Paolo Amoroso's Journal

Science journalist Luigi Bignami made a documentary that tells the story of astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti through the memories of some of her friends and colleagues. It's a unique resource as it shares little know facts about Samantha's early life and background.

Originally aired in Italy on the eve of Samantha's launch for the Crew-4 space flight, the documentary is now available for streaming: Ad Astra – Ritratto di Samantha Cristoforetti.

The Crew-4 launch was scheduled for April of 2022. In early February, Luigi, knowing I'm friends with Samantha, got in touch with me to ask whether I would have liked to contribute to the documentary with some anecdotes or recollections. I was happy to do so.

I shared the story of when I first met Samantha in 2007 at a convention of an online community of Italian space enthusiasts, and let her know ESA was planning to select a new astronaut group. She applied and was selected.

Samantha invited me to view the Crew-4 launch at Kennedy Space Center, a wonderful and unforgettable adventure.

#space

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Now that Chrome's reading list icon is next to the omnibar, I wondered whether I'd notice it and use the feature. Nope. To maximize the content area, I keep the reading list collapsed and the icon isn't prominent enough to notice.

So I'm back to my read later tool of choice: Google Keep.

#chromeOS

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I joined Mastodon over a month ago. But I've been seeing a noticeable increase in my follower count since Twitter announced Elon Musk acquired it. Many people are likely checking out the fediverse.

I wondered how these new followers find me, as Mastodon has no algorithmic recommendations and few discoverability tools. It turns out they see my toots boosted by other users, monitor hashtags I tag my toots with, or browse the Trunk for the Fediverse lists. I rely on similar resources for populating my Mastodon feed.

This hints the Mastodon community is proactive, not passive and apathetic like the many Twitter users who consume only what the algorithms feed them and don't step outside of the platform's walled garden.

#fediverse

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With a group of friends, in April of 2022 I did a dream trip to view the launch into space of astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

We flew Turkish Airlines from Malpensa, Italy, to Miami, USA via Istanbul. Although the airline food was better than average and the staff helpful, a number of issues made the flights unpleasant and stressful: broken, confusing, and limited website and mobile app that didn't issue boarding passes, forcing us to long lines at check-in desks; hard, uncomfortable seats that hurt our butts; unresponsive and miscalibrated touch screens of the in-flight entertainment systems; tight margins for connecting flights; delays that forced us to mad rushes for chilometers at Istanbul's airport to catch connecting flights at impossibly far gates; too many passengers not wearing face masks, or wearing them incorrectly, while the flight crews didn't care much.

On top of that, our baggage didn't arrive with the return flight. Most of us got the baggage soon, but one of my friends is still waiting for his.

I'm not sure I'll ever fly Turkish Airlines again.

#misc

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I'm back from a trip to view the launch into space of astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti and her crew aboard the Crew-4 flight to the International Space Station. I'm still processing this once in a lifetime experience, as well as reviewing the thousands of photos and videos I and the friends I traveled with took.

#space

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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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