Zotech.it, a company my father co-founded, is the startup with the highest score among this round of regional funding.

https://github.com/tamnd/kage

When talking about state control over the internet, it seems to me that most people think of our governments as being essentially democratic, so whatever legal action they do has intrinsic democratic legitimacy, even when it blatantly conflicts with our stated fundamental principles. When foreign authoritarian governments to the same things, they're essentially authoritarian, so their actions are unacceptable.

Besides the obvious problems with device attestation in general, and with oligopolistic device attestion, I just don't understand how the bounce rate from something that requires me to dig out my phone is not 100%

Online age verification is the hill to die on

In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You

It can even be installed from a browser through webUSB. It only misses a dictionary, but they're working on it: https://github.com/crosspoint-reader/crosspoint-reader/discussions/1599

οὐ τὸ ぜん ἀλλὰ τὸ ζῆν?

https://web.archive.org/web/20141022035044/http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/SciAmDraft3.html

German implementation of eIDAS will require an Apple/Google account to function.

There are a lot of weird claims in this ad, which are not in the Salford University-authored report: https://cdn.skoda-storyboard.com/2026/04/Skoda-DuoBell-Research-final_cf127752.pdf

They depict this gap in noise cancelling effectiveness, but what the report actually says is "700-800 Hz (Suggested range for penetrating ANC passive isolation)" So it's insertion loss, not ANC at all!

#acoustics

It's an experimental browser extension that mounts tabs to the filesystem, allowing for full bidirectional manipulation using common filesystem methods.

We need way more mainstream consciousness about repairability, and about digital rights in general.

Scales, man

https://rowan441.github.io/1dchess/chess.html

"1d-chess is a new variant where you can play the beautiful game without all those unneccessary and complicated extra dimensions. Play as white against the AI. You might initally find it more difficult than expected, but assming optimal play, is there a forced win for white? "

Give a Link → Get a Feed
Add any public account from Instagram, Facebook, Threads, X, TikTok or YouTube to quickly get a feed for your favorite reader.
Bonus: Add any website to quickly grab its existing feed as well.

"Six-Degree-of-Freedom Audio Rendering Using Spatial Impulse Responses in an Urban Context"

A lot more work is needed on a perceptually-validated metric for 6dof interpolation, in my opinion. #acoustics #VR

"Say the EU creates a rule requiring platforms to take reasonable measures to prevent hate speech. This requires
arriving at a common definition of hate speech;

adjudicating whether a given user's speech rises to that definition; and

determining whether the platform's technical measures were "reasonable."

This is the work of months, if not years. And hate speech happens hundreds of times per minute on the big platforms. It's just not an administrable policy."

Is there an AI coding boost? Analysed with facts and logic #betteridge

#acoustics #6dof #photogrammetry #unrealEngine

Pretty straightforwardly censorship

AES Italia, the university of Parma, the order of engineers, AIA and Casa della Musica are organising a memorial conference for my father

Pretty fun CSS clicker, with no JS, and very specific badges.

I do miss cohost!

https://www.ilpost.it/2026/02/12/vladyslav-heraskevych-skeleton-squalificato-olimpiadi-casco-foto-atleti-uccisi/

https://innovazionepubblica.substack.com/p/immergiti-in-un-mondo-di-cultura?r=5gfls9

On october 17th we gave two presentations and a few demos at MiniDigital Festival at the University of Parma. We had to use the room’s computer setup due to the streaming setup, which complicated the demo quite a bit, but we made do.

The recordings are available on LinkedIn, starting at around 2h50min.

Sadly it requires a LinkedIn login.

I'll update to liquid glass as late as possible

Il piano gratuito supporta solo 5 feed, ma nei miei test funziona bene.

https://prudenziolo.wordpress.com/2025/10/07/genera-feed-rss-per-siti-che-non-lo-forniscono/

Il piano gratuito supporta solo 5 feed, ma nei miei test funziona bene.

This is truly a reference of everything we’re striving for, it’s just that we also want to support VR headsets.

One of the creators has a talk explaining how they work:

This weekend we took part in this hackaton called Hack4Culture: https://officineonoff.com/hub-up-hack4culture-noi-siamo-rigenerazione/

On Saturday morning, we all met up in the main hall of Laboratorio Aperto, where we shown “inspirational examples”, which were Chiesi Gardens, Start Working Pontremoli, and Kilometro Verde Parma (the latter sounds mostly like green washing to me).

Then, there was a brief lesson on strategic planning. It started with the impact we wanted to see in the community. Working backwards, we defined what resources we needed to perform activities, what outputs these activities needed to have, and what would be the outcomes that would lead to the desired impact.

This “canvas” was really not as backwards as it first looked, but it’s very much one of those “you’re selling holes, not drills” kind of things. Following the canvas scheme was one of the 5 parameters that we were told we would be graded on.

Participants could choose between three case studies, and we had to come up with a project and a communication strategy for it. Two of the case studies were about co-working spaces operated by On Off, one in the city, and one in the plains.

The third was brought forth by another participant, and it was called Radio Pablo, a community podcasting project aimed at giving a voice to the youth of the Pablo neighborhood, here in Parma. As soon as we heard about this, my mind started swimming with lofty ideas of decentered and geo-located audio distribution systems (I had in mind something like https://blind.wiki/).

In practice, it was all about making a good pitch for the project, so we started filling out the “canvas”, and checking every box in the evaluation scheme.

What was interesting was working with people we didn’t know at all, and finding a synthesis between their genuinely original ideas, and the strategic elements that the judges commented positively about. At one point, we pretty much restarted from scratch when a teammate pointed out that our approach was to have the youths perform work that we deemed important, and to assume that they needed to be taught, almost like they needed to learn a job.

Saturday evening, we presented our improvised pitch to the mentors, who had very kind things to say, and who pointed out what questions were left hanging.

After that, Benedetta redid the slide show with coherent graphics, incorporating the advice of the mentors, and we headed to the pub.

On Sunday morning, 20 minutes before we were supposed to present our pitch, the team hastily changed the tone and order of the presentation, making it more energetic, and switching from just one speaker to a more dialogic format. In the final scheme, the presentation started with a fierce appeal to emotions, followed by Benedetta explanation of the planning and practical steps needed to bring the project to fruition.

Here is the presentation with which we won the first prize. An NGO (APS) will have to be formed for handling the project and actually getting the money. We’re excited to work on this project for real, for now we have this tiny demo of how we want the public history part of the website to look: https://e-muse.it/portfolio/pablo/

Honestly, if I were a judge I would have voted for Team 3, which did end up winning both the second prize and the special prize for projects targeting “interior areas”.

A big thank you to the organizers, and to all other participants, it was great meeting people with such a wide array of skills and perspectives.

There’s also an instagram reel about the event: https://www.instagram.com/p/DPve_DDDBXx

As is often the case, kids where the ones most interested in VR.

For the occasion, we came up with an interactive way of showing our BCC Arte & Cultura 3D Gallery, by 3D-printing the terrain and pavilions, and sticking QR codes on the parts.

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/eu-report-calls-member-states-accelerate-digitisation-cultural-heritage

Direct link to the report: https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/8d2435d7-31fe-11f0-8a44-01aa75ed71a1

If you or your organization need help with you Cultural Heritage digitisation efforts, you know where to find us!

Deeply misguided legislation

Now I'm also providing an RSS feed for the Cultural Heritage news page of the Emilia-Romagna regional government website.

Then I checked my own Apple Health sleep data, and I got something even more nonsensical, how can the time asleep be longer than the time in bed?

https://www.beautifulpublicdata.com

https://www.epa.gov/land-research/elevated-temperature-landfill#:~:text=The%20generation%20of%20heat%20in,reactions%20within%20the%20waste%20mass.

In this interesting but horrifying article, I’m perplexed by this sentence:

“In early 2022 a closed section in the landfill’s northwest corner began overheating, eventually reaching temperatures above 200F (93C). That’s nearly 40% hotter than the federal EPA’s standard for landfill operations”

What do they mean with 40% hotter?

Day 1

Day 2

sudo lsof -PiTCP -sTCP:LISTEN

https://prudenziolo.wordpress.com/2025/07/04/elenca-porte-aperte-e-quali-processi-le-aprono/

What struck me while reading the 10-year-anniversary post was this quote:

Through a handful of FOIA requests I’d learned that the images had been meticulously digitized and put online for purchase, but that less than 100 pictures had been sold that way — not nearly enough to justify the paywall.

We previously wrote about the ongoing attempts at selling access to cultural heritage digitalisations that have long entered the public domain, as long as they’re owned by museums.

The fundamental issue is that while it might be nice to generate revenue both for the institutions conserving the artifacts, and for the people doing the digitalisation (that’s us, ideally), there is simply not enough willingness to pay.

There is also the moral question of creating a class of works which never truly join the public domain, but I’ve found it quite hard to argue with people about this, apparently the public domain is not a self-evident good thing for everyone.

And of course there’s the latest hype, AI, which allows people both to attempt to profit from the public domain (by using it to train their models) and to trivially bypass paywalls (by just generating another image). This complicates the argument for the public domain, at least for those whose benefits are not self-evident.

Yet, those benefits are there, and they are great.

Ho scaricato l'access.log di un server Apache, contente le informazioni delle ultime 12 ore. Aprendo banalmente il file con Notepad++ e facendo un po' di ctrl+f, viene fuori che l'85.54% degli accessi hanno user agent che dichiarano esplicitamente di essere bot. Hanno questa distribuzione. A me va benissimo che il materiale sia indicizzato, con la soluzione di hosting che uso non è né un costo né un problema, ma mi chiedo…

https://prudenziolo.wordpress.com/2025/07/02/percentuale-di-bot-negli-accessi-al-server/

A me va benissimo che il materiale sia indicizzato, con la soluzione di hosting che uso non è né un costo né un problema, ma mi chiedo perché questi LLM abbiano bisogno di accedere così tanto di più rispetto ai motori di ricerca. Petal, tra l’altro, non l’avevo mai sentito, ma è della Huawei.

We wanted to bring our A-game, so we even bought a roll-up, which sadly didn’t arrive in time due to a strike.

We had:

• 3D prints of statues that we had previously digitised, thanks to our dear friend Bonach
• A glassless volumetric screen showing models and photos
• A binaural audio guide for one of the 3D printed statues (written by Maura Rossi, with the voice of Chiara Gandini)
• An Unreal Engine audio-visual simulation of Piazzale San Francesco in Parma, using data I obtained for Progetto Agorà
• A local version of our Tempietto demo (web version with joystick controls or scrolling along a path), made in Unity, running on a Meta Quest 3, and featuring both the photogrammetry of Antelami’s Winter and the previously mentioned audioguide
• 360° videos with Ambisonics audio, also running on the Meta Quest 3, mainly from the Verdi 360° project

Despite the scorching weather, we had plenty of people ready to don the VR headset and to try out our demos. The only problem we faced was keeping the battery level up 😀

Kids particularly enjoyed climbing the stairs, then throwing themselves into the void, they were universally delighted by the sensation, which I personally consider stomach-turning 😀

We’ll have to sign up for more in-person demos, they’re just so much fun!

