In 1701, in Middletown, New Jersey, Moses Butterworth languished in a jail, accused of piracy. Like many young men based in England or her colonies, he had joined a crew that sailed the Indian Ocean intent on plundering ships of the Muslim Mughal Empire. Throughout the 1690s, these pirates marauded vessels laden with gold, jewels, silk, and calico on pilgrimage toward Mecca. After achieving great success, many of these men sailed back into the Atlantic via Madagascar to the North American seaboard, where they quietly disembarked in Charleston, Philadelphia, New Jersey, New York City, Newport, and Boston, and made themselves at home. ...

Last Saturday I went on a motorcycle trip with my club. We had about forty motorcycles, many coming from afar—a tremendous turnout considering how advanced the season is. This event was particularly involving for me, as my local group was in charge of the organization. We were going to visit the Foreste Casentinesi National Park, which isn’t far from our hometown. We know those roads and their surroundings well; we call them home, yet I insisted on scouting the planned route not once but twice, and I think it was crucial to the event’s success. On the narrow road that climbs to a mountain pass, we spotted a mobile traffic light (for a road construction site) with a long (six minutes!) red/green cycle. We arranged a plan in case the motorcycle’s column split at the light: almost one kilometer past the red light, there was a safe place where the forward group could safely stop off the road and wait for the rest to rejoin. All the participants were informed at the departure briefing: if you get stopped at the red light, don’t get over-stressed: we’ll be waiting for you one kilometer down the road. You won’t see us, but we’ll be waiting for you safely. Don’t rush it, and don’t stop to phone us. We won’t be at the first apparently-good parking place but at the second spot, which, despite not looking as good, is way safer (less gravel on the ground). Situations like these can cause confusion and danger to a large group of motorcycles roaming on narrow, steep mountain roads which are often in poor conditiong. The reconnaissance ride allowed us to plan for several potential pitfalls like this one. ...

Oh, joy. After many years with an iPhone, today I learned how to stop spam calls with a single, not-really-super-secret move. Settings > Phone > Silence Unknown Callers That’s it. Unknown callers now go straight to my recent calls list for me to (eventually) review. Most importantly, the phone doesn’t ring. I initially had True Caller installed and enabled, which worked for a while. Spammers use throw-away numbers anyway, so it’s super-hard for tools like that to keep track. In Italy, we can enlist in a nationwide “oppositions register”. Once a phone number is registered there, national call services can’t call it. I signed up on the register’s opening day, which also worked for a few days. There are ways for spammers to go around the register, such as calling from abroad. I fell back to simply not answering unknown calls. That worked, but unsolicited calls still caught my attention and muting the phone helped only a little. ...

Yesterday I was at WPC 2022, “the most important Italian conference on Microsoft technologies”, where I presented a one-hour session titled “Reliable end-to-end testing for modern web apps with Microsoft Playwright.” Attendance was great and there was a lot of excitement up in the air; it was evident that people were happy to meet and interact in person again. After the forced two years hiatus, it was great to be back at a big on-site conference, let alone speak at it. I delivered my talk to a packed-full room of nodding, smiling and questioning attendees, which felt fantastic. ...

Studies have found that high levels of social media use are connected with an increased risk of symptoms of anxiety and depression. There appears to be substantial evidence connecting people’s mental health and their online habits. Furthermore, many psychologists believe people may be dealing with psychological effects that are pervasive but not always obvious. More here.

Ben Werdmuller has a terrific post up on his website. His “tortured” analogy of the web and governments as platforms for people to build upon is fascinating. I believe strongly in the indieweb principles of distributed ownership, control, and independence. For me, the important thing is that this is how we get to a diverse web. A web where everyone can define not just what they write but how they present is by definition far more expressive, diverse, and interesting than one where most online content and identities must be squished into templates created by a handful of companies based on their financial needs. In other words, the open web is far superior to a medium controlled by corporations in order to sell ads. The former encourages expression; the latter encourages consumerist conformity. ...

The Tripitaka Koreana - carved on 81258 woodblocks in the 13th century - is the most successful large data transfer over time yet achieved by humankind. 52 million characters of information, transmitted over nearly 8 centuries with zero data loss - an unequalled achievement. The full story is available here (via).

The New Yorker, in The Man Who Explains Italy: The Italian podcaster Francesco Costa thinks that the foreign press’s fixation on creeping Fascism in the country is overblown and unhelpful. If the center-right coalition wins, “Will Italy be a police state? No,” he said. “Will it be very badly run? Yes.” Full article is available here. I’ve been following Francesco Costa for a few years. He’s talented, conscientious, brilliant, and gifted with good humor. He deserves to be featured in The New Yorker. ...

Eve 2.0.2 was just released today. It fixes a problem introduced with v2.0 in which ETag generation failed if uuidRepresentation was not set in MONGO_OPTIONS. See issue #1486 for details. Many thanks @tgm for reporting and then contributing the fix.

In my early morning stroll, I sometimes listen to audiobooks. This was the case with The Count of Monte Cristo. Rai Radio 3, the third channel of the national broadcasting service, has been airing Ad Alta Voce (Aloud) for many years. In the program, top-tier actors read old and new literary classics. The quality of these productions is astounding. Audio editions are often edited, which was the case with The Count, as the unabridged edition surpasses the 1200-page count (a little-known fact is that most printed editions are also edited for brevity). Despite the edits, the audiobook, splendidly performed by Andrea Giordana, comprises thirty-five installments, each about thirty minutes long. That makes for a lot of strolling. ...