup folder, but since I’ve switched from DD-WRT to OpenWrt, and I’m not using two routers but only one, I want to delete them. The problem is that I absolutely don’t remember where I put those workflows but I know that are somewhere on my disk since every time I download a file, the Automator icon appears on my menubar: And -second trouble- I also don’t remember the name of them. So I searched for any workflow file using Spotlight on my Finder, but Spotlight has found only one, and I remember I have created more than one (probably the others are inside some hidden-to-Spotlight folders). Here’s where the v... Read More

This post is about how I’m doing the backup of my Mac using (the great) Carbon Copy Cloner software. Maybe you can take some inspiration. My setup is to have an external SSD that is always connected via USB-C to my Mac, but I don’t want to leave it mounted on my macOS system every time, due to security and because this would cause more disk wear. So I leave my disk attached to my Mac and CCC should mount it and do the backup, just in case that CCC fails to mount your disk, you can add a bash preflight script to mount it before the backup begins. The script is very simple but you have to identify your volume using diskutil list In my case the volume is the disk4s1 due to size and name... Read More

Some months ago I bought a new microwave from LG (model MH6535GIB), that is a very nice microwave for the price tag but… by default it had a big, enormous problem: the sounds. Alert sounds for everything, every button that was pressed and every time it was ending the cooking, and not one time, but once a minute for five minutes after the end of its cooking cycle. Simply crazy. The model is the MH6535GIB, this: but there are lots of similar models-Serial Number with different capacity or similar functions, that I think use almost the same firmware. So I simply checked the manual to disable it, but the manual didn’t help, since there wasn’t any info. So I emailed the LG support ... Read More

GDPR is a useful law. Full stop. But if something can be improved, why not do it? The privacy and the level of security offered to EU users after the release of the GDPR have surely improved, indeed some other countries took inspiration for new online regulations, but since it’s a quite new law (is active since 25 May 2018), it has some downsides, at least in its first implemention. In fact it has been improved in the 2022, the cookies banner now is more consistent/useful and gives the users more control and more easy control over those annoying banners. Now you should be able to quick choose if accepts them or not and and continue whitout agree to the cookies. An example of the biggest... Read More

This is a simple tutorial to update your umami stat system when deployed on a Heroku free plan, and it’s complementary to my other post: Backing up umami database on Heroku free plan Also because first thing I suggest, is to make a backup of the current database as explained in the post above. Then you have to login in the Heroku CLI: Home@iMac ~ % heroku login And clone the app to your local disk: Home@iMac ~ % heroku git:clone -a blog-stats Cloning into 'blog-stats'... remote: Counting objects: 7721, done. remote: Compressing objects: 100% (2232/2232), done. remote: Total 7721 (delta 5304), reused 7721 (delta 5304) Receiving objects: 100% (7721/7721), 3.60 MiB | 3.33 MiB/s, done. Re... Read More

Few days ago I received an email from Reddit that was noticing me about the removal of one of my post: The removed post is this: Photographer meticulously light paints 686 photos for stop motion project Nothing to be worried, this can happen, as the message says. But what has surprised me is that the copyright violation was for a video uploaded and set to public on YouTube, and also linked from a lot of sources on the web. Indeed I’ve found it on a famous photographer website, PetaPixel: Photographer Meticulously Light Paints 686 Photos for Stop Motion Project. The point here is that the request arrived only after the Reddit post went “quite viral” with +3.1k upvotes and the front pa... Read More

Let’s talk about a very useful function: the NFC tag reader/scan on the iPhone. It would be great to have a simple tag placed, for example, at the home entrance, to turn on/off the lights using Shortcut. Yes, it would be. But it is not. Because the NFC tag reader paired with the Shortcut app, it’s almost useless because: It requires you to have the iPhone unlocked: First point, you must have the phone unlocked. That’s stupid because if I just want to place the phone on a tag and do the action, if I have first to unlock my iPhone, then I can simply tap on an icon on my home screen that do the same thing as the tag can do, but is only the first stupid point, going on. It requi... Read More

Following the abandon of Google Analytics and the beginning of umami usage (you can read the details in this post) I encountered in a little trouble: how to make a backup of the umami database, without having sFTP access to Heroku VPS, because of the free plan? I’ve found a solution that is a bit tricky (compared to a normal backup) but it works. It requires having Heroku CLI installed, can be done via brew tap heroku/brew && brew install heroku then run (replace ‘blog-stats’ with the name of your Heroku app) heroku pg:backups:capture --app blog-stats it will take a dozen of seconds and in the end it will display the number of your backup: heroku pg:backups:capture --app b... Read More