Sui sistemi Unix basta questa sequenza di comandi ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "your@e-mail.com" ssh-copy-id user@host Su Windows invece manca il comando ssh-copy-id, si può invece usare type %USERPROFILE%\.ssh\id_rsa.pub | ssh user@host "cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys"

https://prudenziolo.wordpress.com/2025/07/02/login-via-ssh-senza-inserire-ogni-volta-la-password/

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "your@e-mail.com"
ssh-copy-id user@host

Su Windows invece manca il comando ssh-copy-id, si può invece usare

type %USERPROFILE%\.ssh\id_rsa.pub | ssh user@host "cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys"

Preso da https://superuser.com/questions/1747549/alternative-to-ssh-copy-id-on-windows

Per quando avete un server con SSH ma senza FTP, e dovete riprendere un dowload interrotto rsync -av /source/path user@server.url:/destination/path/on/server

https://prudenziolo.wordpress.com/2025/06/05/caricamento-su-server-senza-sovrascrivere/

rsync -av /source/path user@server.url:/destination/path/on/server 

https://cultura.comune.parma.it/evento/it-IT/Parma-Liberata.aspx

We created an immersive installation in the main room of the museum exhibit, in which the day of liberation takes life through its original footage.

Come visit us before June 26th to experence it!

As a bonus, here’s how we brough the video-projectors to the museum:

I will now attempt to bring all of my company digital infrastructure to Europe. Some will be relatively easy, like switching from Google Work to Proton. Our web-hosting is already ok, what I really have nothing for is the hardware.

We really should step the fuck up as Europeans

In this game, a friendly robot will ask the player to solve some riddles and find some objects. This must not interfere with the audio stream, as users can talk to each other.

Whenever the robot gives out information, it has a speech bubble and one of the yap sounds plays. There are several of these, and they’re meant to mimic an explanatory prosody.

Whenever the player provides an incorrect answer, the nay chime is played.

Finally, when a level is completed, we play the yeah sound. This is a longer joyful jingle, which would get annoying pretty quickly if it was overplayed.

All these sounds were created by playing around with the 8-bit instrument package in Logic Pro. Except for the nay, they’re all built around major triads.

from https://maggieappleton.com/tools-for-thought

Never accept defeat, we can fix our politics, we can fix our environment.

Stupid is a feature, not a bug

https://walledculture.org/how-copyright-chaos-reigns-among-the-uks-top-cultural-institutions/

Big thanks to the journalist, who did a great job in getting our ramblings into a coherent and understandable form!

Specifically they claim the Fountain of the Lions in the Alhambra is a water clock, which is simply false. I wrote a brief debunking, with sources: https://e-muse.it/blog/2024/12/24/weird-pseudoscience-on-youtube-shorts-a-debunking/

Meanwhile the full video has amassed 2.7M views in just 3 weeks.

#culturalHeritage #museum #debunking

It looks like a 3D reconstruction of the Fountain of the Lions from the Alhambra, taken from a longer show on the Alhambra water system.

The comments are all slop about people not being stupid in the past, and about the fountain being built in Al-Andalus, in really weird tones.

Here is the full video, which already has 2.7 million views, in just 3 weeks:

The 3D and the animations are quite well done, unfortunately the actual content is mostly bullshit! The factual part seems to be largely inspired by this BCC Travel article from 2022.

The central claim is about the Fountain of the Lions being a water clock. They have a textual version of each of their videos: https://primalnebula.com/the-engineering-of-the-alhambras-water-system/. The only source they have for the horological features is this “paper”, which is quite evidently devoid of any validity: https://ijisrt.com/assets/upload/files/IJISRT22JAN498.pdf

If we look at the actual sources on the 2011 restoration of the fountain:

• La conservación y restauración de la Fuente de los Leones – CARMEN TIENZA DURÁN Y BEATRIZ MARTÍN PEINADO
• THE MASTERY IN HYDRAULIC TECHNIQUES FOR WATER SUPPLY AT THE ALHAMBRA LUIS JOSÉ GARCÍA-PULIDO
• Fountain of the Lions. Methodology of a Restoration

There is no mention of the horological feature in any serious text, for the very simple reason that the fountain is not a clock! Water simply comes out of all twelve spigots.

There are other basic physics mistakes, but I don’t understand why one would go to all the effort of doing all of this 3D reconstruction, all of these renders, just to spread lies on the internet. I guess the motive is actually quite clear: get millions of views, make lots of money.

It does fail on the more topologically challenged ones, but that is to be expected. As an example this 25MB model:

Was reduced to this, which is just 295kB.

I did remove the black background by hand, though.

The interesting thing is that it added Sharps to edges automatically, you can see them in cyan.

Of course the other interesting announcements in this field were Nvidia’s Meshtron and Microsoft’s Trellis (try it on hugginface), both of which do really interesting mesh generation.

Of course for our requirements we cannot simply throw generative AI at the problem and hope for the best, we need to carefully represent the actual objects. But just as a try, we did try to throw an image of a bas-relief at Trellis. It created a plausible (but incorrect) result with a low-res texture. We tried throwing the original image on it as a texture, and it almost looked like it worked, until we tried moving the point of view.

This is the original photo, it’s Il Lavoro by Pietro Palmisano, from the BCC Arte & Cultura catalogue.

Generated model, with no texture:

With the AI-generated texture

With the original texture applied:

It’s simultaneously very impressive, and not any good. We could try to salvage it by sculpting the most egregious parts, and we could do way better on the texture mapping.

The geometry is really quite dense, we could try combining Trellis with Moderate Weight Reduction Tools.

That really broke down. The geometry became visibly spiky, but the texture is just all wrong, it did not expect our “Project from View” trick.

For the past year or so, we’ve been working on the cataloguing and digitalization project of the art and cultural heritage assets of the BCC ICCREA group.

Overall 59 banks and 109 works were included. The results were an art book, a digital catalogue, and a 3D gallery. We created 3D models of buildings and sculptures, we photographed a few paintings, and most importantly we created the 3D gallery.

The project was announced in the rather wonderful Biblioteca Braidense, and it has already gained quite a bit of press:

• https://www.bccveneziagiulia.it/news/dettaglio_news_div.asp?i_menuID=71368&hNewsID=177897 (our first clients, thanks!)
• https://www.artribune.com/professioni-e-professionisti/2024/12/nasce-iniziativa-bcc-arte-cultura/
• https://www.vipiu.it/leggi/bcc-artecultura-coinvolgere-le-comunita-locali-alla-scoperta-e-alla-valorizzazione-del-patrimonio-artistico-e-culturale/
• https://insideart.eu/2024/12/11/il-nuovissimo-museo-diffuso-del-gruppo-bcc-iccrea/
• https://www.corriere.it/cultura/24_dicembre_11/italie-dell-arte-8792f0f2-b722-11ef-8a8c-92a9a5aa32b7.shtml
• https://www.economymagazine.it/bcc-iccrea-presenta-il-progetto-nazionale-bcc-artecultura/
• https://italia-informa.com/bcc-arte-cultura-museo.aspx
• https://www.exibart.com/progetti-e-iniziative/digitalizzazione-e-arte-nasce-il-museo-diffuso-di-bcc-artecultura/
• https://euroborsa.it/bcc-iccrea-arte-cultura.aspx
• https://www.repubblica.it/dossier/economia/top-story/2024/12/10/news/un_filo_rosso_tra_banche_e_territorio_via_al_piu_grande_museo_diffuso_privato_nazionale-423875072/
• https://artemagazine.it/bcc-artecultura-un-museo-diffuso-per-raccontare-lidentita-culturale-italiana/

We’ll be back soon with a thorough log of what we did, and how we did it.

(Also, there are still quite a few wrinkles to take care of, if you find any, drop us a line!)

We were interviewed by StoryTime, which is itself an interesting initiative to promote business and professionals in Emilia-Romagna. They were really friendly, and really put us at ease, which is not easy, we’re a skittish bunch 😀

https://lav.io/notes/ffmpeg-explorer/

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/11/disposable-vapes-from-a-music-festival-can-power-a-beefy-e-bike-20-miles/

Genuinely so inspiring

The interviewer was truly great, and everyone was simultaneously very friendly and very professional, we’d recommend them to anyone looking to promote their activity.

In about a week we’ll be given the video and we’ll be able to share it with everyone, but in the meantime we wanted to save a copy of the audio, and I’m currently up a mountain, so I had to do it from an iPhone.

Getting the mp3 url was pretty easy, I just had to go to the website in Safari, open the Web Inspector extension, and it was right there. I could open the mp3 directly in the browser, but while on an actual computer it would have been enough to right click and save it, on iOS I had to get a bit more involved. I used iSH to get a command line, downloaded the mp3 file with wget, and then I had to figure out how to get it out of the iSH sandbox.

It turns out that you can just mount any folder.

I created a download folder with

mkdir Downloads

Then I connected it to the Downloads folder on the iPhone filesystem with

mount -t ios llama Downloads

This opens up a graphical interface that lets you select which folder you wish to mount.

I then simply copied the file to my Downloads with

cp example.mp3 Downloads

I guess the native iOS workflow would have been using Shortcuts, but I’m old.

The simplest interpretation is that they think that they will create profits for cultural heritage institutions, which certainly could use funding. It doesn’t seem to produce this effect in reality, though.

If they keep successfully suing commercial users, we think that the most likely outcome will be a diminished presence of Italian culture in commercial settings, and, in the long term, a loss of mind share. After all, there’s plenty of unencumbered art that is just as good.

I'm not Citynews, but a 3% tax on all revenue "from web services" would definitely be a problem for my tiny company.

VLC wouldn’t open it, and FFMPEG threw a “ERROR MOOV atom not found” warning, and then was unable to process any data.

With no time to spare for another render pass, we found this forum thread: https://www.videohelp.com/software/recover-mp4-to-h264

It’s a tiny and self-explanatory command-line utility, that saved us and gave us a usable file in seconds.

The only problem is that it’s Windows only.

Brilliant work in defending the public's access to art, and to 3D scans of art.

The cause is near and dear to us, doubly so because it involves Rodin’s The Thinker, which we have remixed for the BCC Innovation Festival.

What we genuinely cannot understand is how people opposing the free distribution of our cultural heritage think of these issues. It is disconcerting, and we know that being unable to summarize the opposition’s views often signals a lack of genuine understanding.

With the visionOS2 release Safari gains webXR support

We are tasked with producing audiovisual material that shows off our immersive experiences in a context that is still immersive, but not interactive. In practice this means producing 360 videos, which have fewer rendering constraints (they don’t have to be executed in real time on random devices), but in which the visitor is less able to look around and explore.

We’ll make sure to share this video when it is done, but for now I want to share how we managed to preview how the projection was going to look, without going all the way to Rome to try the system out in advance.

First of all we took the floor map of the space, which was available as a PDF on the venue’s website, we imported into Blender and we modelled a very simple mockup, using just cylinders for the walls and columns, and planes for the ceiling and floor.

We also put in cubes to represent the positions of video projectors, but we didn’t bother to scale them correctly. We also didn’t model the sort of “steps” with which the ceiling lowers towards the sides of the room, as they don’t interact with the projection geometry.

So far this was all straightforward modelling, the only somewhat non-obvious thing we did was mapping the 360 video onto the screen.

