English on mzll

Dotfiles and nerdy stuff

lg@mzll.it (Luigi Mozzillo) — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 01:22:22 +0100

I need to replace my work Mac within a few weeks. ¹ My work laptop is synced with my personal one for everything that involves iCloud. I have pretty much the same apps, and I use Homebrew for everything I can. So, with the switch coming up, I’ve been thinking about rebuilding my dotfiles for macOS.

Slop and translations

lg@mzll.it (Luigi Mozzillo) — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 01:22:22 +0100

AI has recently been used on this blog just to improve the graphic design: I’ve asked for help on several occasions to fine-tune aesthetic details that would otherwise have taken me forever. But never when it comes to the content. And that will never happen because, since this is a personal blog, writing using soggy stuff generated by an unconsciously system would be really stupid.

New needs and new possibilities

lg@mzll.it (Luigi Mozzillo) — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 01:22:22 +0100

I had a PDF in English, so I asked Claude Code to translate the text into Italian and convert it to EPUB. Done – it works and reads well. It took me less than 5 minutes. Things that, I don’t know, might not even have occurred to me to do before.

The Gratitude Subscriptions, March 2026

lg@mzll.it (Luigi Mozzillo) — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 01:22:22 +0100

I won’t go into the reasons why you should use a password manager. I’m assuming that if you’re reading this blog, you’re nerdy enough to already have one. Right?

Put full post in your feeds

lg@mzll.it (Luigi Mozzillo) — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 01:22:22 +0100

If you have a blog and you’re not making any money off it, for crying out loud, just put your full post in the RSS feed – let us read it without having to use some gizmo tool to view it in its entirety. We’ll check out your website anyway, we probably already know it, but – for heaven’s sake! – forget about the stats and just let us read your content. If we read, it’s because we like what you write. Leave that to us.

We need the illusion that we matter to someone

lg@mzll.it (Luigi Mozzillo) — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 01:22:22 +0100

It’s impressive how writing a blog and feeling responsible for your readers – no matter how little you know them – can make our brains stick to promises we’d normally break without a second thought. Kev Quirk wrote about this recently, discussing his weight and his desire to lose weight.

Du-ddu-ddum

lg@mzll.it (Luigi Mozzillo) — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 01:22:22 +0100

Maybe, for the first time in my life, after trying dozens of them and reselling them or sending them back because they hurt or bothered me behind the ears due to the temples of my glasses, maybe I’ve found the over-ear headphones that, in addition to having an exceptional sound for my expectations, don’t hurt behind the ears: the Major IV by Marshall. What a treat. And what a hell of a basses.

Digital DIY

lg@mzll.it (Luigi Mozzillo) — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 01:22:22 +0100

Even the most foolish entrepreneur today thinks he can replace consultants, technicians, lawyers, and accountants with a credit card and a subscription costing just twenty dollars a month.

The Gratitude Subscriptions, February 2026

lg@mzll.it (Luigi Mozzillo) — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 01:22:22 +0100

In February, my gratitude subscription was expressed with a donation ($10) to Johan Sanneblad, lead developer of Notebook Navigator.

7HE INB0X

lg@mzll.it (Luigi Mozzillo) — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 01:22:22 +0100

In my professional experience, I’ve often dealt with corporate communication. Many users don’t know what an email is, don’t know how to write, don’t know how to reply, or – even worse – sometimes don’t even realize they need to reply. The inability to communicate within an organization, both internally and, above all, externally, is a hurdle that absolutely must be overcome.

G pleasure

lg@mzll.it (Luigi Mozzillo) — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 01:22:23 +0100

One thing about AI is that I use it. I use it for work, but also for personal stuff.¹ And there’s nothing wrong with that. I also wrote about it here (in Italian): I don’t remember how to do some things that I now do with a calculator, and sooner or later I’ll probably forget how to do things that I now do with an LLM. All in all, it’s not a big deal. The serious thing is that I had distanced myself from Google.

The Gratitude Subscriptions, Jenuary 2026

lg@mzll.it (Luigi Mozzillo) — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 01:22:22 +0100

Over the past two years, I’ve started this my virtual subscription to projects for which I express deep gratitude. Projects related to applications I use, or blogs I follow, or podcasts I listen to, and so on. I wrote about them for 2024 and 2025.

We're always talking about blogs, anyway

lg@mzll.it (Luigi Mozzillo) — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 01:22:22 +0100

With a toot¹ on Mastodon in which he appreciated this post, my dear friend Nicola made me think about how little I put into promoting my professional blog on these shores.

Which are worth a lifetime

lg@mzll.it (Luigi Mozzillo) — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 01:22:22 +0100

When my daughter gets a haircut, she comes home sad and angry because she doesn’t like it, that haircut, and then her mom washes it again and fixes it, and she looks at herself in the mirror and smiles, and then, in bed, under the warm covers, shortly after, happy, she tells me, Dad, I love my hair.

Vibe self-hosting

lg@mzll.it (Luigi Mozzillo) — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 01:22:22 +0100

In a recent blog post, Jordan Fulghum noted how, through the use of AI agents via the terminal, the management of self-hosted solutions has radically changed. Today, it’s easier, faster, more convenient, and even more fun to install and configure utility, monitoring, or productivity applications.

Calmness

lg@mzll.it (Luigi Mozzillo) — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 01:22:22 +0100

One thing I wanted to say, regarding my last post. I am not a pessimist, and I do not want to imagine any kind of block on artificial intelligence tools for supporting creative work or development. On the contrary, aware of my past mistakes, having experienced defeat, mortificazione and frustration in my youth, I believe these tools should be used to produce faster and, perhaps, to sell the fruits of one’s labor better. Clearly – needless to say – cleary the results of these tools must be verified, corrected, analyzed, and adjusted before being put into a stable context. Already said. I am optimistic about this, but with calmness.

The quality shop

lg@mzll.it (Luigi Mozzillo) — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 01:22:22 +0100

As a boy I was a freelancer for many years. I built and sold websites. I did it like a craftsman: I designed the layout with Macromedia Fireworks, refined it with lines, shadows, and reflections, and then manually converted it to HTML¹. Then I used my own CMS, built from scratch with my own PHP framework, to make it dynamic.

On Made in EU digital

lg@mzll.it (Luigi Mozzillo) — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 01:22:22 +0100

In an post from a few years ago recently republished on his blog, Lionel Dricot compares the “American dream” with the European one, the economic benefit that characterizes American technological production and the community and social benefit of the European one (read Linux, VLC, the Internet itself or the World Wide Web).

If this is a man

lg@mzll.it (Luigi Mozzillo) — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 01:22:22 +0100

United States of America, A.D. 2026.

In addition to Jonathon Ross murdering Renee Good, the very same day they went to a high school and attempted to arrest students and staff. One day after this, 6 men with guns kicked in the door of someone’s home without a legal warrant and dragged the husband out in cuffs. He is an American citizen. Today local law enforcement in and around the Twin Cities held a press conference calling out these “agents” in breaking the law. They are now targeting and attempting to detain off-duty officers. Every single one of the officers they targeted are people of color. It is straight up racial profiling. They are smashing car windows and tear-gassing people including toddlers. People are carrying their passports and birth certificates around with them and often they are not even allowed to show these “agents” their paperwork before they are beaten and/or abducted.

How to solve a problem

lg@mzll.it (Luigi Mozzillo) — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 01:22:22 +0100

I stumbled upon Vinson Guo somewhat by accident. I don’t remember exactly, but I think his app was suggested to me by Gemini or Perplexity. I don’t remember. Anyway, Vinson is a developer based in Chengdu, China. In recent months, he’s been working on publishing SmartRSS.