First of all this is not the usual(ess) article that says “use Low Power Mode, disable background refresh, etc…” we already know those stupids tips, I’m assuming that we are a bit above this level. So I would try to explain how to keep charged your batteries between 20% and 80% using Shortcuts and Alexa connected Smart Plug, plus get some notifications when the batteries are below or above a threshold of other devices. For example, get an SMS or email on your iPhone when the battery of the MacBook is above/below x% level, in order to remember to charge it. But since it’s boring to remember to detach the cable when the charge is above 80%, I made an automation using Shortcut, that automa... Read More

I started this blog few weeks ago and I installed, despite my will, Google Analytics but, just few days after… G. Analytics has been declared illegal in EU. Then? Okay, first a bit of background: everyone is curious of how many visitors, from where and from which referral site, is coming to his website. And I’m too, so what is the easy to install, free and detailed analytic service? Google Analytics, you bet. Well, maybe it’s true, if you run a commercial website and you need to know some super detailed stats maybe if you want to be the money, you can use Google Analytics for free. But since I’m not interested in all those data that G. Analytics gives, but I’m a lot more interested in my... Read More

Yes, finally I’ve found the time to buy a VPS and host a Jekyll blog with a nice comment system and to move my old blog from Medium. …but why? Medium is so handy and simple, why I’ve spent one week of work to move few pixels of text? Because I want that my content is my content and not my content on the “Medium’s hands”, plus Medium is not what was in the beginning. There’re lots of reasons of this that I’ll try to explain in this post. Your content and privacy Medium doesn’t give you your content and your reader, instead it stored them for you, but you’re not the owner of these information. I mean, if you want to go away from Medium because of some reasons, you are absolutely not su... Read More

My idea is to achieve a technological house but that doesn’t rely only and all on a connection, because it can have failure and is not always more useful, I want instead to have a handy and comfortable setup to enjoy my everyday life with the help of some automations and tech. But my priority is also the appearance, so I tried to build some “nerdy things” with cables and a lot of hardware but without leave the cables visible or expose the power strips, plugs, etc… since I hate to see all of those messy and horribile hardware. And I wanted to achieve a design that mix and creates contrast between old furnitures design and new tech gadgets. Because both things can cohabit. So, first of all... Read More

WireGuard is a great network tunnel/VPN, very fast and reliable, but for me it has one downside: I have to update the config file every time I reboot my router or modem, because the IP from my ISP change every time. So I solved this trouble using a dynamic DNS service provider (in my case noIP), so now every time the router/modem change the WAN IP, my iPhone and Macbook change the WireGuard configuration and they can connect automatically to the new IP of my home router and I’m connected to my home LAN plus I can use my Pi-Hole adblocker also via mobile or outside my home. First of all you need a router flashed with DD-WRT, then activate the WireGuard tunnel with your configs, here’s mine... Read More

…also because until you sell, and you have the money on your bank account, your are not making any profit. The story behind my psychologic limitation is quite short and common, on the “cryptos hype” I was involved with mtGox “puff/disappeared” exchange, with some dollars (well euros since I’m italian) so I promised myself to “don’t fall again in the crypto black hole”. But every temptation that is made to be broken, so I have fallen in it again some time after. Nothing wrong as long as you are conscious to use the money you can lose, you have simply to put a cut-off in your brain and said “ok, stop here, I can’t put in other money, I’ll put my ideas instead”. So I bought cryptos, since ... Read More

Since I’ve never found a complete and easy tutorial on how to setup an encrypted account using the default macOS/iOS Mail.app, I’ll try to explain my setup and how I made this. Keeping things separate for the two type of encryption, an easy and less secure way: S/MIME, and the more robust and secure PGP. I’m using both on my macOS/iOS devices, with two different apps, when I want to use a friendly way and I don’t have to share important information, I I use the handy S/MIME with the default apps, and when I want to have a robust encryption, I switch to another app with PGP encryption. Both the apps are easy to use and don’t require specific capacities. Before the beginning, I want to wri... Read More

This post is about my Adblock setup with an (overkill) RaspberryPI 4 and Pi-Hole, and since the pics tell the story more than words, so first pics, then words/specs/code. Nothing special, but since I like the tech things that looking nice I tried to make the setup a bit nicer but it works also without the stand/display/etc… The Raspberry PI is a 4B 1.2 with 4Gb RAM, absolutely not needed for run Pi-Hole but I prefer to have it for other things and Gigabit ethernet, I think a FriendlyARM ZeroPI is perfect for run Pi-Hole only. Building the Raspberry PI The Router is a Netgear R7800 with DD-WRT firmware, the list of items about the Raspberry PI is: Raspberry PI 4B 1.2 Pimoron... Read More