We added a new material on the walls cylinder, with an Image texture obtained with an equirectangular camera in our Innovation World Blender scene. (Note: equirectangular cameras only seem to work in Cycles)

Going into the UV Editing screen in Blender we put a seam on a vertical edge of the screen, and we did an UV > Unwrap. Then we selected all faces, and scaled them on the UV side until the seam matched perfectly. We can then change the center of the projection by moving the UV faces on the X and Y axes.

We put the resulting Blender file and a GLB on our site, and we also stuck it on Sketchfab for ease of use. We should do a three.js version in which users can load their own files and play around with the projection parameters.

Geometrically the problem is that the equirectangular video we make in Blender goes from +90 to -90 degrees on the vertical axis, while in the Salone delle Colonne there are something like 29 degrees of vertical elevations, if we look from the center of the room. Actually considering a standing spectator it’s something like +18 to -9 degrees.

This is of course assuming that the projection has been setup correctly in the room itself. I think ideally the venue should provide examples files, but after all it is a very new installation.

Similarly the projectors themselves are very advanced, they have an automatic edge and overlap system that we’re very curious to see in action, but it is not quite clear what the logical resolution of the system is.

Very interesting stuff!

Edit: I’ve found this article with more technical information on the room’s video system: https://www.sistemi-integrati.net/proiezione-immersiva-di-grande-impatto-nel-salone-delle-colonne-di-roma/

Edit 2: brief video render

Immersive identity

The concept developed by our clients’ communications department was centered on a low poly theme, and in particular on a low poly version of Rodin’s The Thinker. We created a 3D version of this low poly concept, and we put it in a scrollable three.js webpage, which was then embedded on the homepage of the festival for the vast majority of the festival’s duration. (It has now been replaced with a countdown to the pivotal Festival Day, which is on the 20th of September).

We’ve also created a webAR version (using <model-viewer>), to see the Thinker in your space, which has been featured on the festival’s promotional posters.

We also made 3D printable versions, which were supposed to be handed out to the winners, kind of like Oscar statues, and a massive version that another contractor was supposed to cut out of polystyrene foam, but they were both canceled for cost reasons. As I write this, we’re seriously considering just building a massive cardboard Thinker and bringing it to the Festival Day. It wouldn’t be profitable, but boy would it be cool.

Immersive Experience

Using FrameVR, we built a 3D world in which all the information about the festival, including the live event during the Festival Day, can be experienced immersively. It’s a webXR experience, so all you need is a browser, it runs on smartphones, computers, and XR headsets. It runs pretty great on both the Quest 2 and the Quest 3.

World building

We designed the environment to foster a sense of exploration. Due to platform limits it was pretty hard to build real interactions, so we basically ended up building a walking simulator. You can walk around, find information about the festival, and most importantly interact with other visitors. People can talk with spatial audio, share whiteboards, stream videos, share their own screens, add 3D models or images. They can personalize their avatars (including with Ready Player Me), and control them through their webcams or through their VR setups.

The whole environment is built in a low poly style, both to match the Thinker and to optimize performance on low-end devices. Apparently there are quite a bit of those among the computers given to our clients by their corporate IT.

Scattered around the environment are some large stones with the same material as the Thinker. Currently we don’t have it enabled to increase signal to noise ratio, but we also tried assigning sounds to each stone, that would trigger when someone walked next to them, creating an harmonic progression.

Users start their journey in a small hexagonal corral, filled with a festival timeline and a clickable map. We worry that the clickable map undercuts the sense of wonder and exploration, but it also makes moving around much quicker. Following the path one can reach a panoramic platform, or what we called the Innovation Square, a large concrete circle sitting in a rather wide valley, where a large Thinker acts as a centerpiece.

On the left you can find information about the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development objectives that all candidate startups (Champions in the BCC lingo) have to pursue in some way.

On the right you can find information about the festival itself, and about the institutional partners.

At the far end you can see a large building, creatively denominated “Innovation Building”. It was originally designed as a very permeable space, allowing access from different directions, and ideally the flow of people would be visible from the outside in.

Innovation Building

Inside the building itself we had to showcase the startups. They were originally supposed to be 20, but they ended up being 30. They’re classified by UN objectives. This “bento” shape is replicated in two small maps, one on the floor and one on the opposite building, which allow visitors to understand the layout, and to click on them to teleport to the cube they want to visit.

The startups were allowed to send text, images, video, and 3D models to showcase what they’re working on. Sadly, nobody ended up having any 3D material, despite the fact that several worked on domain areas where having a 3D representation would come in quite handy. Quite a few startups provided video, and the spatial audio works great at letting multiple people watch them without interfering with other visitors.

Coming Soon

We also built an Auditorium used for startup-only seminars, and we’ll soon have more to share about the Festival Day, and about the performance of the FrameVR platform.

https://exercism.org/blog/september-2024-restructure

With a bit of research I found out a oneliner using the tree command.

You can try the result on https://e-muse.it/bccaec

“opere” is just the relative path between the location where I’m running the command and the directory structure I wanted to transverse.

tree opere -d -H "https://e-muse.it/bccaec" > index.html

Logistics

At this point it’s not really clear what we’re allowed to publish, as legal departments are surprisingly slow in responding to our queries, so we are going to err on the side of caution. You’ll have to wait until the official announcement before we post the actual works that we’ve digitised, but there shouldn’t be any harm in discussing how we set up the logistics.

Sadly, these locations were largely connected too poorly to attempt to do the whole trip using public transport. We really wanted to be ecological, but we didn’t find a way to do it in the given time and cost constraints without heavily relying on cars.

Once we could confirm the availability of the works on a given day we found cheap accommodations on Booking, loaded all the equipment and all the team members in a car, and we generally tried to avoid traveling during working hours. Northern Italy was covered through a series of short trips, while central and southern Italy were covered sequentially, going roughly clockwise. Some extra trips had to be broken out of the main loop, we managed to make that convenient by relying on some really good friends, who very graciously hosted us.

The whole thing cost us a bit under €2000, which is not too shabby for a 3-person team. This figure includes highways, fuel, accommodation and food, but it does not include the wear and tear on my car. Or the fact that I forgot some lenses at a friend’s place.

What we digitized

Again, we’re not supposed to share images of the works, as many of them are copyright encumbered, so stay tuned for the official launch of the project. I don’t think there’s any arm in sharing a list of what we did, though:

• Alla fine del Giorno, Alberto Sughi, oil on canvas
• Natività, Ilario Fioravanti, painted ceramics
• Presepe, Capuano Brothers, multiple materials
• Ducal Palace and several artifacts, in Mafalda
• Ut Unum Sint, Arnaldo Pomodoro, outdoor metal stele
• Bank building, Ugo Pagliara, building and architectural drawing
• Carrù Castle, building
• Chandelier made of Murano glass, 3 paintings, near Venice
• Acquaviva Picena, whole building (we ended up scanning the whole town)
• Incontri al Maneggio, Silvano Spessot, iron and colored glass sculpture
• Untitled, Nane Zavagno, steel sculpture
• Pinocchio, Venturino Venturini, bronze sculpture
• Sant’Antonio Abate, Luca della Robbia, painted ceramics
• Bank builiding, part of the Gradara castle-town
• Bank building in Alba (no drones for this one, we had to climb literal towers!)
• Assalto all’Olimpo, Bruno Liberatore, bronze sculpture (a much larger version is in Rome)
• Untitled, Cesare Berlingeri, bent and stacked colored paper
• An archeological site in Rome, featuring Imperial-age fresco-ed walls and a very well preserved Roman road

Signal Is More Than Encrypted Messaging. Under Meredith Whittaker, It’s Out to Prove Surveillance Capitalism Wrong

Ho appena scoperto che Google Translate non è abbastanza furbo da lasciare immutati gli indirizzi quando traduce una pagina. Anche traducendo singole frasi traduce Nel caso di un esempio ci può stare, ma in questo caso mi ha cambiato l’indirizzo mantenendo la lingua di origine Apple Translate invece sembra comportarsi correttamente

https://prudenziolo.wordpress.com/2024/09/02/google-translate-traduce-gli-indirizzi-e-mail/

Nel caso di un esempio ci può stare, ma in questo caso mi ha cambiato l’indirizzo mantenendo la lingua di origine

Apple Translate invece sembra comportarsi correttamente

In Windows 11 è stato aggiunto un Package Manager da linea di comando, chiamato WinGet. Lo si può anche installare su Windows 10. Ovviamente sugli altri sistemi operativi c'è da 20 anni (APT ha 26 anni, i vari cloni su Mac poco meno), ma è veramente molto comodo. Aprendo il Terminal basta scrivere: winget search qualcosa per cercare il nome del pacchetto che volte installare…

https://prudenziolo.wordpress.com/2024/09/02/aggiorna-tutte-le-app-con-un-solo-comando-su-windows-11-winget/

Aprendo il Terminal basta scrivere:

winget search qualcosa

per cercare il nome del pacchetto che volte installare

winget install qualcosa

per installarlo

winget upgrade qualcosa

per aggiornarlo, o il gloriosissimo

winget upgrade --all

per aggiornare tutto in un colpo solo, inclusi programmi che non avete installato tramite WinGet.

Ho appena scoperto un trucchetto, comodo, e a quanto leggo anche relativamente recente, che non comporta nessun cambiamento nell'esecuzione del codice, ma che rende più facile leggere i numeri "grossi" nel proprio sorgente. Semplicemente, se scriviamo un numero in JavaSript, i trattini bassi vengono ignorati. Quindi se devo scrivere un milione posso fare: var pippo = 1000000 oppure, ottenendo esattamente lo stesso risultato, il ben più…

https://prudenziolo.wordpress.com/2024/08/30/separatori-numerici-in-javascript/

Quindi se devo scrivere un milione posso fare:

var pippo = 1000000

oppure, ottenendo esattamente lo stesso risultato, il ben più leggibile

var pippo = 1_000_000

Sto facendo una pagina sul mio sito che permetta di mostrare ai visitatori i feed RSS seguiti. Questo articolo è un making of, scrivo i requisiti del prodotto. Il punto di partenza è un file OPML, che tutti i servizi seri permettono di esportare e importare. Voglio avere una cartella sul mio server, con dentro un file HTML e un po' di JavaScript, che leggano un file OPML e ne mostrino i contenuti in modo accessibile agli utenti, fornendo…

https://prudenziolo.wordpress.com/2024/08/29/condivisione-dei-blog-seguiti/

Il punto di partenza è un file OPML, che tutti i servizi seri permettono di esportare e importare. Voglio avere una cartella sul mio server, con dentro un file HTML e un po’ di JavaScript, che leggano un file OPML e ne mostrino i contenuti in modo accessibile agli utenti, fornendo nomi, descrizioni, link, e qualche opzione di sorting. Ad esempio l’utente deve poter visualizzare solo i feed in Inglese, o solo i podcast. L’utente deve poter selezionare i feed che gli interessano, e il sito gli deve generare un nuovo OPML che gli permetta di seguire i feed a cui è interessato.

