Ennio Morricone, iconic music composer, dies at 91

Jul 7, 2020

The New York Times

Ennio Morricone, the Italian composer whose atmospheric scores for spaghetti westerns and some 500 films by a Who’s Who of international directors made him one of the world’s most versatile and influential creators of music for the modern cinema, died on Monday in Rome. He was 91. […]

Mr. Morricone looked professorial in bow ties and spectacles, with wisps of flyaway white hair. He sometimes holed up in his palazzo in Rome and wrote music for weeks on end, composing not at a piano but at a desk. He heard the music in his mind, he said, and wrote it in pencil on score paper for all orchestra parts.

The Guardian

The British film director Edgar Wright also paid tribute, saying: “He could make an average movie into a must see, a good movie into art, and a great movie into legend. He hasn’t been off my stereo my entire life. What a legacy of work he leaves behind. RIP.”

Variety

Morricone had enjoyed a top-10 hit with the theme for “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” but it was “The Mission” that brought him worldwide acclaim in 1986. His alternately primitive and sophisticated, choral and orchestral music for Roland Joffe’s epic set in 18th century South America won BAFTA and Golden Globe awards but lost the Oscar to “Round Midnight,” a jazz score that wasn’t entirely original.

The loss — which outraged Oscar observers and disappointed Morricone in his best-ever shot at Oscar glory — resulted in modification to Academy rules and, eventually, the honorary Oscar as a 20-years-late consolation prize.

But in general, Morricone devoted more time In later years to classical composition, writing more than 50 works for chamber groups, symphony orchestra, solo voice and choral ensembles.

If you want to listen to some among his more than 500 compositions, here's one YouTube channel that has some.

Six months with the HomePod: a review

Jun 15, 2020

In december of last year, I went visiting my wife in the US as she was spending some months there for her PhD studies. Since the HomePod wasn't (and still isn't) available in Italy yet, I took the chance to find a good deal there and (legally) bringing it home. For the past 6 months, the HomePod has been in our livingroom acting as the main sound source for listening to music, and has recently been coupled with a new one we bought used 2 weeks ago.
As in the past, this review is by no means coming out in time for early buyers. Nevertheless, I think 6 months of experience with the device might prove useful to somene who is still pondering whether to buy it or not.

Setup

Setting up the HomePod is fairly easy and quick: upon completing the booting process, the speaker plays a chime; once it doest that, you just need to bring an iPhone close and the setup screen will appear on the smartphone. If we hadn't grown accustomed to these kind of features, this could have well been one of those it works like magic Apple moments. As the 2 devices connect, the setup process asks few questions (among which, what room the HomePod will be placed in) and then offers to use iCloud and the device setting to finish setting up the speaker. The whole process takes less than 2 minutes.
The first time I tried to set up the HomePod in my wife's room in the dorm she was renting in the US, the procedure didn't go as smoothly as expected, with me needing to restart the HomePod and the pairing process a few times for it to work. Once that was done, I couldn't stream anything over from my iPhone to the Pod. A bit of research brought me to this support document which I think outlines the problem I had with the facility's WiFi and might prove useful for someone else with a peculiar WiFi configuration.
The process of setting up the second HomePod last week went flawlessly: being under our house's WiFi, after an initial speedy configuration, since the HomePods were both told to be in the same room, the option to set them up as a stereo pair popped up straight away and kicked into place immediately.

Sound Quality

As always with Apple, what makes this device so capable is the integration between software and hardware.
On the software side, the HomePod OS (tvOS as of now) leverages the power of its A8 processor to shape the sound it produces. By means of its array of microphones, 6 for far-field Siri and music listening and 1 for automatic bass correction, the HomePod can understand how the environment it is placed in responds to the sound waves it emits and can deflect music to account for that. The end result is music that always sounds calibrated and room-filling. To hear the difference, just take a functioning HomePod and turn it around its vertical axis by 90°: for the first 15s the music will sound empty, colorless, but as soon as the software can process this new environment input, it will begin to render music well again.

On the hardware side, together with those 7 microphones, the HomePod is equipped with 7 horn-loaded tweeters and 1 high-excursion woofer, all with their custom amplifiers. These allow the A8 to drive each speaker separately, both for volume and sound, rendering the highs and medium frequencies quite well.
But what the HomePod excels at, to me, is the bass range. With its 20 mm p-p woofer, the HomePod can deliver high quality bass notes without distortion both at high and low volume, making details emerge from music and songs.
Few years ago, when I bought my iPhone 5, I was finally able to come in contact with the then-new Apple EarPods, the newly released earbuds shaped by studying many ears, and I was amazed. Those tiny headphones were capable of drastically improving the sound they reproduced in comparison to the previous generation. Above all, the bass frequencies were one of the strong points of the new design and when I let them be tried by my brother - an amateur bass guitar player - he rejoiced as he was finally able to properly hear the bass section of songs without the need to crank the volume up.
The HomePod has had a quite similar effect: with respect to any other means of listening to music, Apple's smart speaker has unveiled a whole range of frequencies I had never heard while listening to songs. What this translates into, is not just the possibility of hearing lower notes, but to add valuable nuances to the songs and music we play, providing a much, much richer listening experience. To some degree, I now think I am closer to experiencing music the way it was played or even composed.

