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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Glasp, the social highliner

— Posted inTech — 6 min read

Yes, I wouldn’t want to define it differently, because this tool is really a wonderful social highliner. This is what Danilo Ruocco also calls him in his excellent article (Danilo, journalist and writer, is one of the few Italians I have found on Glasp, because that’s what it is about).

The rules are extremely simple, on a first level. You install the extension for Chrome or derivatives (Brave, Vivaldi, etc.) and from that moment on you have a set of highlighters, of different colours, ready to be used on any web page, to mark phrases of particular interest.

This is enough to start changing my modus operandi, which in these cases consisted of simply saving the page to Pocket and then going there to highlight the important sentences.

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Flying for me

— Posted inScience — 2 min read

This image was acquired by the Space Shuttle Columbia with a digital camera during the STS-107 mission. It shows the Sun playing with the Earth’s atmosphere, spreading a wide and suggestive glow.

Credits: NASA


Columbia’s crew perished during a tragic accident on their return to Earth on February 1, 2003. This photo was released by NASA on Remembrance Day 2022, nineteen years after that terrible tragedy.

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More stars on Spotify

— Posted inTech — 1 min read

It’s called Under the Star and it’s another pleasant occasion to meet stars on Spotify (I mean, not celebrities, but real stars). Such playlist it’s very good for working without distraction (even if you’re not in the Observatory) or event to go to sleep, as the few words of presentation seem to suggest.

With this occasion, I like to point out that – speaking of stars – there is another list you can find interesting (disclaimer: it’s created by me), it’s called simply Stardust (previous name was Sun and the other stars). It also appears in the right column of this blog.

It’s not only instrumental, because it features songs that have something of astronomical in the title. Oh, and it’s collaborative too. Yes, it’s not exactly viral (well, maybe it’s a vocable not too adequate in these times), but feel free to submit your favourite “astronomical” songs to the list!

Do you know of other (even loosely) astronomy related playlist on Spotify? Let me know in the comments, I’ll check them with interest.