The moon of Makemake

— Posted inScience — 4 min read

There is a whole world, besides the small cabotage of classical astronomy, that of a school textbook. And that’s exactly what fascinates me most. I’m curious about what is in the shade, what is not in the spotlight. We never, never or almost never think about. Because there is a world, indeed there are endless worlds, beyond that limited set of things that usually occupies our mind.

Makemake is exactly part of these endless worlds, almost always out of our heads. In size, it represents the second dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, so it is not exactly the latest addition, so to speak. The band is occupied by a very large number of objects: more than a thousand have already been discovered, but it is believed that there can be a hundred thousand objects with a diameter greater than 100 km. Think about it? One hundred thousand large stones that wander silently in a vast space. The largest of all is Pluto, as we know. What was once considered a planet in all respects, long derubricated to a dwarf planet.

Artistic image of Makemake and its moon  
Crediti: Alex H. Parker (Southwest Research Institute)

Makemake here it is, it comes immediately after Pluto. And the interesting thing is that it is still large enough to own a moon of its own. Called in code MK2, Makemake’s moon “reflects” sunlight from a dark surface like coal, thus resulting quite inefficient as a night light: if ever on Makemake someone was looking for romantic nights softly lit by the moon, he would be extremely disappointed.

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Making a home in the fediverse?

— Posted inTech — 9 min read

One of the most interesting by-products of all the tussle that there was (and still is) following the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk , with all the mess also derived from the incongruous moves of the well-known billionaire, is that a lot of people have started, shall we say, to look around .

Moving from a bird to a mastodon? Who knows… but it might be the right time to experiment…

Yes, trying to figure out if there are viable alternatives to Twitter, for example. Indeed, it would be legitimate to doubt about the fate of a platform ended up in the hands of a person who, in just one day, fired half of the employees (or even more), moved in a random way , resulting in great confusion with the famous authentication blue checks, and finally – gem of the gems, probably – he entrusted an online survey with something as delicate as Donald Trump’s return to Twitter.

Incidentally, on the (slightly) favorable outcome of Donald’s return (who already said thanks but no) Elion hastened to affirm Vox Populi Vox Dei . Too bad, however, that this conclusion – at least in the case of Twitter – is highly questionable, as others have immediately highlighted .

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A new creation

— Posted inScience — 2 min read

Certainly well known is the photo of the Hubble telescope that shows the imposing columns of gas and dust, site of intense star formation, inside the Eagle Nebula . Oh well, we have seen it a lot of times.

But now, it is as if what we have been accustomed to seeing for years, suddenly reveals an unexpected new depth. So that even the usual views take on a new meaning. As if it were a new universe, the one we are observing through the tools of the James Webb Telescope. New and very old, at the same time .

“The pillars of creations” from JWST
Image Credit: Science – NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, NIRCam
Processing – Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

At least, that’s the feeling I get from looking at this image. I mean, do you know something beautiful, really beautiful, but that by dint of seeing it and seeing it again bores you, doesn’t tell you anything anymore, doesn’t it speak to you?

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My new house, here in Vivaldi

— Posted inTech — 3 min read

In modern age, the choice of the browser is far more important than a simply problem of deciding which software you prefer to use. Considering that you tipically spend a lot of time inside your browser, it’s more a matter of the way you see the world, it’s something that is deeply related to what you feel important.

Let’s say it : just the idea to take some distance from the giants of Internet, it’s refreshing. Google, I’m talking about you, now. Not that I’m going away fro you: au countraire, I’m still a faithful user of many of your services. Mail, maps, searches… even the Google Assistant in my bedroom (which I find really confortabile and pleasant to use).

So I’m not quitting Google, in no way. I just think that promoting diversity and encouraging many smaller realities to spread their specific vision on the web, is nowadays more and more necessary.

After some times spent with Brave, from some times I’ve come back to my previous love, the browser Vivaldi. Yes, Brave it’s an interesting project, but it too focused on handling of cryptocurrency, which is not my cup of tea (and I agree Vivaldi on that).

Vivaldi is a different world. The number of useful features here is quite impressive (so that I do not even try to list them, in this post).

Antonio Vivaldi was a very famous italian composer.

I also like the name of the project, since Antonio Vivaldi has been a talented composer of my country, centuries ago. His music is still attractive and it deeply influenced many great composers.

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An interesting story

— Posted inTech — 3 min read

I must stop to talk a little more about Vivaldi, because I find him extraordinary even in certain details, something that is not often lingered on. For example, a really intriguing thing for me is watching how Vivaldi presents the browsing history.

First of all, the history accessed, if you have synchronized the various devices through the reliable Vivaldi’s servers, is not just that of the computer you are working on, but the overall one. To say, I sometimes operate in smartoworking but even when I am in the office, I easily find the list of sites visited from home. Undoubtedly useful, to always carry your navigation history with you.

Specifically, a very quick way to access the history is to click on the button in the left sidebar, in order to bring up a vertical bar with the list of sites visited. The list itself can be even sorted by date, by number of visits to a site, by title or by address. Undoubtedly comfortable. Moreover, each choice supports ascending or descending sorting.

You can quickly access your history via the left bar.
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Tabs? They close by themselves

— Posted inTech — 3 min read

This is exactly what happens in the new version of the Vivaldi browser for Android. A really nice browser, now even better. In the new version, you can set a period after which the remaining open tabs are automatically closed, freeing up memory to the benefit of your device’s performance.

The team that build Vivaldi seems to be one of the few who seriously believe in developing a browser for Android devices, a browser which is not look simply as “small copy” of the computer browser. I like it for this very reason, because they believe in it. A serious competitor of Vivaldi, to me, is only Samsung browser, but this one – at least to now – has no counterpart in the computer world, so it’s not really universal as Vivaldi is.

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