Are you planning to attend PyCon Italia?

Would you like to join Python Dojo workshop organised by me and my friend Nicholas Tollervey?

More information and registration link here https://2025.pycon.it/en/event/python-dojo

I finally decided to purchase Micro Social apps.apple.com/it/app/mi…

It’s an alternative Micro.Blog client with interesting features.

Version 1.5.2 has just been released.

The app is free for most of the features but you can unlock a one time purchase to support its development.

Finished reading: Il pipistrello by Jo Nesbø 📚

I should probably write a long blog post (on my main blog) about why I lost interest in micro.blog 😕

Briefly:

• editor is so annoying (see picture below where cursor is in the middle of the character)
• posts are too short to serve as future documentation / tutorial
• lack of proper Markdown editor
• not clear how to insert multiple images and how to alternate text with images
• no way to know if your posts are being read or not (I don’t even know if people appreciate what I write… I don’t know if they are sharing my post somewhere else)
• completely zero engagement (it’s like shouting against a wall)
• editor is so annoying (no, not an accidental duplicate. I hate it so much and it takes me ages to write a post, especially because of the but I’ve already explained which makes me write wrong chars)

Putting @manton in CC, maybe he can take some inspiration for future development.

Since everyone seems to be talking about it, here is another superb owl. I hope you enjoy it 😃

In the past couple of days I was having this annoying issue while trying to pull a model from Ollama: I was running the command ollama pull deepseek-r1:8b, it was downloading something like 4-5% of the model and then the connection was reset, the client was “crashing” and it always restarted from 0%.

It looks like I wasn’t alone: https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/8406

Here is the solution: https://www.andreagrandi.it/posts/how-to-workaround-ollama-pull-issues/

Self note: if you want to quickly generate images of terminal containing commands or short code snippets, you can use Carbon

carbon.now.sh

So, it’s coming! Nintendo Switch 2 will be announced on April 2nd (I see why they skipped April 1st) www.youtube.com/watch

In the last couple of days I finally had the chance to test Copilot Edit (the multi file editing feature). I made sure to write proper and detailed specifications and I asked it to write the implementation.

The good news? It was able to get it right at the first attempt and I was really impressed. Once the implementation was done, I asked it to also fix the two test files involved: it did it right 🎉

The bad news? Thanks to my colleague who did the code review, I realised that I had asked the wrong thing 😭

The thing I had to implement required way more changes than what I had asked for. I quickly reworked and simplified the code by myself this time, but for once it wasn’t AI fault!

Using GitHub Copilot as rubber duck, pairing buddy, to automate boring tasks, giving it clear and precise instructions and always verifying the results 👍

Expecting it will do your work for you, with little or no guidance 👎

Thanks for attending my talk

I’ve enabled stats on my Micro.blog account.

Stats are not included in Micro.blog so I’m self hosting them (no personal information is being collected and this data is never leaving the host) using Umami.

I don’t really care about “numbers” (I do appreciate comments and interactions a lot!) but I’m curious to see if people are reading what I post or not.

You can read on my main blog how I’m doing that: https://www.andreagrandi.it/posts/self-hosting-analytics-at-zero-cost/

Not sure how and why, but I entirely missed the first book in the Harry Hole’s series from Jo Nesbo www.goodreads.com/book/show…

Catching up now!

Starting the day and realising my backup system has been broken for the last 4 days 😵

Error reported to vorta people github.com/borgbase/…

Then realising something broke the borgbackup-fuse installation on homebrew

Uninstall + install fixed it 😮‍💨

Trying to brush up a couple of things today:

• Watching a few existing talks about a subject I would like to give a talk about (no spoilers yet!)
• Reading documentation about VSCode extensions for an idea I have (at least I found a good name!)

All of this while I try to relax after a nice day where I also trained my dog a little bit 🐶

In a future iteration of GitHub Copilot I expect it to check the errors in CI and automatically propose a fix.

I just did this manually: copy pasting the error back, asking for a fix, the fix was correct, I made the commit, push etc…

It could be automated with me still in charge to dismiss or accept.

Renewed 1Blocker subscription for another year.

I think I missed the opportunity to purchase a discounted life time plan because I saw a few days ago the price was around 36€ and now it’s ~45€ 😕

In case anyone needs, the Breathable app has been made free for life.

😮‍💨 Spread the word! Developer Garrett Murray has made Breathable, his air quality index tracker with excellent widgets, free of charge, forever:

In light of the awful fires and air quality in Los Angeles, I’ve made Breathable free and app will remain free permanently. I charged for the app prior only so I could donate the proceeds to climate change charities, but paying Apple 15% for that privilege is silly. breathable.app

(Via Daring Fireball)

On a side note, if you need to keep an eye on LA fires, I suggest using Watch Duty.

If you are planning to attend FOSDEM and you have kids, it looks like you may have a valid option this year: https://fosdem.org/2025/news/2025-01-08-junior/

FOSDEM Junior is a collaboration between FOSDEM, Code Club, CoderDojo, developers, and volunteers to organize workshops and activities for children during the FOSDEM weekend.

I just found out about these micro.blog categories help.micro.blog/t/emoji-i… to help users discovering content. I’m wondering if “Tech” has been left out on purpose.

I found this very old post from @manton www.manton.org/2018/01/0… but it doesn’t mention anything about it.

After nearly 3 weeks off, I’m finally back to work. Weather is awful and it won’t be easy to manage my puppy (I recently got a Basset Hound!) because he won’t stay quiet inside the house.

Let’s see how it goes!

After finding out about the new 1$/month plan, I couldn’t resist and finally decided to subscribe.

There are a lot of things I usually want to post and which are too small to justify the effort of creating a blog post on my main blog, but they are too big to fit a Mastodon (or Bluesky post), so I think I will start using this micro blog much more!

Happy New Year to everyone 🎉

The second day in Maiorca (I’m here for my company annual retreat) started with a very nice breakfast with a wonderful view on the sea.

We had a few sessions during the day (unfortunately I can’t talk about them) followed by some relaxing time next to the swimming pool.

The weather is nice and in my spare time I’m keeping an eye on the last few things being prepared for the next PyCon Italy.