In the weeks I gathered thoughts about this review and kept on thinking on the right way to picture the incredible sound quality the HomePod has, one expression kept on coming back to me: the HomePod is the Retina of sound.
As for Retina screens introduced since 2012 across Apple's screens, the HomePod has had the ability to reproduce songs in their full quality, bringing to the ears some hidden details of songs I had never noticed. Similarly to Retina screens, whenever I go back to some other audio reproduction, I find myself missing that sound richness: as they say, once you go Retina you don't go back. Moreover, as it is the case with Retina screens, increased details don't always mean good music per se: bad songs are rendered even worse, as low definition pictures are on high-definition screens.
This is particularly bothering for songs that have been balanced as to have hitting drums: if that's necessary with regular speakers to have the rhythm clearly emerge with that disco feel, the effect is terrible on the HomePod. Luckily for me, I almost never listen to disco music and, maybe, what sounds awful to me is much appreciated by people who like the genre.

Smartness, or lack of

The HomePod is sold as a smart speaker and on this field it has to be measured too.
Let's begin with some premises:
first of all, the HomePod still doesn't support Siri to speak Italian, my mother-tongue and the one we (of course) use at home. This means we cannot yet ask for personal requests such as adding notes or sending messages;
second of all, I know how Siri works and that has not infused me with great confidence in the system;
third of all, I don't yet have any HomeKit devices for the HomePod to act as a central device to prompt for controlling lightbulbs, thermostats, fans or cams.

All this said, we don't use the HomePod as a smart speaker much. We ask Siri to lower or raise the volume from time to time, or to pause and resume a song, but I still prefer to tap on its top to do that, or use the iPhone as a remote. Similarly, when I want to play a song, 90% of times I use Music on my iPhone or Mac and stream it over, rather than asking to play something out loud for the reasons I outlined before. I'd say the only thing we often do via voice command is to set timers when we cook.
The inability of speaking Italian to the HomePod (and being understood) I think it's a major issue here: for one, the previous owner of the second HomePod we bought sold it specifically because he could not get Siri to understand him in a way sufficient enough to be comfortable to use. After all, lacking the Italian language I think is one of the reasons Apple still doesn't sell the speaker in Italy. Let's be clear: Siri does speak Italian in iPhones, Apple Watches and Mac, and it has for a long time; let's hope they will implement the feature in HomePods soon too.
Apart from what the software can do, the hardware is there and it works great: the HomePod(s) is able to pick your voice well even while playing music, and it works best if placed on surfaces at least in par or above your waist. Similarly, music reproduction sounds the best if the HomePod is not put on low furniture.
Again, what lacks here is the software: last week Siri on the HomePods kept on answering for prompts coming from a YouTube video I was playing, making me stop to play that specific video altogether.
Sincerely, 9 years after its introduction with the iPhone 4s, I thought Siri could do better, especially when it runs on one of the best case scenarios it could hope for: a 7 microphone equipped device.

Wish list

As the rumor mill has been saying for a few months now, the HomePod might have a successor, or a mini-successor in the future.
As curious I am for new stuff to come out, I really love the incarnation of the HomePod as of now: all my complaints are actually on the software side of the smart assistant functions, and those I hope can get fixed via one software update in the future.
As for the audio part, the Pod is just great to listen to and one of my favorite Apple devices in the recent years.
For what I am concerned, the right-for-me price tag on this speaker is 200$/€: I know that maybe the technology there is more valuable, but that hits a sweet spot between being cheap and over the budget for a non-essential device as it is.
Regardless of a new model coming out, I would be more than happy to see this version being sold at 200€ for the next years as the "las year model" of the HomePod family.

One last big shortcoming is the inability of streaming from macOS to a stereo pair of HomePods. This is actually more of a macOS deficiency, but I suppose it ends up impacting HomePod sales and user experience more than it does for the Mac platform. I too hope this gets finally fixed in macOS 10.16

Final Words

The HomePod(s) have gained a central role in our evenings: while cooking, as background when we have guests over and when we want to have some quality-time and just want to listen to some music properly reproduced.
The sweet setup we now have is an Apple Music subscription to have access to almost any song and music we want, ready to be played through the HomePod in its full glory.
If I needed to sum it up in one, final sentence, I'd just say that of all the devices we have at home, the HomePod is the only my wife not only likes, but uses with pleasure.