Aggiornamento 2024-09-01: Ho trovato questo progetto che fa sostanzialmente la stessa cosa che volevo fare io: https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/

Inoltre ho fatto un dump dei miei feed seguiti su Feedly e li ho messi sul mio sito: https://adrianofarina.it/opml/

https://prudenziolo.wordpress.com/2024/08/28/3012/

Su Mac tradizionalmente non c’è una funzione equivalente, ma da macOS Venture c’è un nuovo Low Data Mode che fa qualcosa di molto simile, ma è relativamente nascosto. Bisogna andare in System Settings > WiFi, poi nei Details della vostra rete compare questo switch:

Non ho verificato se si può fare anche per le reti cablate.

https://prudenziolo.wordpress.com/2024/08/27/iniziativa-di-finanziamento-libre/

It is always a good occasion to mention: donate to the Internet Archive, it is such an important resource, and it’s constantly under attack. Donating to them was the first thing I did when I got my first wage (rapidly followed by Wikipedia).

⁂

https://prudenziolo.wordpress.com/2024/08/22/esperimenti-con-audio-e-foto-immersive/

✋•••🤚 ⬆️ 🪰______ Per prendere una mosca sul tavolo, non tentate di schiacciarla con una manata dall'alto verso il basso.Invece battete le mani direttamente sopra la sua posizione, vedendo il movimento decollerà ortogonalmente alla superficie su cui si trova, finendo dritta tra le vostre mani. Questo post è offerto dall'acquazzone estivo, che mi ha spinto addosso un sacco di mosche.

https://prudenziolo.wordpress.com/2024/08/16/ciapamoschi/

Per prendere una mosca sul tavolo, non tentate di schiacciarla con una manata dall’alto verso il basso.
Invece battete le mani direttamente sopra la sua posizione, vedendo il movimento decollerà ortogonalmente alla superficie su cui si trova, finendo dritta tra le vostre mani.

Questo post è offerto dall’acquazzone estivo, che mi ha spinto addosso un sacco di mosche.

Audacity permette di editare tracce con un numero arbitrario di canali, ma limita l'export a 32 canali. Mio padre vuole usarlo per le sue registrazioni con l'Eigenmike 64, che come dice il nome ha 64 canali. Ha trovato la linea di codice da modificare, poi l'ha ricompilato per Windows e Mac Intel. Io l'ho ricompilato per Mac ARM.

https://prudenziolo.wordpress.com/2024/08/16/esporta-tracce-audio-fino-a-128-canali-con-audacity/

Ha trovato la linea di codice da modificare, poi l’ha ricompilato per Windows e Mac Intel. Io l’ho ricompilato per Mac ARM.

La modifica del codice è alla riga 29 di Audacity/src/export/ExportFilePanel.h

constexpr static auto MaxExportChannels = 32u;

diventa

constexpr static auto MaxExportChannels = 128u;

L’unica parte vagamente difficile è configurare Xcode per la corretta compilazione. In realtà c’è tutto nella guida ufficiale, ma ci sono un paio di accortezze.

Innanzitutto bisogna procurarsi il sorgente, con:

git clone https://github.com/audacity/audacity/

Poi bisogna creare una cartella build, ed entrarci, con:

mkdir build && cd build

A questo punto bisogna eseguire CMake, la guida ufficiale dice di usare:

cmake -GXcode ../audacity

Questo permette già di aprire il progetto Xcode, di modificarlo come spiegato sopra, e di compilarlo. Per poter compilare per Mac ARM, però, invece del comando CMake scritto sopra bisogna usare questo:

cmake -GXcode -DMACOS_ARCHITECTURE=arm64 ../audacity

Non ho verificato come fare un Universal Binary, ma è sicuramente possibile, dato che l’Audacity ufficiale è rilasciato così.

Una volta fatto girare CMake apriamo il progetto XCode, eseguiamo le modifiche al codice, poi cerchiamo di compilare. Il primo accorgimento è passare dal build target Audacity all’ ALL_BUILD. Altrimenti il software sarà compilato senza librerie, e quindi non sarà in grado di fare niente di utile, ad esempio di importare file audio. Poi bisogna andare in Product > Scheme > Edit Scheme, e cambiare la configurazione per il run da Debugging a Release

A questo punto possiamo fare build e ottenere un Audacity.app funzionante, e capace di esportare a 128 canali. Potete trovare anche le versioni pre-compilate sul server di mio padre, sia per Intel, che per Mac, che per Windows, a questo indirizzo: http://www.angelofarina.it/Audacity_128ch.htm

Qui in montagna c’è questa lepre che sta sempre vicina a casa, e non sembra aver particolare paura degli umani, purché stiano a qualche metro di distanza Sembra quasi domestica, tanto che mia mamma la chiama “cuní”. Come sempre al crepuscolo vorrei lenti migliori.

https://prudenziolo.wordpress.com/2024/08/11/lepre/

Sembra quasi domestica, tanto che mia mamma la chiama “cuní”.

Come sempre al crepuscolo vorrei lenti migliori.

Switch to Firefox, people!

https://prudenziolo.wordpress.com/2024/07/26/streak-su-duolingo-2/

FOSS funding vanishes from EU's 2025 Horizon program plans

Elimination of most Next Generation Internet funding 'incomprehensible,' says OW2 CEO Pierre-Yves Gibello

https://inclusive.microsoft.design/tools-and-activities/InclusiveActivityCards.pdf

What I struggle more with the cognitive part: https://inclusive.microsoft.design/tools-and-activities/InclusiveDesignForCognitionGuidebook.pdf

Ho trovato un metodo più user-friendly del mio classico, cioè aprire la linea di comando e lanciare yt-dlp. Ho scoperto un sito dedicato a raccogliere gli Shortcuts fatti da altri, con questo che con le giuste dipendenze fa tutto in automatico: Bisogna innanzitutto avere Shortcuts, che credo essere preinstallato. Poi aprendo il link a RoutineHub scaricate le dipendenze, sono comodamente linkate, e installate lo shortcut.

https://prudenziolo.wordpress.com/2024/07/01/scaricare-video-da-youtube-su-ios/

Ho scoperto un sito dedicato a raccogliere gli Shortcuts fatti da altri, con questo che con le giuste dipendenze fa tutto in automatico:

https://routinehub.co/shortcut/7284/

Bisogna innanzitutto avere Shortcuts, che credo essere preinstallato. Poi aprendo il link a RoutineHub scaricate le dipendenze, sono comodamente linkate, e installate lo shortcut. Questo aggiungerà una voce SW-DLT al menù di condivisione di sistema.

Da YouTube sarà necessario premere su more per uscire dal menu di condivisione dell’app e arrivare a quello di sistema:

Selezionanti SW-DLT si avvierà lo shortcut, comparirà un pop-up dove si può scegliere il formato che si vuole scaricare, poi lo shortcut stesso provvederà a lanciare la linea di comando e a eseguire i comandi appropriati, fa pure automaticamente la ricodifica con ffmpeg quando è necessario.

Il risultato finale è un preview del video o dell’audio scaricati, da dove si può scegliere dove salvare il file.

Inoltre, se volete fare un montaggio video in iMovie potete usare musica presa da YouTube con questo metodo. Basta scaricarla come video, e selezionare Audio Only quando si aggiunge la clip alla timeline.

Poi ovviamente a seconda di dove mettete il video vi beccate le conseguenze dell’uso di musica sotto copyright.

Di recente mi è stato chiesto di fornire immagini per un progetto web in una specifica risoluzione, e con un valore specifico di DPI. Per me in un progetto con varie fonti di immagini e varie destinazioni ha molto più senso conformare le immagini alla destinazione in modo automatizzato (con una riga di imagemagick, per esempio), ma quello che mi ha davvero lasciato perplesso è stata la richiesta dei DPI.

https://prudenziolo.wordpress.com/2024/06/23/un-rant-sui-dpi/

Sicuramente chi ha fatto la richiesta aveva in mente la vulgata secondo cui le immagini stampate sono a 300 DPI, e quelle sul web sono a 72DPI. Innanzitutto, cosa sono i DPI? Dots per Inch, quindi un’unità di densità di punti nello spazio. Il problema della vulgata è semplicemente che è vecchia di 30 anni, le risoluzioni degli schermi sono ormai regolarmente superiori a 300DPI anche su computer e cellulare. L’altra distinzione importante è tra i pixel del dispositivo e i pixel dell’immagine, che non corrispondono necessariamente in modo univoco. Data un’immagine di una certa risoluzione, nel web potremo assegnarle altezza e larghezza arbitrarie, e il browser la adatterà alla risoluzione appropriata, determinando quanti PPI (pixel per inch) avrà sul dispositivo usato dall’utente finale. Finché la risoluzione a cui la si mostra è minore o uguale a quella dell’immagine di partenza, e finché si rispetta il rapporto tra altezza e larghezza, non ci sono particolari problemi.

Se andiamo a guardare le proprietà di un file immagine vedremo sia la risoluzione che i DPI

Questo valore è però un mero metadata, può essere cambiato senza modificare il file immagine.

Se inserisco queste due immagini in una pagina web saranno del tutto identiche.

L’unica differenza è che se io stampasse le due immagini (non la pagina che le contiene, proprio i JPEG) il sistema rispetterebbe il valore di DPI.

Ma tutto questo in un progetto web non conta niente, quel che conta è che l’immagine abbia una risoluzione sufficiente.

People keep talking about the death of View Source, but I keep using it. Same with RSS, really.

Our own position is that eventually openness will win out, simply because the state is trying to charge for something that people are not willing to pay for, and the state has very little enforcement power over the open web (they should have even less).

Sto cercando di decodificare un piccolo file binario, fornitomi come read only, e inizialmente il Terminal si rifiutava di cambiare i permessi con chmod o di cambiare il proprietario dei file con chown. Ho risolto con questo comando, trovato su StackOverflow: Occorre dare al Terminal il "Full Disk Access": "System Settings --> Privacy & Security --> Full Disk Access --> check the Terminal" Altrimenti da un…

https://prudenziolo.wordpress.com/2024/05/16/sblocca-le-operazioni-non-consentite-su-terminal-su-mac/

Ho risolto con questo comando, trovato su StackOverflow:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17255340/chmod-unable-to-change-permissions

Occorre dare al Terminal il “Full Disk Access”:

“System Settings –> Privacy & Security –> Full Disk Access –> check the Terminal”

Altrimenti da un messaggio “Operation not permitted”, anche facendo sudo.

XR technology has been commercially available for 30 years, it tends to progress in the same way that people go bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly.

We’re seeing some pretty interesting gradual changes, particularly in terms of software platforms. The Apple partnership seems to really have pushed Unity into high gear, they’re releasing a lot of resources, both on the editor side and on the design side. Sadly some of the best stuff is reserved for paying customers, and it’s pretty expensive.

This seems to also have changed the thinking on the Sony (with the opening up of PSVR2 to PC users) and Meta. In just a few days Meta announced a radical opening up of their efforts.

First of all they announced a new educational project, which will probably increase the demand for the kind of work we do quite a bit. The fundamental problem is that they keep using the “metaverse” word, and quite a few people have a very negative reaction to it. The concept is really not that clear, but the educational uses of VR are real, hopefully if there is an educational sales push it will also benefit us.

The most important announcement is the opening up of their operating system. It will be possible to buy compatible headsets from other manufacturers, which should keep prices affordable without selling hardware at a loss, and even more importantly they’re opening up the app store. Multiple stores will be available, which could several important advantages. We could have a cross-platform cultural heritage app store which encourages reuse. Or more prosaically, maybe I could use some of my SteamVR purchases.

