Tech projects, hobby programming, and geeky thoughts of Paolo Amoroso
I had a lot of fun chatting about space with my friend Cocopraise as a guest of his show Do You Speak Tech? In the interview, which aired on Near fm community radio for Dublin North East, I talked about the history of space exploration, the technology spinoffs to everyday life, and more.
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Google is rolling out Markdown support for Google Docs to Google Workspace and personal accounts. When the editor detects a Markdown code sequence, it can automatically replace it with the corresponding formatted rich text.
The tech giant is taking note of what developers, bloggers, creators, and power users already knew. Markdown reduces friction and improves productivity, which is helping me blog daily.
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Am I the only one who despises gamification?
Certain platforms, products, or programs cram gamification down the user's throat, adding clutter and disrupting the experience. What's worse, especially with membership programs, is many try to game the system for points and badges, thus making the experience worse for all.
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I have been blogging every day for the past month.
Not that I set any goals, it just happened. When I started my journal, I signed up with Write.as after extensively researching a blogging platform. To reduce the friction between ideas and posts I wanted a Markdown-based, lightweight blogging platform with good support for technical writing.
It turns out Write.as has such low friction it enables and encourages me to write. I ended up doing it daily without plans or deliberate effort.
Up to a few months ago I wouldn't have believed I could do it. On my main blog I almost never posted more than a couple of times per week and usually less. I sent out my old newsletter once per week, and focused on curation rather than original content because I felt I couldn't sustain anything more frequent.
Write.as made it possible to produce that much original writing. I'll definitely take breaks, but this one-month milestone hints at a solid trend.
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I don't remember exactly when, but some time in 2022 it will be three decades since I first accessed the Internet. It was 1992 when I got online at home and at the University of Milan, Italy, as a computer science student.
At home I installed the COHERENT Unix clone on my 386 laptop. Then I bought the classic ZyXEL U-1496E dial-up modem, configured uucp on COHERENT, signed up for the Italian UUCP access provider Sublink Network, installed the Elm Unix email client, and was able to send and receive email.
Back then it was a big deal. One of my professors was impressed when he realized I was emailing from home.
At the Computer Science lab, which in the early 1990s dispatched 60% of the Italian Internet traffic, I had access to advanced equipment, great people, and a very liberal policy with nearly no restrictions — students were allowed to do anything, within reason.
The lab had HP-UX servers and workstations connected to Zenith and Ampex text terminals, as well as X-Windows terminals.
The hardware and the good network connectivity let me explore lots of interactive services such as FTP, Telnet, Gopher, Finger, Talk, WAIS, and the nascent web. How many did you try?
Although my COHERENT setup supported USENET, I preferred to read the newsgroups at the lab with the nn newsreader. I wasn't confident in my ability to configure the system on COHERENT and had storage, bandwidth, and cost concerns. Usenet was my first exposure to online communities and geek culture.
My guide to the new world was Zen and the Art of the Internet: A Beginner's Guide to the Internet by Brendan Kehoe. This excellent and popular tutorial was published as a free online document and in print.
Ironically, I skipped most of the BSS era of the 1980s and jumped directly on the Internet. It's been an amazing journey that gave me the privilege of witnessing the birth of the modern Internet.
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On Chrome OS, to maximize the content area I leave Chrome's bookmarks bar hidden.
This is also where the reading list icon sat, which is why I kept not noticing and using it. Chrome 99 moved the icon next to the omnibar, where it's always in view. I'm meaning to try the reading list and the new location will hopefully help me notice it.
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In an interview published on the company blog, Google's Public Liaison for Search Danny Sullivan said:
Over the last seven years, we’ve decreased the number of irrelevant results by over 50%.
As a Google Search user, this contrasts with how helpful search results are to me. In most cases, the top results are ads-filled pages with shallow content heavily optimized by SEO farms.
How can Sullivan's data be reconciled with my subjective experience of unsatisfactory search results?