World Environment Day 2020: Biodiversity

Jun 5, 2020

World Environment Day 2020 calls for urgent action to protect biodiversity.

Biodiversity describes the variety of life on Earth. It encompasses the 8 million species on the planet–from plants and animals to fungi and bacteria; the ecosystems that house them; and the genetic diversity among them.

Biodiversity may be seen as an intricate web, in which each part is interdependent. When one component is changed–or removed–the entire system is affected, and this can produce positive–or negative–consequences.

Nature responds to some of the most pressing challenges faced by humans today. It provides us with oxygen, purifies the water we drink, ensures fertile soil, and produces the variety of foods we require to stay healthy and resist disease. It enables medical researchers to understand human physiology; and offers substance for developing medicines. It is the foundation of most industries and livelihoods. It even helps mitigate the impact of climate change by storing carbon and regulating local rainfall. Life on earth would not be possible without nature’s services. It is our greatest common good.

[…]

Living in harmony with nature can only be achieved if we reverse negative impact of biodiversity loss and pursue full implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. World Environment Day celebrations will help build momentum and unite the global community in actions for positive change.

Read the full manifestos at worldenvironmentday.global

Apple Music goes black

Jun 2, 2020

How to fix an exFAT drive on a Mac

May 13, 2020

A couple of weeks ago, one of my wife's friend had an issue with an exFAT formatted external USB drive. exFAT, aka FAT64, is a Microsoft filesystem that comes in handy for drives you may want to be read and written both by PCs and Macs, in opposition to NTSF for which you need some third party software or some ability with the terminal to be able to write on.
This is the case with this friend too: she uses this drive to share data between her Mac and the PCs she finds at work, but this drive does often corrupt and when it does, the Mac cannot mount it. Usually, she goes back to work, mounts it on a PC and gets it fixed there, but now that she has been home for weeks, she did not know how to get it working again and, above all, retrieve the valuable data she had inside it. So she asked me.

Searching the web points to some code lines to be typed in the terminal to perform a fsck_exfat on the drive, a command line built into macOS since 2010, but something Disk Utility seems unable to do at first via its graphical interface.
Looking around a bit more, I found this thread suggesting one simpler solution: waiting.
Turns out, if you leave your drive plugged in for quite a while - the bigger the disk, the longer the time - it eventually gets mounted on the desktop. I forwarded this solution to this friend and, after a faithful wait, the drive was actually mounted and working.
Apparently, the problem seems to be related to not proper ejecting, especially if some files are still present in the trash upon disconnection. My guess here, is that macOS does silently perform fsch_exfat on its own while the drive is plugged if it senses something has gone bad with the volume, hence the need to leave it plugged in for long times, even if it looks as is the system is lying still. In fact, many report that the status light of their external HDs does actually blink while being connected to the Mac and not yet mounted on the desktop.
In case this simple solution does not work, looks like running the above-mentioned code in the Terminal does make the disk appear in Disk Utility and being fixed by it.

One final note: even if software tools are becoming increasingly powerful at fixing volumes' structures, regular backup is the only real guarantee your data will not be lost. If you can afford to have twice the HDs you own for data redundancy, go for it. If you can't, or want a remote copy of your data, among all the online backup solutions out there I highly suggest Backblaze. I subscribed to its unlimited plan 2 years ago and haven't worried about data loss since.

Two months that shook Lombardy

May 12, 2020

The first case of the coronavirus infection in Italy was identified on February 20 at the hospital of Codogno, in the province of Lodi. Within two weeks, the whole country was subjected to some of the toughest quarantine measures taken outside of China. Today, after two challenging months of sacrifice and loss, and with the most critical stage of the emergency behind us, more and more people are starting to look for answers. Tens of thousands of children and grandchildren were not able to say goodbye to their loved ones who died in intensive care wards, at home or in nursing homes. They are now wondering whether everything possible was done to save them. Nowhere are these questions more pressing than in Lombardy, the richest and most populous region of the country and the one that was hit first and hardest by the epidemic.

ilPost is the online newspaper I read every day: it is wonderfully written, doesn't indulge in low-quality-high-clicks news and is well made as a whole.
Many times in the past I wished the articles they had put together were written in English to allow me to share them here. Today, I finally can with a deep and well crafted report on what COVID-19 has done to Italy's richest and most populous region, one that, by population, is bigger than quite a few european states.