Zuckerberg is explicitly aiming at providing the Windows of the XR market. At the same time, these changes should make them entirely Digital Markets Act compliant.

A new regulation came out in March modifying the rules and introducing exemptions. Wikimedia Italia wrote about it on their Arkivia blog.

Academic works and news are now exempted from the fees, and so are catalogues printed in less than 4000 copies.

The bureaucratic abomination under-girding the system, however, remains in place.

There are several use-cases for algorithmically generating music, and indeed there is a long history of both hardware and software in this field. Back in the 80s there was even a significant professional backlash against MIDI and drum machines.

For example, it would be quite handy to generate anechoic sounds for acoustics listening tests, so that they can be convolved with the Impulse Responses of simulated environments.

The current mania is randomly generated media, which is an offshoot of a longer-standing mania for using media as filler instead of as a signifier. A lot of what we see and read is just Lorem Ipsum: posts need an image to do well, so people just slap a random image in them. It’s algorithmic garbage causing other algorithmic garbage. One of our deepest worries regarding our own work is that we could be hired to do it just because immersive technology sounds cool, and not because it genuinely adds value to the project at hand.

Anyway, of course there are going to be attempts at using the newest technology for generating music, and here are three of them:

1. Suno AI: this one definitely got the most attention
2. Udio
3. Stable Audio 2.0

There is also an OpenAI product, but it’s not generally available.

The increased repetitiveness in commercial music is definitely not an hindrance for these efforts.

Fundamentally, all of the do what they say they will do, but we do wonder why they focus on directly generating sounds instead of generating MIDI.

Energy consumption

Check out this Ars Technica syndacation of a Financial Times article: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/04/power-hungry-ai-is-putting-the-hurt-on-global-electricity-supply/

This is fundamentally an effect of computing getting increasingly centralised in massive data centers (just think of government over-reliance on Microsoft), which has noticeable economies of scale.

With AI there is also a significant divergence between the cost of executing the software, and the cost of training the software. The current AI boom is largely focused on just throwing resources at relatively “dumb” approaches, which is working better than it could be reasonably be expected for now, but that will inevitably run into resource limitations. For now, that bottleneck is energy, which is very bad news in environmental terms.

The silver lining is that if we managed to make companies pay for their environmental impact we would make smarter, more correct, approaches even more competitive.

Learn the basics

The always excellent 3Blue1Brown has released two new videos in his Deep Learning series, explaining Transformers. Here is a link to the whole series of videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk&list=PLZHQObOWTQDNU6R1_67000Dx_ZCJB-3pi&index=1

There are still around two weeks to participate, and we’re aggregating a little bit of media coverage. Mostly it’s because we like seeing our own work (the 3D model of the low-poly Rodin statue) featured so publicly.

The Gazzetta di Napoli newspaper wrote about it on the 6th of March: https://www.gazzettadinapoli.it/economia-2/industria-4-0/al-via-la-terza-ediz

ione-del-bcc-innovation-festival/

Emilia-Romagna Startup, the regional government’s startup promotion agency, wrote about the festival today: https://www.emiliaromagnastartup.it/it/innovative/articoli/2024/04/bcc-innovation-festival-2024-percorso-progetti-e-idee-innovative

There is time until April 30th 2024 to sign up. The whole process was very useful for anyone starting a company, they provide plenty of educational resources and mentorship.

Con oggi sono 900

https://prudenziolo.wordpress.com/2024/04/09/streak-su-duolingo/

The difficulties stem from its diminutive size and from its texture. It is quite smooth, with lots of reflections and some subsurface effects. Also the lighting in the room was very direct, we had to move carefully to avoid throwing our shadows on the object, which negatively affected the spatial sampling.

Our objective was clearly observing how these technologies fail, so it suited us.

Macro Tube + Photogrammetry

https://poly.cam/capture/82c44695-e858-4ed1-8132-dd6d44778175

Macro Tube + Gaussian Splatting

https://poly.cam/capture/82c44695-e858-4ed1-8132-dd6d44778175

iPhone + Photogrammetry

https://poly.cam/capture/0B379F23-0C60-4CD5-BB29-6D21E2A2B4E4

iPhone + Gaussian Splatting

https://poly.cam/capture/B3A580C6-09CE-43FD-8297-06E0F9539557

> GET /MIMO/ HTTP/1.1
> Host: adrianofarina.it
> User-Agent: curl/8.4.0
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Date: Thu, 08 Feb 2024 19:45:16 GMT
< Content-Type: text/html
< Transfer-Encoding: chunked
< Connection: keep-alive
< Last-Modified: Tue, 18 May 2021 22:25:18 GMT

Un sacco di pagine moderne non funzionano senza JavaScript, come facciamo ad archiviarle?Con questo comando, riportato in versione Chrome per Mac, ma con minimi adattamenti funziona anche su Linux e Windows. /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome \--headless --incognito --dump-dom > /tmp/github.html /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome è il path all'eseguibile di Chrome è…

https://prudenziolo.wordpress.com/2024/03/30/salva-unintera-pagina-web-con-chrome/

/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome \
--headless --incognito --dump-dom https://github.com > /tmp/github.html

/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome è il path all’eseguibile di Chrome

https://github.com è l’indirizzo del sito da archiviare

> è l’output redirect

/tmp/github.html è la destinazione in cui salvare il risultato

https://rogule.com

Sto lavorando a un progetto su nuovi formati di audioguide, e man mano che leggo la letteratura scientifica prendo appunti in Markdown. Ovviamente basterebbe usare un'app di appunti in Markdown, ma voglio che resti un file pulito nella cartella condivisa con il resto del team, ma presentando il risultato in modo leggibile. Ho quindi installato pandoc con brew install pandoc o sudo apt-get install pandoc…

https://prudenziolo.wordpress.com/2024/03/29/conversione-automatica-da-markdown-a-html-o-epub-con-css/

Ho quindi installato pandoc con

brew install pandoc
o
sudo apt-get install pandoc

Rispettivamente per Mac e per Debian

Poi ho copiato il css di default di Cassidoo in base.css, e ho eseguito il seguente comando

pandoc -c base.css -s -f markdown+smart --toc --metadata pagetitle="Audioguide Notes" --metadata title="Audioguide Notes" notes.md -o notes.epub

Per l’EPUB, mentre per l’HTML:

pandoc -c base.css -s -f markdown+smart --toc --metadata pagetitle="Audioguide Notes" notes.md -o notes.html

Genera anche un’indice grazie all’opzione –toc, ma in realtà mancano un sacco di metadata, innanzitutto la lingua, per la quale basta aggiungere

-V lang=it

Sostituendo il codice lingua da voi utilizzato.

Inoltre la pagina generate manca completamente di landmark, non ha nemmeno un main, difetto prontamente segnalato dai checker di accessibilità come Axe.

Alla stessa maniera potete anche creare documenti Word, o PDF. Per mettere il file su un kindle la cosa più semplice è usare Calibre, che converte perfettamente gli EPUB.

There is a complete tutorial on handling point clouds in Blender by Florent Poux: https://youtu.be/DCkFhHNeSc0

In order to visualize the data, my first attempt was using Blender, with this plugin: https://github.com/nittanygeek/LiDAR-Importer

You only need to pay a bit of attention about the Python path while installing it, especially if you have multiple versions installed, but the provided instructions are perfect. We were able to see points in Blender, and to get a general idea for the shape of the cave, but getting from there to an actual mesh is non-trivial.

Instead, we found a short tutorial for doing the same thing using CloudCompare.

As a super short summary: open your point cloud in CloudCompare, select it, convert it to a mesh by going to Plugins>PoissonRecon. You can also choose between the color actually captured for each point, or this density heatmap: red is maximum information density, blue is the minimum.

In the next steps we’ll need to convert the mesh to quads (using Blender), import the model into Ramsete, then assign materials to each face and run the simulation. In order to properly calibrate the model we’ll need to know the specifics of each material, or ideally even perform actual acoustics measurements, like we did for the Tindari paper.

(via @tedium)

The new WebAIM screen reader user survey came out, and it turns out that 68% or respondents agree with us.

#webdev

PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) are websites which can be installed on a user’s device, and that can even be listed in app stores. Our research indicates that a certain percentage of users search their app stores before searching on the web. This is honestly hard to comprehend, but that does not mean that we don’t want to serve those users. Most people building PWAs use JavaScript frameworks, like React, Vue, Angular, Flutter, and just so many others.

We’re deeply suspicious of those framework. It is certainly possible to use them well, but the examples of their misuse, and of people learning them before learning actual web development, and consequently perpetuating terrible, unaccessible, practices, are just too widespread to ignore.

Luckily, we don’t have to get our hands dirty to get the benefits of PWAs, we just need to add a manifest and a service worker. We don’t even need to actually write them ourselves! We can just install PWABuilder Studio for Visual Studio code, open the folder for our web app, and run a couple of commands.

Specifically, press Ctrl+Shift+P to open the command Palette, write PWA to find the relevant commands, and then run PWA Builder Studio: Generate Web Manifest. This will generate a manifest.json file, in which you’ll have to specify your app name, canonical URL, icon, and so on.

Then run PWA Builder Studio: Generate Service Worker to enable offline functionality.

You can test your results as soon as you’ve uploaded your files to a web server of your choice, we tried with the demo of an audio-guide product that we’re building. If you insert the URL of your web app into the PWABuilder homepage you can obtain a report card, and you can download packages that can be submitted to the main app stores (Windows, Android, iOS, Meta Quest).

And that’s it, the only question is how to communicate the new functionality to your users. Let us know if you have suggestions on that front 😀

Opus gets a ML upgrade: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39593256

App for chatting with local AI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39532367

The Era of 1-bit LLMs: ternary parameters for cost-effective computing

https://stratechery.com/2024/aggregators-ai-risk/

https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/21/24078610/google-gemma-gemini-small-ai-model-open-source

https://www.theverge.com/24054603/chatbot-chatgpt-eliza-history-ai-assistants-video

You can now train a 70b language model at home: https://www.answer.ai/posts/2024-03-06-fsdp-qlora.html

The Pile is a 825 GiB diverse, open source language modelling data set that consists of 22 smaller, high-quality datasets combined together.: https://pile.eleuther.ai/

https://thoughtbot.com/blog/deploy-llm-the-naive-ways

https://www.yitay.net/blog/training-great-llms-entirely-from-ground-zero-in-the-wilderness

https://spreadsheets-are-all-you-need.ai/index.html

In short, other than the hosting platform it was all Blender and a few Open Source JavaScript libraries.

Il Pensatore: an immersive landing

Following the concept from BCC’s own creative department, we created a low-poly version of Rodin’s Le Penseur. In the original concept art the statue was 3D printed, clearly showing the signs of a filament printer. Our own version was materialized with a resin printer:

This model became a sort of leitmotif of the whole immersive experience. We changed the texture to a brushed metal in the corporate green, and we provided the client with renders for web and print channels.

We then proceeded to make this model available in webAR, using the model-viewer library. This will be used in an upcoming promotional campaign, asking the public to share pictures of the statue in their environment, a bit like we did with the whale for the Leverans comic.

