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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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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)....

Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s hot take on software quality: Software quality is more the result of a system designed to produce quality, and not so much the result of individual performance. That is: a group of mediocre programmers working with a structure designed to produce quality will produce better software than a group of fantastic programmers working in a system designed with other goals. This leads to the insightful conclusion: Instead of spending tons of time and effort on hiring because you believe that you can “only hire the best”, direct some of that effort towards building a system that produces great results out of a wider spectrum of individual performance....