More on protein modeling against SARS-CoV-2

May 5, 2020

John Timmer at ArsTechnica.com outlines the research behind how Remdesivir might work against SARS-CoV-2 and points out a topic I wrote about few weeks ago:

A few decades ago, figuring out atomic-level details of proteins would have required many months of laboriously trying to get the drug and protein to form neat, orderly crystals. But we've since developed a combination of hardware and algorithms that now allow us to take what are essentially electron microscope images of individual proteins and combine them with enough precision to figure out where all the atoms are.

Distributed computing projects like Rosetta@home are showing their role in fighting this current pandemic and are something more each of us could do to help.
To me, it's fascinating how, in few decades, research has gone from lengthy protein crystals growth for X-Ray Diffraction analysis to days of molecules being modeled by computational chemistry.

A Video That Plants Trees

Apr 21, 2020

Last year, for Earth Day, we made a video committing to planting one tree for every 1,000 views. Thanks to so many people, we reached over 10 million views and planted over 10,000 trees. This year, for Earth Day 2020 on April 22nd, we decided to do it again: we will plant 1 tree for every 1,000 views. Want to get involved? Share our video!

I discovered Treedom this winter around Christmas thanks to one of my wife's friends. Treedom is the only website in the world that allows you to plant a tree from a distance and follow it online. Since its foundation in 2010 in Florence, more than 1,000,000 trees have been planted in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Italy. All trees are planted directly by local farmers and contribute to environmental, social and economic benefits.

We gave few trees as gifts for Christmas last year and they do what they say: every tree has a webpage for you to follow and you may also give it a name.

The idea around the video is easy: the more we share it, the more views it gets, the more trees they plant. Go give a look at their website and share!

Rosetta@home against COVID

Apr 8, 2020

Rosetta@home is a distributed computing project that uses some of your CPU time to compute protein structures.

By running Rosetta@home on your computer when you're not using it you will speed up and extend our efforts to design new proteins and to predict their 3-dimensional shapes. Proteins are the molecular machines and building blocks of life. You can read more about protein folding and design here.

I've been running Rosetta@home and other BOINC projects on my computers for the past 10 and more years, even dedicating spare Macs I had at home to the cause.
I had missed it, but in late february Rosetta@home announced some of its computational resources were used to compute an important Coronavirus protein weeks before it was possible to measure it in the lab.
Currently, many R@h tasks involve the modelling of proteins that could be used to find a vaccine, the only known cure to COVID-19.

Rosetta@home leverages BOINC to run: if you want to donate some spare CPU cycles to science, start here to download BOINC and join the project. Through BOINC you may also join other projects and configure how much RAM, storage and CPU time these calculations may use. Among the other project you may join, I also like and run World Community Grid.

Apple Updates iWork for Mac With iCloud Folder Sharing and more

Apr 1, 2020

Juli Clover, writing for MacRumors.com

Apple today updated Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, its iWork apps designed for the Mac, to version 10.0 with a new set of features. The updates add support for iCloud Folder Sharing for collaborative files with macOS 10.15.4 installed, plus there are options to edit shared documents offline.

Hallelujah! I always had to tether with my iPhone while travelling, with interruptions any time the connection dropped.
Plus, look how big you have become, iWork! You've reached version 10!

Pathogen Resistance

Apr 1, 2020

Lovely strip from xkcd.com

Coronavirus is our future TEDxSMU

Mar 30, 2020

I found this video on YouTube weeks ago and, ever since, it has proved more rightful than I hoped and thought. So, let me share it with you in case you haven't already seen it. And, if you have, watch it again to make sure that some of the concepts outlined stick in your memory

Alanna Shaikh is a global health consultant who specializes in strengthening health systems. You can read more about her here, here, here and here.

The talk is full of interesting concepts, previsions of what has actually happened and is happening in the world. From politicians not wanting to admit the seriousness of the pandemic, to lack of facial masks, to the crisis it is being on medical systems.

You can find the whole transcript of her speech on TED website; I've picked one passage I found particularly interesting, as it explains why what we're doing to our planet is turning against us in more ways than we can imagine:

This is not the last major outbreak we're ever going to see. There's going to be more outbreaks, and there's going to be more epidemics. That's not a maybe; that's a given. And it's a result of the way that we, as human beings, are interacting with our planet. Human choices are driving us into a position where we're going to see more outbreaks. Part of that is about climate change and the way a warming climate makes the world more hospitable to viruses and bacteria. But it's also about the way we're pushing into the last wild spaces on our planet. When we burn and plow the Amazon rain forest so that we can have cheap land for ranching, when the last of the African bush gets converted into farms, when wild animals in China are hunted to extinction, human beings come into contact with wildlife populations that they've never come into contact with before, and those populations have new kinds of diseases: bacteria, viruses - stuff we're not ready for. Bats, in particular, have a knack for hosting illnesses that can infect people. But they're not the only animals that do it. So as long as we keep making our remote places less remote, the outbreaks are going to keep coming.