One way to look at this is Google focuses on relevance. SEO-optimized pages are certainly relevant, in that they match my search queries. But, to me, that content has low quality and is a waste of time.
Google is improving relevance, not quality.
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To dip my toes in the fediverse, yesterday I joined the Mastodon.technology Mastodon instance for people interested in technology. I signed up as @amoroso@mastodon.technology but my journal was already in the fediverse as @paolo@journal.paoloamoroso.com
I had been meaning to do it for a while. My decision to dial down on Twitter gave me the motivation to sit down and try the platform.
I read the Mastodon user documentation, but playing with the system a bit was enough to get me up to speed with most of the features.
The website is clean and smooth and lets me do the customizations I really need, such as setting a light theme and changing the language to English. I like the TweetDeck-like advanced web interface. I initially planned to try a Mastodon client for my Android devices. However, the PWA works so well on mobile that it's good enough for me.
I expected more confusion between the local and the federated timeline, but figuring which is which and where to get what I want turned out to be easy.
Within hours of joining Mastodon and posting two toots, I gained 2 followers and a few favorites and boosts. I also got into a couple of interesting conversations. On Twitter, it would have taken me months to reach a comparable level of engagement.
My first impression is people on Mastodon care about sharing and discussion rather than building a following like on traditional social platforms. It's also a place where more people who do cool niche projects and stuff hang out. For example, I immediately followed Techy Things @ZephyrZ80, a computer engineering hobbyist who designs and builds his own Z80-based single-board computers.
I'm looking forward to exploring the fediverse in more depth.
In October of 2022 I migrated from Mastodon.technology to Fosstodon and my new profile is @amoroso@fosstodon.org
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This is the laptop bag for my Lenovo Yoga N26 11.6” Chromebook. Nothing fancy, just a cheap Amazon Basics shoulder bag that does the job.
What makes the item interesting is it's the only product I ever bought after clicking an online ad.
I had googled and searched extensively Amazon, eBay, and other retailer websites without coming across anything that met my requirements. Then, on an unrelated website, I saw an Amazon ad for that bag. It was exactly what I wanted, it seemed 3D-printed from the spec in my brain. I immediately clicked the ad and bought the product.
The event is even more remarkable considering I've been surfing the web for almost three decades. Yet none of the countless ads I was served were compelling enough to lead to a click, let alone a purchase.
The first reason I nearly never find ads that match what I want is that, although I don't use ad-blockers, I tune out ads and hardly notice them.
But, even when I do check out the ads, nothing matches my interests or needs. All I get is braindead remarketing that follows me across the web to push stuff I already own or researched and discarded.
Putting aside for a moment the security and privacy issues with online advertising, I'd love ads that drew attention to stuff I really want, like the Amazon one. Yet, despite all the tracking, personalization, machine learning, and advanced technologies the advertising industry deploys, the results are irrelevant or underwhelming.
I can't think of anything more inefficient than the online advertising industry.
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I'm going to use Twitter less and focus on my journal and blog.
After over a dozen years on Twitter, I hit a growth ceiling: my follower count is flat and I'm invisible. Despite the occasional viral tweet, I get less than a hundred impressions and nearly no engagement per tweet.
I tried posting text, threads, media, links, replies, mentions, quote-tweets, lists, the works. Nothing makes a difference, no matter how good my content is.
The algorithms just don't like me and bury my tweets. Fair enough.
On platforms with a level playing field, such as RSS aggregators, I get an order of magnitude more visibility and engagement. After less than a month, my journal gets roughly the same views as after over a dozen years on Twitter.
I'll continue using Twitter as a source of content and discussion. But tweeting is a waste of time as nobody sees my content.
Instead, I'm doubling down on my existing blog and my new journal, where I post about the same interests I cover on Twitter.
I left the links to my journal and blog in my Twitter profile. I'd share them there, but social platforms did an effective job conditioning users not to escape their walled gardens and explore the open web, so Twitter would bury my link tweets.
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