We then created the scrollable section of the festival homepage, using a threejs scene embedded in an iframe. All semantically meaningful elements were implemented as standard DOM elements, the 3D is purely decorative, but it does not detract from the accessibility of the content.

Check it out on the Festival home page.

Innovation World

We also built a virtual world on framevr. The design goal was to let users interact in a shared explorable space. We’re pretty proud of the work our architect did, and there is some technically clever work on object instancing, but we’ll have here write a whole post on the matter. Keeping to the high level concept, we have a pretty linear progression from the starting point to the exhibition area, gradually disclosing information to the visitor no matter what path they choose.

We worked pretty hard to balance visual quality with performance, and we can now confidently state that it will work on whatever device you use.

Geodesic rocks in the same material as the Pensatore were inserted throughout, and to tie the concept together we made this short video (pretty early in the process, a lot of the environment is missing):

Please do check out BCC Innovation World, we’ll be expanding it a lot in the next few months.

As a primer, Eric Bailey wrote some thoughts about the nuances of the matter: https://ericwbailey.website/published/thoughts-on-embedding-alternative-text-metadata-into-images/

Also check out this post by Heather Buchel, with a much broader focus: https://heather-buchel.com/blog/2024/03/letters-to-an-accessibility-advocate/

What follows are instead our own thoughts.

Decorative Images

The general idea is that alt-text is going to be used by anyone who cannot look at a picture, and that it should be as good a substitute as possible. We should think about the meaning of a picture, and about its function in the webpage, and about how the alt-text will be used in practice. A whole lot of images are simply decoration, and the general advice is to exclude them, so that text to speech systems don’t waste time reading descriptions that don’t actually carry any meaning.

However, even extraneous decoration carries connotations that influence the interpretation of the written word. Should we attempt to transmit the same connotations to every user? And should we attempt to provide cultural context for those who lack it? This is the kind of thinking that leads to people giving short self-descriptions at the beginning of online conferences, something that seems to be quite common in the US. I have nothing against it, but I also don’t really understand the value of it. I’ll happily do it when it’s asked, but I don’t do it of my own initiative.

Rich Images

What about images that carry a lot of information? Charts, and graphs, or increasingly maps. How do we enable everyone to access the information in our own 3D spaces?

The short answer is that we try to follow the W3C guidelines:

1. https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/complex/
2. https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/informative/

The longer answer is that it is a bit of an art form, and that sometimes the only solution is to be redundant, and just recreate everything in good old text. This can be hard work, but nobody claimed that having principles is easy.

Specifically for visual art, it is sometimes very hard to motivate clients, we’ve often heard the argument that visually impaired users are intrinsically excluded, or intrinsically uninterested. We’re glad to report that our clients from the banking sector have been universally fully committed to accessibility, they’re institutionally used to it being a legal requirement. (They do tend to use overlays a bit too much, for my tastes)

AI

There has been much ado about the usage of AI for generating alt-text. This is something that already happens a whole lot on social networks. Famous web-usability expert Jakob Nielsen wrote about it recently (I mean, it’s a bit of a wider argument, but very related), and it caused a bit of a shitstorm in the community. I’m just going to link to Adrian Roselli’s take: https://adrianroselli.com/2024/03/jakob-has-jumped-the-shark.html

My own take is that the work needed to make a site accessible is all going towards making the website better.

It is truly exhibit design at its best, but it gave me the idea of digitizing not only the back of paintings, but the very structure. I’d like to build an exhibit in which we show how the painting is made, how it looks from every direction, how the frame is built, and even how the canvas has been constructed.

There is also this great video from Christie’s about the back side of paintings, and all the information they can reveal: https://www.christies.com/en/stories/what-to-look-for-on-the-back-of-a-painting-821e1638846944fb9a2b05aad53854fe

Or you can set it manually, just go into Edit Mode, then at the top right of the viewfinder go to Options, Transform, Affect Only Origins.

This allows you to move the origin to wherever you want, without affecting the object. Dont’ forget to apply transforms (ctrl+A) when you’re playing around with this stuff.

What I just learned is that if you Shift+click on the selection modes you can activate more than one at a time, it looks like this:

You can then click on whatever mesh element to select it.

http://e-muse.it/blog/2024/02/28/press-release-sala-venezia-giulia/

The room currently hosts 5 works by Graziano Cuberli. An inauguration reception was held in Romans d’Isonzo.

For the occasion we overhauled the rest of the Arte in Banca experience. A new control scheme is now available on mobile devices, and the photogrammetries in rooms 1 and 5 can also be accessed in Augmented Reality.

New mobile control scheme

The original control scheme for the Arte in Banca project aimed at providing one-handed six-degrees-of-freedom movement on a touch device. We used a redundant control scheme for rotation, using both the gyroscope and a one finger drag gesture. This allowed for 3dof rotation, but users found the gyroscope cumbersome to use for long periods, as it imposed ergonomic constraints.

Translation was handled with a one finger press to move forward, and a two fingers tap to move backwards. This movement was combined with the drag rotation to achieve a sort of steering, which was somewhat unwieldy in tight spaces, and didn’t allow for strafing.

We added two joysticks using nipple.js, the left one controls translation, the right one controls rotation. This works well for people used to videogames, others don’t fare as well.

This sent us down a rabbit hole of academic papers, user testing, and just plain old trying other products. We found that despite the popularity of 6dof games on mobile devices, most users are just terrible at achieving any sort of mobility. This is very discouraging given our goals, but we also found out that we score great in the mobile version of Call of Duty.

It seems that there is a reason why our competitors usually restrict movement along one or more axis. This is where we stopped for the Arte in Banca project, but check this blog soon for further experimentation.

AR view

We also wanted to add better visualization tools for the objects and sculptures that we digitized. We went the easy way, by using https://modelviewer.dev/

It provides a nice 3D viewer, and it allows for webAR on both Android and iOS, complete with light estimation, and some rudimentary occlusion. It can be accessed by tapping or clicking on any 3D object in the virtual museum, then on the tiny cubic icon on the right, if you’re using a supported device.

Stay tuned, we have a lot of interesting projects to write about in the next few months!

Blender's auto depth setting is a life saver
#blender

With the default Blender settings it is quite common to get into situation where you just can’t get close enough to your object.

There are two tricks to fixing it. The first is to use the Shift+C shortcut, to reset.

The second is to enable Auto Depth, under Edit > Preferences > Navigation, as shown in the picture

These are so beautiful

Web components allow for the richness of JS frameworks, while maintaining the clean semantics of HTML.

Let’s start from the MDN explainer: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_components/Using_custom_elements

And here are a few recent blog posts and resources on web components:

• Drab
• Jake Lazaroff on Web Components as a framework compatibility mechanism
• HTML Web Components on the Server Are Great by Scott Jehl is also a great explainer of the concept itself

“For example, we train models that write secure code when the prompt states that the year is 2023, but insert exploitable code when the stated year is 2024.”

#AI

They even came up with their own marketing-infused grammar, they want people to say Apple Vision Pro, never the Apple Vision Pro.

Some of the discourse has veered into worries about people wearing visors while driving, luckily those are just a handful of attention seekers.

Technical Analysis

First of all, how is it built? iFixit to the rescue:

It would seem that finally the screen resolution and clarity are sufficient for the “lots of virtual screens” use case. Last year Karl Guttag evaluated the angular resolution of the Apple Vision Pro as between 35 and 40 PPD (pixels per degree). In the above iFixit video it’s measured at 34 PPD, so that was spot on.

Basically if you are at all interested in the optics side of thing, just read everything Guttag writes: https://kguttag.com/tag/apple-vision-pro/

Also check out the Ars Technica review.

On the development side, Unity support is now out of beta, but it is only available for Pro users ($1800/year). So for most developers the choice is between the native Apple SDKs and WebXR. The latter enables us to develop once, and run on every device, so it is clearly superior.

There has also been some debate on Spatial Video, namely whether it is simply a stereoscopic image, or if there is some parallax magic. As always with immersive video, Hugh Hou has the last word:

Another important issue with the Apple Vision Pro are the optical inserts, Eric Cheng wrote a status of optical accommodation in the whole industry.

Mainstream Reviews

Casey Neistat’s failure to activate travel mode was very funny, but it was not a very good review, so we’re not going to link it.

Joanna Stern tried some interesting “spatial” uses. In particular the multiple timers are a classic Ambient Computing idea.

The Verge’s review is great at emphasizing all the ways in which the Apple Vision Pro pushes the limits of our current computing environment.

Stratechery, Daring Fireball, Wait But Why, Hypergrid on VR Gentrification, Road to VR,

Personas demo:

MKBHD did a four-parter:

Apps

The fundamental distinction is between “windowed” apps, that are limited on a virtual screen, and actual VR apps. The beauty of Reality Kit is the ability of having spatially-aware elements in apps that still work with passthrough.

Soul Spire, Shortcut Buttons, Now Playing,

Aro.work: A webXR workspace

Everyone seems very enthusiastic about Juno, a third party YouTube client. The whole thing reminds me of Windows Phone.

From Road to VR: 8 Great Vision Pro Apps to Download First

We need better compatibility, less cloud dependency and more user control, not less connectivity.

This is a brilliant business model, the only problem is that I quite like the "ugly" interface :D

Apple open-sourced this interesting local AI for instruction-based image editing.

https://github.com/Mozilla-Ocho/llamafile

https://github.com/apple/ml-ferret

General AI news

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/17/24041518/generative-ai-copyright-violation-fair-training-label-certification: Nonprofit group Fairly Trained plans to certify AI models that ask permission to use copyrighted material.

https://moritzgiessmann.de/blog/posts/using-ai-for-accessibility/

https://www.theuxda.com/blog/ux-case-study-ai-powered-spatial-banking-for-apple-vision-pro

https://arstechnica.com/health/2024/01/what-do-threads-mastodon-and-hospital-records-have-in-common/

Building a fully local LLM voice assistant to control my smart home: Hacker News Thread

Mixtral 8x7B: A sparse Mixture of Experts language model: Hacker News Thread

Energy use is one of the real show stoppers with AI, so this is super important: TinyML: Ultra-low power machine learning Hacker News Thread

Antirez, the maker of Redis, has been experimenting with AI:

Translating blog posts with GPT-4, or: on hope and fear

First Token Cutoff LLM sampling

https://openfuture.eu/blog/ai-and-the-commons-the-paradox-of-open-for-business/

https://blog.cassidoo.co/post/ai-voice-test/
https://hidde.blog/redundant-ai/

https://studiodradiodurans.com/blogs/radar/navigating-the-paradigm-shift

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/18/24042354/mark-zuckerberg-meta-agi-reorg-interview

https://www.brinkxr.com/

Il sito di un progetto a cui ho collaborato, progettosipario.org, ha smesso di funzionare l'estate scorsa, e a me piace aver traccia del lavoro svolto. Per cui ho comprato il dominio progettosipario.it con l'intenzione di ripubblicare il contenuto del sito, che fortunatamente è salvato su web.archive.org. L'unico strumento in grado di scaricare un intero sito è il wayback-machine-downloader…

https://prudenziolo.wordpress.com/2024/02/03/come-scaricare-un-sito-da-archive-org/

L’unico strumento in grado di scaricare un intero sito è il wayback-machine-downloader di hartartor, che è uno script ruby. Recentemente archive.org ha dovuto introdurre un limite al quantitativo di file scaricabili, per cui bisogna aggiungere delle attese nello script, come spiegato in questa issue: https://github.com/hartator/wayback-machine-downloader/issues/273

A questo punto ho ottenuto 189 file, solo che, come spesso accade con i siti WordPress, i link erano tutti assoluti, cioè il link dalla home alla about puntava sempre alla about di progettosipario.org, e quindi non funzionava. Ho perso tempo con uno script perl trovato su perlmonks che avrebbe dovuto fare esattamente quello che mi serviva, risolvendo anche un problema di dipendenze, causato dalla sostituzione dei tab con gli spazi mentre scaricavo lo script.