Lastly:

Don't wear a face mask. Face masks are for sick people and health care providers. If you're sick, your face mask holds in all your coughing and sneezing and protects the people around you. And if you're a health care provider, your face mask is one tool in a set of tools called personal protective equipment, that you're trained to use so you can give patient care and not get sick yourself. If you're a regular, healthy person wearing a face mask, it's just making your face sweaty. (Laughter) Leave the face masks in stores for the doctors and the nurses and the sick people.

Should Apple have released its Software Updates in Europe?

Mar 26, 2020

As days passed since Apple announced the release of its macOS 10.15.4, iOS and iPadOS 13.4 updates, I begin wondering if it should have. And since I knew it would have, I wondered what the impact on web traffic would have been.
In Europe, as a consequence of the spread of the Coronavirus disease (COVID19), many workers are working from home; I myself am working from home these days, connected via VPN to our company server. Moreover, teachers are trying to keep schooling alive by streaming video-lessons to students at home, by sending them material to work on and asking the class to send back homework as they are done.
As the networks are seing an important surge of traffic, european institutions have asked major video-on-demand providers to lower the quality of their strams to accomodate the need for free bandwidth, rightfully establishing a priority of needs. All this said, I began wondering: should Apple release its software updates via the internet now?

Some numbers

Since I haven't found any data on the last few days of network usage, I looked at past iOS/macOS releases to get some perspective.
Back in October 2011, iOS 5 caused a 20% increase of web traffic when released, a spike that actually had a severe hit on Apple's servers that were effectively failing half of the requests.
A similar effect had the release of iOS 7 a couple of years later:

At one unnamed North American fixed Internet provider, "Apple Updates immediately became almost 20 percent of total network traffic and continued to stay above 15 percent of total traffic into the evening peak hours,"

iOS 8 apparently had an even higher impact on Network Traffic, with some sources indicating a 50% increase of traffic as the software update was released.

All this said, what's the big picture of web traffic? Who are the big players as per bandwidth usage today?
Sandvine has issued a detailed report towards the end of last year analyzing web traffic.
As some may have expected, over 60% of web traffic is devoted to video streaming. 60%.
From here, it is clear the need of addressing this web usage first of all to free some bandwidth for workers and students at home, especially since the flow of data for increasingly High Quality video can scale up quite fast, starting from 1.4GB of data for a Standard Definition movie, going to 6GB for its HD version and sky rocketing to respectively 54GB and a whopping 162GB for 4k and 8k video streams.
But what's Apple's share in this panorama?
Always according to Sandvine's report, all Apple related traffic, including iTunes, iCloud, Apple Software Update, FaceTime, Apple Music, Apple.com, iCloud Photo Stream and the Mac App Store account for a mere 4% of global traffic.

What can I do?

As we have established, maybe OS updates aren't the big bandwidth monster I imagined. Nonetheless, if you are worried or just want to play your part, there are few things I think we can do to help keeping the line free, some precautions we can use this and next times.

First: let the device choose when it is time to download the update. As some might have noticed, Apple devices rarely rush to download the latest software update and this I believe is a strategy the company uses to also avoid stressing their servers. So, let's wait for our iPhones, Mac and iPads to choose when to download and install the next update instead of being collectively downloading GB of data at the same time.

Second: download stuff at night. While this may seem a bit silly in a worldwide web that runs 24h a day, using your data at night might help reduce the web traffic in your local network from peak hours: the same network your neighbors use, the same peak hours people need for working and studying remotely.

Third: if you have the possibility, enable macOS local caching. Previously available only for macOS Server, but recently available on all macs, local caching allows to store (cache) some content on a mac on the local network and source it from there if and when needed. This applies to iOS and macOS updates, but also to iCloud files, iTunesU videos and even high quality Siri voices.

Final words

Let's see if next days will give us a glimpse of what impact the release of a slew of OS updates on Tuesday had on Internet web traffic.
In the meantime, lets keep in mind that, now more than ever, our actions can have a significant impact on other people; from something as big as staying inside to protect the others, not clog hospitals and stop the spread of this pandemic, to something as small as waiting to update our Apple devices.

