Looking for the perfect client (and meeting Vivaldi)

— Posted inTech — 7 min read

Okay, email – as a concept – is surely aged. In fact, the one who is writing this post (who does not boast a particular technological perspicacity) already ten years ago claimed that the mail was old. Let alone if it is not true today.

Then, there was the beautiful, crisp, thrilling, open Google Wave experiment. Pretty soon, as good as dead. And, nothing relevant, after. In the end, it’s evident that the email protocol suits us just fine.

Notwithstanding the extendend stationarity of email concept, the choice of the client remains a field in which we have never stopped. So much so that today there are many excellent programs to manage e-mail. Moreover, many of them are also completely free of charge.

As far as I’m concerned, the ones I’ve adopted lately have been essenctially two.

  • Apple Mail (the default on MacOS). Well made, essential but complete, in pure Apple style. Do whatever you need, even more. For those within the horizon of products with apples, probably the happiest choice (certainly the simplest).
  • Windows Mail (the default on Windows). Well, what can I say… Colorful, definitively. It feels more like something to showcase than a software you use. Minimum functionality guaranteed the essential but little space (or even less) for everything that goes beyond.

Until not too long ago, on my laptop (Galaxy Book Ion, with Windows) I used Mail and, on my iMac, Apple Mail. However, I was a bit annoyed in using different programs (with different keys, different settings, different ways to do the same thing… you got the idea). So, I was still looking for something that was available on all platforms.

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The music of the cosmos

— Posted inPersonal — 1 min read

Can the lyrics of a song be literature? When I was in middle school (last century), the words of La Guerra di Piero by the Italian songwriter Fabrizio De André (Stefano Sandrelli recently spoke about him with ChatGPT) with amazement I saw them appear in my subsidiary, side by side with those of far more renowned poets.

At the time, I still had a sense of culture as (mainly) dusty and ancient stuff, so it seemed to me funny that a person related to the living world of song (a world that constantly engaged my emotions and my feelings, as it still does), could earn a place there. The question has followed me ever since: was that text okay in the subsidiary? Was it the right place? I won’t even try to answer: I know the question would still haunt me from time to time… [Keep reading on Edu INAF magazine]

Why use Vivaldi?

— Posted inPersonal — 4 min read

We were in front of the screen, in my office. Just trying to fix something; I can’t remember exactly. Internet site stuff, anyway. At one point the colleague tells me something like open Chrome, let’s see… and I say no, I don’t have Chrome, I use Vivaldi instead to which she, in return, ah well, but then!

How to say, then you are going to look for troubles! And here I would like to plead. Because the colleague’s exclamation is largely the result of misinformation. If you meant that that particular site should be viewed with Chrome and not with a browser that you don’t trust (because you still don’t know it), well you’re probably wrong. At lest in this situation. Chrome and Vivaldi are built around the same core, which as we know is Chromium . Therefore, the rendering of the various sites does not present substantial differences. In other words, what looks good with Chrome looks good with Vivaldi. And viceversa.

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A girl on a tram (or not)

— Posted inTech — 1 min read

So, I opened NightCafè and wrote “A girl on a tram” (don’t ask me why this image came to mind) and this came out. Really intriguing. It is not on the tram but in front, but in short we are there.

At this point I got carried away, and I insisted on changing the subject. I tried to write “A cat in a old house” and I produced this thing below. Sooo cute.

We are at a turning point, our way of using written content and even images (as you can see) will change radically in a few years.

Obviously we are not ready, but this is clear. After all, we never are.

The rhythm of the Moon

— Posted inPersonal — 3 min read

This is the problem. That we have gradually freed ourselves from the rhythms of the Earth, of the seasons, of the cosmos. Until we build a synthetic and precisely artificial life, with temporal scansions that are out of this world, which make us strange and tire us. Because we are in the world, we are made of stars, intertwined with universal matter. The cycles of the cosmos are the cycles of our body, the cycle of female fertility itself is in suggestive agreement with the cycle of revolution of the Moon around our planet.

That’s why I understand well what the musician Peter Gabriel writes in the notes accompanying the release of the song Panopticom , the first of the forthcoming i/o album 

‘Some of what I’m writing about this time is the idea that we seem incredibly capable of destroying the planet that gave us birth and that unless we find ways to reconnect ourselves to nature and to the natural world we are going to lose a lot. A simple way of thinking about where we fit in to all of this is looking up at the sky… and the moon has always drawn me to it.’

In fact, the phases of the Moon will also give the rhythm to the releases of the songs of this highly anticipated new album, by a musician who, together with Genesis, has really written the history of progressive rock, to then embark on a solo career characterized by great expressive originality. Specifically, a new song will be released every full moon. We have already started, in fact, with the song Panopticom , which was unveiled on the full moon of January 6, 2023.

For aficionados, another reason to wait for those days when the Moon is mostly present – ​​almost invasive – in our sky. For me astrophysicist, admirer of Peter’s art, a device that effectively connects two of my affective universes, music and astronomy.

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A truly space beagle

— Posted inScience — 2 min read

The Artemis I mission was, as we know, a complete success, and is destined to represent a clear turning point, to symbolically open (because in fact is already underway) the new race towards the Moon.

Mission accomplished! Proud of himself 😉
Credits: NASA/Isaac Watson

Something that involves, as we well know, both the space agencies of different nations, as well as various commercial enterprises. Artemis I was unmanned, being dedicated to verifying the reliability of the Space Launch System, an orbital launch system designed by NASA and derived from that of the Space Shuttle. However, Snoopy was present on board, the zero-gravity indicator who in the photo wears a beautiful smile, just after being “unpacked” from his space carrier, on January 5th of this year.

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