Paolo Amoroso's Journal

After blogging daily for over a month, I'm taking a deserved break.

I'm going to travel from Italy to USA to view the launch of my astronaut friend Samantha Cristoforetti at Kennedy Space Center, Florida. The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Dragon capsule of her Crew-4 flight to the International Space Station will blast into space no earlier than April 23, 2022.

There will be so many things to see, stuff to do, and excitement I'm unlikely to post much. But I'll try to share some photos and updates to my Mastodon profile.

#space

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I use exclusively Chrome OS on the desktop and store most data in my Google account. So Spinbackup is the best cloud-to-cloud backup and recovery tool for my needs.

It allows to back up the data from my Google account in Gmail, Google Drive, Google Photos, and other Google products. Spinbackup also supports personal Google accounts for individual use, is affordable, and lets me access the data even if I lose access to my Google account (don't take this feature for granted).

The product has a few rough edges though. Two-step verification comes with no backup codes. And there's no way of updating a payment method, other than canceling a subscription and purchasing it again with a different method.

#chromeOS

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Ever since trying the IndieWeb I realized something the tech elite rarely thinks about, if at all. The IndieWeb needs a lot of work to be useable by ordinary people, let alone considered an option. Manuel Moreale reached similar conclusions:

Personal sites are not going to “come back” because they never “went away” to begin with. At one point they were the only available tool and that's why they were everywhere. But at that time the web was also dominated by tech oriented people and those same people still have personal websites to this day. They've simply become a minority. Today's web is filled with people who are not tech savvy—or nerds—and they are content to use social media platforms. They never cared about having a personal site. It was never a thing for them.

#misc

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Platforms like Stoop Inbox and Feedly want to be the inbox for newsletters. They provide a unified inbox for reading email newsletters outside of email clients and optimized for the format.

This is great for readers. But these platforms swap the subscribers' email addresses with addresses generated and owned by the platforms, thus hijacking the relationship between authors and subscribers.

So why don't Gmail, Outlook, and other email client vendors adapt their products to improve the newsletter reading experience straight at the source?

Keeping newsletters in the inbox maintains email decentralized and gets rid of yet another gatekeeper.

#misc

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Do you dream of being a celebrity or influencer? Careful what you wish for.

My name is Paolo Amoroso and I'm on Twitter as @amoroso. My last name is the same as that of a few major celebrities such as an Italian singer, at least one football player, and a politician.

From time to time my Twitter profile receives reactions intended for the celebrities, as the users unintentionally mention my handle or don't remove it when replying or quoting. Up to last year, in these cases I got at most several dozen reactions.

One year ago today the wildly popular football celebrity Alex de Souza, who has 3 million highly-engaged Twitter followers, unintentionally mentioned me in a tweet instead of a football player by the same last name.

All viral hell broke loose.

De Souza tweeted overnight. Opening TweetDeck the following day, I was greeted by thousands of reactions, mostly likes, but also dozens of retweets including some by users with over 100K followers.

The TweetDeck notifications column seemed a special effect straight out of The Matrix, with new items countinuously dropping for a while. Scrolling down the notifications page on the Twitter website didn't show all the reactions and I bumped into an error or two. I could no longer access my previous notifications and it took me days to clear the extra ones.

I muted de Souza's profile as well as those of the users who retweeted him. Things seemed to improve and the dust settled. But my Twitter notifications remained broken and unusable for a while.

All this because of a single tweet. I can't imagine what celebrities and influencers face daily on Twitter.

If you think this drive-by engagement may have brought some advantage, all I got were fewer than 20 new followers who misunderstood who I am. My online properties linked from the Twitter profile got no traffic at all. I'm sure there's some lesson here on how walled the social gardens are, how overlooked the open web is, and how few links the users click.

Also, there's zero overlap between my interests and the world of football — I'm possibly the only Italian who doesn't follow football.

Having been Twitter-famous for a day, I considered getting a limo or something. But I ended up mothballing my Twitter profile in complete obscurity.

#misc

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The SkySafari 6 Plus astronomy app for Android still works on my Chromebook but no longer on my Chromebox. The app doesn't detect any Internet access despite the Chromebox being wired to a 1 Gbps fiber connection.

It's emblematic of Google never encouraging Android developers to adapt their apps to Chrome OS.

#chromeOS

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I often search GitHub for libraries and software I need, or browse to discover something interesting. But sometimes I skip or miss several potentially interesting items.

Why?

Because many repos don't provide any information or metadata. Or they don't stand out and get lost. It's a missed opportunity, especially because a few quick fixes may raise the odds of getting the repos noticed.

What can you do to improve the discoverability of your repositories?

First, provide a README.md file with at least one screenshot or other image, a short description of what the code does, installation and setup instructions, and a handful of usage examples.

Next, upload a preview image that social platforms can use to generate a nice snippet with a thumbnail when sharing a link to the repo.

The image may be the same one in README.md. Nothing fancy, even a screenshot of a terminal window running your code will do. On GitHub, you can upload an image to the repo under Settings > General > Social preview.

Finally, add relevant tags to the repo.

If you set up a social image and someone browses the GitHub listing of the repos matching one of your tags, the repos with a social image will stand out prominently. For example, visit the intel-8080 GitHub tag. You can't miss my suite8080 repo, right? It's Suite8080, a suite of Intel 8080 Assembly cross-development tools I'm writing in Python.

These fixes take a dozen minutes and are well worth a try.

#development

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ClariNet Communications pioneered digital publishing in the 1990s and may have been the first dot-com company. They delivered newspaper and magazine stories to paying subscribers over the USENET.

When I first accessed the Internet in the early 1990s, I was aware of ClariNet but could never try the service as I wasn't at an organization or institution with a site license. I always wondered about ClariNet's technology and business but didn't get much information at the time. Decades later, I found a detailed history of ClariNet written by its founder Brad Templeton.

#retrocomputing

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A week ago I joined Mastodon and soon faced a common hurdle: following enough interesting users to populate my feed.

It's not as easy as it seems as Mastodon has no algorithmic recommendations and doesn't support full-text search of toots. Although Mastodon instances come with a profile directory, this coarse filter lumps together mostly random profiles loosely tied by a generic match with the topics and themes an instance is about.

How did I get started?

I seeded my feed by browsing the results of hashtag searches for topics I'm interested in. This produced a handful of people to follow.

Next, for a finer grained filter, I browsed several more profiles from a number of sources:

• people followed by the users I follow
• people boosted or mentioned by the users I follow
• people who follow me, reply to, or boost my toots
• hashtag searches I monitor
• local timeline

When I came across a promising toot from these sources, I reviewed the author's profile for consistent posts with similar quality or themes. I discarded the profiles who only occasionally toot content matching my criteria and followed the others.

Now I'm following a dozen users. Although not many, these profiles are a good result after just a week. And the toots in my feed are enough for generating a compounding amount of relevant candidates to iterate the process.

#fediverse

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The book Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint is a first-hand account of the design, development, and commercialization of Microsoft PowerPoint written by its creator Robert Gaskins.

It's a fascinating window on the software and computer industry in the 1980s, an era of rapid transformation driven by the personal computing revolution and the trasition from text to graphical user intarfaces.

Sweating Bullets provides insight and context not only on the story of PowerPoint, but on several aspects of creating software in the 1980s. For example, how Gaskins researched the presentation slides market to design the product, the development tools and processes, the practicalities of handling floppy disks and printed manuals, life at startups, seeking funding, and the acquisition of PowerPoint by Microsoft.

#retrocomputing

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