Some links from ArsTechnica

Mar 15, 2020

I've been having these articles open in tabs for weeks now, waiting to post them here.
ArsTechnica is one of the very few websites I visit almost daily: I don't always find something to read, but when I do, articles are very interesting and enriching.
Here's some (random) ones I liked and could be worth reading during this days of isolation:

• New estimate of how much thawing permafrost will worsen warming
• HAMR don’t hurt ’em—laser-assisted hard drives are coming in 2020
• Infantilizing babies helps them learn language
• Variant of photovoltaic power could generate 24 hours a day
• The Ars Technica semi-scientific guide to Wi-Fi Access Point placement

View from the Top: Craig Federighi

Mar 15, 2020

One of my dear friends sent this to me in February: I like Craig Federighi, and this made me like him even more. As I was watching it, of course some memory went to Steve Jobs' famous Stanford speech.
To me, I found valuable advices in Craig personal story, like not chasing success for the sake of it, but doing your best and have this as your main goal, and the importance of being able to make place in your life for other things than your work, like family and passions.
It's a 50 minutes video, including the presentation, Craig's speech and few questions at the end.

How to turn off notifications for shared calendars iOS

Feb 26, 2020

I don't know if it's a sign my wife and I are growing older and busier, but last week we finally decided to share some iOS calendars to be able to plan the future months even while being distant for some more weeks.
Setting them up was easy and straightforward, but what we couldn't figure out how to, was muting notifications of events coming up on specific shared calendars say, for example, my work meetings on my wife's phone.
I looked carefully under the Notification panel in Settings, but I couldn't find what we needed. After a not-so-immediate web search, I found this on Pocket-lint:

How to turn off notifications for the shared calendar Open the Calendar app > Tap on Calendars at the bottom of the screen > Scroll down to the 'Family' calendar under the iCloud section or whatever you've renamed it > Tap on the 'I' > Toggle off 'Event Alerts' in the Notifications section if you don't want to be alerted when an event is coming up.

I'm posting it here for future reference in case someone else needs it.

How to list articles by month with Twig

Feb 21, 2020

Speaking of doing some maintenance to the blog, for months I had been trying to automate the way the Archive page of the website worked by making it populate itself automatically as pages were added to the blog, with no success.
The only thing I wanted to use was Twig, the flexible, fast, and secure template engine for PHP provided by Symfony many CMS's are based upon. My idea was to use a loop function to call out months and print articles that had a date equal to that month. As it turned out, it was a bunch of work: first I stumbled upon some date_modify bugs that actually were tied back to PHP's DateTime function; and even after fixing that, I could not set out a way to make the if condition work well enough to only print out months during which I actually had written something in.
It was an enriching process: I got to play around with coding and needed to learn many things along the way, but, in the end, all I wanted was not to manually type in entries every time I published something, so I asked. And help, once again, arrived.
Posting the question to Pico's GitHub Issues section, promptly yielded an answer from Pico's main developer:

{% set current_month = "" %}
{% for page in pages|sort_by("time")|reverse if page.time and not page.meta.unlisted %}
    {% if page.time|date("Y-m") != current_month %}
        {% set current_month = page.time|date("Y-m") %}
        <h2>{{ page.time|date("F 'y") }}</h2>
    {% endif %}
    <a href="{{ page.url }}" title="{{ page.meta.description }}">{{ page.title }}</a><br>
{% endfor %}

The solution he came up with is nicer and more compact than the one I was chasing and, besides some Pico's specific functions, it should work somewhere else too.
I am posting it for future reference: I couldn't find it anywhere else and it has benefitted me greatly since implementing it about 20 days ago.

Pico CMS

Feb 13, 2020

Over the past few weeks I did some key maintenance to Biting apples, among which was updating the CMS that makes this site run, Pico, to its lates version.

Pico is, as its motto reads, a stupidly simple, blazing fast, flat file CMS.

When I found it almost three years ago, I liked it because it was simple enough to start publishing right away, yet it forced me to learn some CSS, HTML and Twig to personalize the pages at my need - something I had wanted to do for years, but never got a chance to.
Besides being fun, learning some of the web's building languages turned out to be quite useful for some later side projects, namely my wedding's website made with Pico with multilingual versions and some Wordpress websites where I was able to edit the CSS at need.

The reason I chose Pico over some apparently simpler options like more common CMSes, was that I wanted a CMS that was not reliant on databases to run few mere pages, something I could completely tailor at need and, above all, a CMS that would allow me to write posts offline (as I am doing right now) in plain text wherever I was - mostly while commuting to work.
The choice has been valid: the website never had a problem and stayed light; once the foundations were laid down, writing new posts has been very easy. Even if I don't have the variety of plugins Wordpress has to choose from for new features, neither have I experienced absurd problems with it as I am with other WP websites I've worked on and currently have to maintain.

Flat files CMSes are an interesting option for a low budget blog like this: they don't require separate MySQL servers and are light to operate. Pico is one among many, Grav and October are two other very interesting projects looking good.
What I like of Pico as an open source project, is that it is still rather small and with an active development. I myself was able to contribute by localizing it in Italian and whenever I had an issue I could not resolve, support has come quickly and proficiently.

