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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