Alla fine l’ho risolta in modo molto più semplice, in Visual Studio Code ho aperto la cartella contenente l’intera struttura del sito, e ho fatto un cerca e sostituisci, da progettosipario.org a progettosipario.it.

Poi ho caricato tutto sul server via FTP, il problema è che ci avevo già installato Omeka S, e adesso funziona solo specificando esattamente l’URL del file, non della cartella come dovrebbe. Non sembrano esistere istruzioni su come disinstallare Omeka S.

(via https://untested.sonnet.io/TIL/weekly/54)

#museum

1. Code Llama 70B, download, the new version for Meta’s code-generation Large Language Model. Here it is on huggingface.
2. RWKV Eagle 7B, the most interesting part is that architecturally it is not transformer-based, but it should be more energy-efficient.

We should probably write a tutorial on how to run these models locally, and on how they can be used productively. The latter is an open question, it is very easy to waste time, and these things tend to be power hungry.

1. The best CSS Grid tutorial, from cssprinciples.com. We love interactivity embedded into good old textual pages.
2. HTML self-awareness from Cassidoo. A neat trick for those among us who don’t use JS frameworks.
3. Val Town allows you to run functions, schedule them, and build APIs using TypeScript. There is also a community sharing ready-made functions. The e-mail logging function is great for monitoring client-side-only sites.

An interview about the beautiful openwebsearch.eu project. I don't think search can be free of bias, but making the mechanisms transparent would go a really long way.

In theory the blog itself is also available on Mastodon (@e-muse.it ) using the Wordpress ActivityPub plugin, but the feed doesn't seem to load correctly, the number of posts shows up, the actual posts don't.

However, we’re already working on Blender most of the time, so why not use that? After all reducing dependencies is generally a benefit to any workflow.

Here we are going to share just a few tips for users not already familiar with Blender. It is surprisingly internally self-consistent, for something that can do so many different things.

When opening Blender we can create select the Video Editing layout from the splash screen, we get this layout:

This is basically the same as any other non-linear video editor: we select files in the top right, we drag into tracks below, we see the result at the top in the center. When we drag videos onto the timeline Proxy Media is automatically generated.

There are just a couple of tricks to get you started: use Blender keyboard shortcuts, like G to move objects, X to delete them. A video-specific one is Shift+Space+K to select the Blade tool, Shift+Space+W for the select tool.

The Blade tool is used to split clips under the cursor.

To make it usable you should also enable Waveform Display for all audio tracks. It’s at the bottom of the video sequencer View menu, which has this icon:

Here it is with waveform display off:

And on:

That makes it much easier to use.

You can pick you video’s resolution and frame rate in the Scene inspector in the top right, as well as the output file location, container and codec.

In order to render just press Shift+F12 (Command + F12 on Mac), or go to Render > Render Animation in the top menu.

Da anni aspetto che l'Apple permetta di eseguire il software che vogliamo sul nostro hardware. Forse i recenti sforzi legislativi riusciranno a convincerli, ma intanto qui spiego un modo di farlo adesso, se avete un Mac o un PC Windows. Bisogna installare l'AltServer sul vostro computer, seguendo le istruzioni installare l'AltStore sul vostro dispositivo iOS, poi abilitare i vari repositories.

https://prudenziolo.wordpress.com/2024/01/21/sideloading-su-ios-2024/

Bisogna installare l’AltServer sul vostro computer, seguendo le istruzioni installare l’AltStore sul vostro dispositivo iOS, poi abilitare i vari repositories. A quel punto potete installare varie App non disponibili sullo Store ufficiale, sono soprattutto vari emulatori, sia di interi sistemi operativi che di varie console da videogiochi.

Con UTM, ad esempio, si possono emulare vari sistemi operativi “da computer”, sui quali possiamo eseguire software arbitrario, eliminando quindi tutte le limitazioni di iOS. Ovviamente è una soluzione scomoda, ma è bello poter pensare di farlo.

Nell’articolo originale viene anche mostrato come usare questo shortcut da linea di comando e da dentro uno script Python, con ovvio potenziale di automazione. Ma come si fa a scegliere un’immagine come input dello script senza usare la linea di comando? Soprattutto, come si fa da iPhone, dove la linea di comando non c’è? (O meglio, c’è ish che è molto comodo, ma non ha accesso al comando shortcuts).

Bisogna andare nel pannello details (premendo il tasto ℹ️) e attivare l’opzione Show in Share Sheet

A questo punto per testare il funzionamento è sufficiente condividere un’immagine con del testo. Ecco un esempio:

Ed ecco il risultato

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Il vero vantaggio di questo Shortcut non è per le immagini, dato che cliccando l’icona in basso a destra nella Gallery si ottiene lo stesso identico risultato:

Con lo Shortcut si può fare la stessa cosa con qualunque file statico, ad esempio con dei PDF contenenti immagini.

In Historical Trails there are wonderful examples on how chronological information can be shifted to a spatial representation, allowing for better and faster retrieval, and more generally for matching the semantics of how users navigate information to the syntax of history retrieval.

In Ambient Copresence she thoughtfully defines a paradigm for sharing space online, reflecting on what works synchronously and what scales to different audience sizes.

We are working on a project that will see a virtual exhibition space and a live event come together in a cohesive experience, so these considerations are very precious for us.

In the VR community there has been much ado about Apple’s choice to entirely refuse the industry jargon: there is no VR, MR, XR, AR, it’s all spatial computing. They’ve been accused of making up new words to obfuscate what they’re offering. We think it’s more subtle than that.

First of all, naming things matter. Some of the experiences we build can be considered part of the “metaverse”, but that’s not a term we use, because it doesn’t have a good technical definition, and because it reminds people of sleazy operations. Some think of the Meta advertisements, some think of literal scams. Those scams that are so pervasive that I don’t dare to mention them, lest I attract their spam.

Apple systematically chooses feature names that represent the value added for the user’s experience, while simultaneously obfuscating the technical details. They don’t want us to know the DPIs of a screen, they just tell us it’s Retina. It doesn’t matter very much to Apple that competitors make screens with better resolution, if it’s Retina it’s good enough, you’re not going to see the individual pixels. It’s annoying for us nerds, but it seems to work just fine.

In some ways it’s similar with Spatial Computing, it’s technically indisputable that the Apple Vision Pro is a VR headset with a Mixed Reality passthrough function, just like the Meta Quest 3. But what Apple is doing is not only obfuscation, and they certainly didn’t come up with the term. What they’re trying to communicate is that the advantage of computing on a headset rather than on a laptop is going to be spatial in nature. Spatial computing is not a new term at all, the essays written by Timoni West at Unity were an inspiration for my dissertation, and then for the founding of this company. The fundamental idea is to use the dimensionality of the interface for communication between the user and the computer. Information doesn’t have to be limited to a 2D screen, and most importantly user input doesn’t have to be limited to discrete actions. It’s still hard work, but we can enable natural interactions that allow us to think gesturally. Let me gesture that I want a piece of machinery to be ✋ this 🤚 big, and have the computer figure out how big that is in numbers. This is the kind of use case that Sony is targeting with their new VR headset.

Looking at the Apple developer documentation, a lot of work has gone into making the creation of this kind of experience possible, but they’re not focusing their presentation on that at all. All that the user is seen doing is positioning virtual windows around them.

This is extremely similar to what was possible with Windows Mixed Reality or with the Quest. On the Hololens the visual fidelity was just not enough, and the field of view was tiny. On the Quest 2 the visual fidelity was still too low, it is much improved on the Quest 3, but it is still somewhat worse than just staring at a screen. Looking at the specs the Apple Vision Pro might finally be able to pull of this use case.

However, it’s not at all the kind of spatial computing that I described above.

Instead, it harkens back to the old days of the classic Mac Finder, and in some ways to the design of Jef Raskin. The idea is that rather than following the hierarchical organization of the file system, the interaction between the user and the computer will determine a spatial organization of the information that is being worked on, that will mirror a spatial conceptualization in the user’s mind.

A lot of the modern window management solution that Apple has added to both the Mac and the iPad, like Stage Manager and Mission Control, have enabled users to experiment with this kind of paradigm. There is also a $9.99 Mac spatial desktop environment called Raskin as an homage. Raskin’s son Aza also developed Tab Candy, which brought spatial tab management to Firefox.

I think the verdict is still out on how useful this kind of spatialization is, but I think it’s clear that it is part of what Apple is going for. With any immersive technology we must always remember that the real immersion is in the user’s mind, we can feel present in a novel as much as in VR. As a company we are sticking to the other kind of spatialization, where the spatial information is intrinsic to the problem domain, whether it’s reproducing historical artifacts, simulating the propagation of sound in an environment, or assembling a machine in the correct order. Apple Vision Pro makes both of them much easier to develop. You know, when we’ll actually get one here in Italy 😀

The latter has reached Baseline status in December 2023, so it makes sense that I didn’t know about it yet!

Googlando ho trovato questo thread su Microsoft Answers, in cui un utente nel 2019 ha avuto lo stesso problema, ma senza alcuna soluzione. Purtroppo il thread è chiuso, ma la soluzione è molto semplice, basta cliccar destro sul fondo della finestra in cui si vede l’elendo dei file da bruciare, e cliccare “Burn to disc” dal menù di click destro. Apparentemente sono due modi per fare la stessa cosa, ma simpaticamente quello in bella vista non va, quello nascosto sì. La meravigliosa qualità del software.

Per il ripieno:

1. Soffritto di cipolle con un cucchiaio di strutto sciolto nell’olio
2. 200g di pasta di salame
3. 200g di kimchi (in scatola), rompendo i pezzi di cavolo più grossi con la forchetta
4. Zenzero fresco sminuzzato
5. Un goccio di salsa di pesce tailandese
6. Un goccio di salsa Worcestershire

Una volta fatto il soffritto ho aggiunto tutto il resto mischiato bene, spadellato a fuoco basso finché non si è asciugato. A quel punto ho aggiunto un uovo ben mescolato.

Ho tentato un paio di metodi diversi per mettere il ripieno nella sfoglia. Il primo era quello dei tortelli d’erbetta, un rettangolo piegato in due. In seguito sono passato a quelle delle empanadas, tagliando dei pezzi circolari di sfoglia con un coppapasta (sarà da couper?), mettendo il ripendo al centro e ripiegando i bordi.

Ho spennellato la superficie della sfoglia di uovo. Per la cottura sono 20 minuti a 200°C in forno ventilato.