In case you want to start your own website, I'd advice you to look at flat-file CMSes before landing on more common platforms without questioning what your needs are: it might be just easy and a more enriching experience as a whole.

In the end, I think this passage by Andy Miller Grav's lead developer sums it up quite effectively:

There are plenty of great open source CMS platforms out there, including personal favorites Joomla and WordPress, as well as some really promising up-and-coming platforms like PageKit.

All of these platforms rely on a database for data persistence, are powerful, and offer a good degree of flexibility.

One real downside to these platforms is they require a real commitment to learn how to use and develop on them. You really have to pick one out of the pack, and dedicate yourself to that platform if you wish to become competent as either a user, developer, or administrator.

What if there was a platform that was fast, easy-to-learn, and still powerful & flexible?

Swift Playground on the Mac

Feb 12, 2020

Julie Cover at MacRumors

Like Swift Playgrounds for ‌iPad‌, Swift Playgrounds for Mac is designed to provide exercises and challenges to help users learn the basics of coding. The app requires no coding knowledge to use and is ideal for students who are just starting out with coding.

I am really excited about this and am looking forward to try it out.
Swift Playground is an app that has interested me since its debut about 5 and a half years ago, and one I never got a chance to play with not owning an iPad. I always figured out Apple would port it to the iPhone, but the move over to the Mac via Catalyst makes much more sense.
Let's see how the app works since other Catalyst apps on the Mac aren't really shining (I'm looking at you Home App)

Disney's "Pinocchio" turns 80

Feb 8, 2020

These days mark the 80^th anniversary of the release of Disney's "Pinocchio".
I am reporting this for two reasons: the first, "Pinocchio" was written by an Italian writer, Carlo Collodi.
The second, is that it gives me a chance to speak about this wonderful video filmed in 1957, where Walt Disney himself explains his multicamera technique, probably the most advanced tool ever made in the field of animation.
The invention is extraordinary in its idea, conception and result; I really love to see human ingeniousness at work, even if it is in tasks that may be considered frivolous. Before I watched that video, I was convinced every frame was drawn from scratch, turns out I was extremely wrong.
To see the Multicamera technique at work in "Pinocchio" itself, look no further than this extremely long sequence at the beginning of the movie with a very deep zoom into Pinocchio's town .

117 New Emojis In Final List For 2020

Jan 30, 2020

I had never been a huge fan of emojis, but I find myself using them more and more as time passes to convey a feeling that goes beyond what I have written, or make messages less formal.
2020 list includes one very special emoji that deserves a big, ironic, finally!

Welcome additions include […] a pinched finger gesture which is commonly referred to simply as "Italian Hand Gesture".

From the emoji's very description:

Pinched Fingers
An emoji showing all fingers and thumb held together in a vertical orientation, sometimes referred to as the Italian hand gesture 'ma che vuoi' (or "finger purse").

I wonder how I was able to communicate all these years…

Speaking of Emojis, in case someone's wondering, here's an article from last December by Emojipedia on how to use punctuation with emojis

Injecting the flu vaccine into a tumor gets the immune system to attack it

Jan 25, 2020

ArsTechnica

A number of years back, there was a great deal of excitement about using viruses to target cancer. A number of viruses explode the cells that they've infected in order to spread to new ones. Engineering those viruses so that they could only grow in cancer cells would seem to provide a way of selectively killing these cells. And some preliminary tests were promising, showing massive tumors nearly disappearing.

But the results were inconsistent, and there were complications. The immune system would respond to the virus, limiting our ability to use it more than once. And some of the tumor killing seemed to be the result of the immune system, rather than the virus.

Now, some researchers have focused on the immune response, inducing it at the site of the tumor. And they do so by a remarkably simple method: injecting the tumor with the flu vaccine. As a bonus, the mice it was tested on were successfully immunized, too.

Polish parliament OKs law allowing gov’t to punish judges

Jan 25, 2020

Associated Press News

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Poland’s lawmakers gave their final approval Thursday to legislation that will allow politicians to fire judges who criticize their decisions, a change that European legal experts warn will undermine judicial independence.

2019 Second Warmest Year on Record

Jan 19, 2020

Nasa:

According to independent analyses by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Earth's global surface temperatures in 2019 were the second warmest since modern recordkeeping began in 1880. […]

“We crossed over into more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit warming territory in 2015 and we are unlikely to go back. This shows that what’s happening is persistent, not a fluke due to some weather phenomenon: we know that the long-term trends are being driven by the increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” […]

Rising temperatures in the atmosphere and ocean are contributing to the continued mass loss from Greenland and Antarctica and to increases in some extreme events, such as heat waves, wildfires, intense precipitation.

See also the slides from the Jan. 15 news conference

Box Office Mojo list of 2019 most profitable movies

Jan 6, 2020

Together with NewScientist's list I linked to recently, this list encompasses the other topic I like: movies.
Here's the list by IMDBPro's Box Office Mojo based on worldwide earnings:

1. Avengers: Endgame, Marvel Studios (Disney)
2. The Lion King, Disney
3. Frozen II, Disney
4. Spider-Man: Far from Home, Sony (partnering with Marvel Studios, Disney)
5. Captain Marvel, Marvel Studios (Disney)
6. ToyStory 4, Pixar (Disney)
7. Joker, DC Films (Warner Bros. Pict.)
8. Aladdin, Disney
9. Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker, Lucasfilm Ltd. LLC (Disney)
10. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, Universal Pictures

Let me point out that 8 out of 10 entries are related to Disney Studios, and the first not related to it is in position 7.
Avengers: Endgame is the highest-grossing movie of all times as of now, and it shows. It takes what grossed #2 and #5 to reach its box-office earnings.

In case you are curious as I was, here's the list of the highest-grossing movies of the decade and the top movie of the year

New Scientist ranks the top 10 discoveries of the decade

Jan 6, 2020

NewScientist listed the 10 most important scientific discoveries of the 2010's, many of which I didn't even remember or knew. I am to list them taking part of their explanations, but I'd advise to read them directly from source:

1. Higgs boson, a fundamental physical particle that helps explain why all other particles in the universe have mass;
2. CRISPR, a cheap system to edit DNA than unfortunately lead to the first gene-edited babies in China¹ in 2018;
3. Gravitational waves, one of the proof Einstein was right about the space-time, the fabric of the universe;
4. AlphaGo, the pinnacle of AI;
5. Layla’s gene therapy, i.e. how genetic editing done right could save lives;
6. Denisovans, one more step in human evolution;
7. Quantum supremacy, calculations done on a totally new type of computers that can perform calculations no classical computer could;
8. Proxima Centauri b, the closest known exoplanet, at a distance of 4.2 light years from Earth;
9. Face transplants, precisely what it sounds like²;
10. Remains of Richard III, former king of England, found excavating under a parking lot.

Denmark sources record 47% of power from wind in 2019

Jan 6, 2020

Reuters:

Wind accounted for 47% of Denmark’s power usage in 2019, the country’s grid operator Energinet said on Thursday citing preliminary data, up from 41% in 2018 and topping the previous record of 43% in 2017.
[…]
European countries are global leaders in utilising wind power but Denmark is far in front of nearest rival Ireland, which sourced 28% of its power from wind in 2018 according to data from industry group WindEurope.

Good news on the renewables front: public interest, support and good engineering can help us make leaps towards a much needed goal.

Merry Christmas

Dec 25, 2019

iPhone stuck on black screen with spinning wheel

Dec 17, 2019

Short version

Problem: iPhone stuck on black screen with spinning wheel
Solution: force restart iPhone

Long story

This morning I wasn't doing anything particular with my iPhone when, out of nowhere, my iPhone got stuck on black screen with spinning wheel.
The device actually responded to commands: the screen would turn on and off with the lateral button, it vibrated when using the mute switch and - most disconcerting - it kept on communicating with the watch, allowing me to receive and answer to messages. It was as if the screen was stuck, while the device beneath it was working as usual.

I looked up on the internet for solutions, but all I could find where terribly written, unnecessarily long articles, or others whose first suggestion was downloading some magical software that would restore the iPhone back to normal. No thanks.
With some patience I read through them and what they ended up saying is that, one first thing to try, is to force restart the iPhone. Actually that's what I kept on trying to do, but I remembered the wrong procedure to do so, i.e. the one that applied to iPhones before the 6/6s versions.

Anyway: I got angry of unnecessarily long pages to find a simple solution in a situation where you need it quickly, and that's why there's a short version up there.

Link: Greta Thunberg is Time's 2019 person of the year

Dec 12, 2019

[This year United Nations Climate Conference in Madrid] is the last such summit before nations commit to new plans to meet a major deadline set by the Paris Agreement. Unless they agree on transformative action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the world’s temperature rise since the Industrial Revolution will hit the 1.5°C mark—an eventuality that scientists warn will expose some 350 million additional people to drought and push roughly 120 million people into extreme poverty by 2030. For every fraction of a degree that temperatures increase, these problems will worsen. This is not fearmongering; this is science. For decades, researchers and activists have struggled to get world leaders to take the climate threat seriously. But this year, an unlikely teenager somehow got the world’s attention.

Time.com