Con queste dosi mi son servite 3 confezioni di sfoglia. A seconda di quanto kimchi e zenzero usate viene lievemente piccante, ma è stato apprezzato anche da parenti particolarmente debole in tal senso, c’è un buon contrasto dolce-salato-piccante.

img2pdf * > output.pdf

Tuttavia nel caso in cui mi sono imbattuto oggi ogni immagine conteneva due pagine, e quindi andavano divise, ho usato ImageMagick con il comando (adattato da StackOverflow), sostituendo subfolder_name con il nome di una sottocartella esistente a nostro arbitrio, in modo da tenere separate le immagini divise da quelle originali.

ls -1 *.png | sed 's,.*,& subfolder_name/&,' | xargs -n 2 convert -crop 50%x100% +repage

Spostandomi nella sottocartella, ho riallineato le pagine, togliendo la copertina che era stata erroneamente divisa in due, e inserendone un’ulteriore copia per mantenere l’allineamento degli spread. Quindi ho ricreato il pdf con img2pdf, di default le immagini vengono inserite in ordine alfabetico.

L’ultimo passaggio è stato un grossolano tentativo di riconoscimento automatico dei caratteri, usando OCRmyPDF

ocrmypdf input.pdf output.pdf

Per mia fortuna oggi lavoravo su un testo in inglese, ma si possono installare altre lingue

MemoryCache, augmenting local AI with browser data

OpenSource macOS AP copilot using vision and voice

Instructions on running local LLM on iOS

Intel CEO against the CUDA moat

FunSearch: Making new discoveries in mathematical sciences using Large Language Models, by Google DeepMind

Advancements in machine learning for machine learning: Machine Learning compilers by Google Researc

Programming

Exploring the design space of “remote scene approximation“.

Use the GPU, Luke! – a GPU programming tutorial for non-graphic-programmers

Permacomputing Aesthetics: Potential and Limits of Constraints in Computational Art, Design and Culture

Bitsy Museum Hack: bitsy is a really fun engine for creating bit-art powered web games, and this hack allows one to create a “museum”, a central hub from which several games or experiences can be accessed. It might be fun to integrate bitsy experiences in our high-dimensionality sites!

Audio

Instrument position in Immersive Audio: an empirical review of award-winning practices

Web

Launch of Brasiliana, a common place on the web for Brazilian museums (from September)

Offpunk: a delightful command-line first browser, sort of a modern Lynx

Media queries for HTML Video: building responsive video is very important for making interactive documentaries work on mobile devices

Paperless: a self-hostable document archive platform, complete with OCR

[Interactive content removed for privacy. View original post]

Motivated by coming across the embedded post on Mastodon, we looked into existing solutions for iOS.

We found this one, which is very sleek, but a bit on the expensive side: https://launch.variant3d.com/

Gaussian Splatting Explosion

Meta: a collection of Gaussian Splatting stuff https://aras-p.info/blog/2023/12/08/Gaussian-explosion/

SMERF: Streamable Memory Efficient Radiance Fields

SMERF

Relightable avatars

https://80.lv/articles/new-relightable-animatable-realistic-avatars-from-meta/

Gaussian Splat based SLAM

https://neuralradiancefields.io/splatam-slam-with-speed-precision-and-gaussian-splats/

Visual Editor for React Three Fiber

Triplex is not actually a new project, but it is still in early access.

ThreedTiles: a 3DTiles viewer for three.js

Source code. Some really impressive demos, particularly the map and Berlin.

https://e-muse.it/blog/2023/12/11/some-ai-news-and-eu-regulation/
@e-muse.it

There are a lot of powerful actors that are working to shape it in their favor, and they are not being secretive at all.

AI stuff

We’re working on a couple of audio-guide projects, and in one of them it would be really convenient to automate some of the work with an AI. Our current attempts are technically presentable, but honestly pretty boring. Think something like the Spot guide-dog from Boston Dynamics (what is up with their microphones?), but on your phone and without installation. We have built it, it works, we do not think it’s good enough, just like automated translations aren’t really good enough, compared to a good professional translator. Needless to say, we’re keeping our eyes peeled for the latest advancements. After all AI is guaranteed to disrupt us.

Large Language Models are tools, and it’s up to us how we use them, from Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots.

The EU Council and Parliament have reached an agreement on the new AI ACT. Before the agreement OpenFuture had written about copyright opt-outs, about friction and governance and about self-regulation.

[Interactive content removed for privacy. View original post]

Local AI

Sticking to AI, it seems that Google is catching up to ChatGPT, confirming our “there is no moat” position. However, just like Threads and Horizon Worlds, it is not coming to the EU yet, which we consider a worrying trend.

We suspect it’s going to end up just like cloud computing: there is a lot of money to be made, but it’s going to be so capital-intensive that only a few big players will dominate the market, developing useful products that are hamstrung by the imperative to build in vendor lock-in. Luckily there are some really interesting developments on the local deployment side, and we think that the transparency and user control of locally run Open Source software are going to be extremely important.

Mozilla published a guide for new AI developers last month, but last week they also published Llamafile, which combines llama.cpp and the brilliant Cosmopolitan library to distribute Large Language Models as single files.

In a similar vein Noiselith allows us to run Stable Diffusion XL and generate images on local hardware, with a user-friendly setup.

Voicemod allows to change your voice in real time, both to existing voices and to newly generated ones. We do not agree with The Verge’s disregard for the legal aspects of voice cloning, rights limiting the reproduction of one’s likeness are well established, copyright is not the issue.

Apple released a Machine Learning framework for Apple Silicon, and they literally just pushed it on GitHub without announcing it. Of course nothing that Apple does passes unnoticed, the tech press was instantly on it.

The ex-Apple employees behind Shortcuts have a new desktop AI startup.

Meta, IBM, Intel, and around 50 other organizations launched an alliance for Open Source AI.

Mistral AI, the French company that releases Apache-licensed models (their benchmark scores are pretty amazing), has received a $2B evaluation.

AI Trust

Meta has a new AI trust and safety initiative, but at a glance it seems like it’s mostly focused on spotting content that does not align with what the owners want, which is obviously super important.

The most important article on AI trust you’ll read this week: AI and Trust by Bruce Schneider.

Stuff at the intersection between law and culture

Getting back to EU legislation, Felix Reda (of Pirate Party fame) and Justus Dreyling wrote about the need for a Digital Knowledge Act, highlighting the need to achieve something that is very much in line with our mission: allowing every research question to be done online. It should never happen that a document or a resource is held in a public archive or is made with public money (we’re thinking of scientific papers) and not be made available, online and for free.

Cory Doctorow wrote on the evils of DRM, and that is always important to keep in mind when building digital archives and collections.

The EU Data ACT is also moving forwards, with some good stuff (harmonization and foreign transfers, in particular) and some really concerning bits. Offering legal protection to trade secrets favors some specific players, but it is opposed to the hard bargain that makes patents exist. The current discourse seems to have lost sight of the fact that “Intellectual Property” is not property at all, in the abstract all knowledge should belong to every human being, we have setup a legal system that exchanges a temporal monopoly for technical information (in the case of patents) or as an incentive for the creation of more cultural works (in the case of copyright). Trade secrets should not be legally protected, if you want protection you should use patents. The current Data Act agreement also restricts reverse engineering, which is terribly harmful for innovation and competition.

Work has also been progressing on the EU Cyber Resilience Act. It seemed to go in a weird direction for what concerns the intersection between security and Open Source, but they seem to have already fixed the most glaring issues. This is a good chance to recommend following Bert Hubert, he always has insightful articles and up to date news. For example that’s how we learned about this case in which Sony attempted to strong arm a DNS provider.

Made with #Blender, I believe

#webdev #webXR #VR #threejs
#aframe #tools

A-Watch

A small library for building watch-like user interfaces in a-frame, supporting hand tracking. There is even a demo, and here is the announcement tweet with a brief video.

Gaussian Splat support for Three.js

Three.js is the basis for a lot of immersive web experiences, including a-frame. drei-vanilla is a collection of threejs modules and helpers, and they just released a splat module, which allows for the inclusion of multiple splats in a scene with the <Splat src={url} /> syntax.

3D comic dioramas with Needle Engine

This one is not a new tool, but an interesting use of an interesting tool.

Las Vegas Sphere with custom shaders

The Sphere in Las Vegas is a super cool engineering project. Weirdly enough the public reaction seems to focus more on the external part, which is being used for ads, and meta-ads like this one:

Developer Alexandre Devaux (who regularly posts super interesting webXR projects, check out this splat experiment of his) created a threejs page in which one can apply an arbitrary shader to the sphere. There are 5 examples, and you can also write your own, or copy-paste from the Hacker News thread, the smiley face is an highlight.

JSAR DOM

This one is a little exoteric. There is a company called Rokid, they make AR glasses and some pretty interesting software to go along, especially related to human-computer interaction. They seem to have several laboratories, one of which is called M-CreativeLab, and they run a project called JSAR, which is somehow related to the YodaOS used on the Rokid AR glasses. They have developed XSML, yet another 3D HTML-like language, SCSS, a spatial version of CSS, and a TypeScript runtime. Combined together these allow for the creation of web-based 3D scenes that can be embedded in a website or inside a native application. There is support for Babylon.js and Unity, and a Visual Studio Code extension.

There are a couple of demo scenes in their GitHub repository, which can be tested in a XSML runtime. For example we can go here: https://github.com/M-CreativeLab/jsar-gallery-flatten-lion, copy the CDN link https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/M-CreativeLab/jsar-gallery-flatten-lion@main/lib/lion.xsml and paste it into the runtime hosted here: https://m-creativelab.github.io/jsar-dom/

We’ll get the scene in the Babylon.js inspector. The cool thing is that the XSML file is very easy to understand, for anyone who knows HTML.

As a personal aside, my one point of criticism is how much of the documentation, and even how much of the code, is written in Chinese. I strongly believe that computers should be used in English, and that having a lingua franca for technical work is extremely important, but I suspect this is now considered part of my 90s techno-optimism. Coming from a native English speaker it would also probably sound like some sort of xenophobia, luckily that’s not the case.

Simulate 3D plants in the browser

Extremely interesting plant simulations by undergrad (serious kudos!) Max Richter. The graph editor is so nice to play with!

Back in October we missed this rather interesting conference on digitalization and reuse, hosted by the University of Turin and shared on YouTube by Wikimedia Italia.

Ideologically we are pretty much aligned with Wikimedia’s position, but as a regular company that has to make money to survive, we can see the point of charging fees, if they were to generate significant revenue for museums and for those carrying out digitization and preservation efforts. We suspect that the monetization approach imagined by D. M. 161, 11 aprile 2023 is never going to generate significant revenue.

Instead, as the Court of Audit report rightly points out, on page 155, the problems with the current approach are that it neglects dissemination, and prevents the kind of free reuse that generates value, which is not the same thing as revenue. Simply put, many potential users are dissuaded by the very possibility of having to negotiate a license.

Day 2 was way easier than Day 1, taking a slightly more structured approach probably helped a bit.

I had a subtle bug in part 2, which had nothing to do with the common complaints about overlapping numbers in textual forms, and I only sussed it out by generating a CSV of my output. All the test data was handled correctly, but wasn't checking for repeated numerical digits, which only happened on 3 lines of purely numerical data. It's always so different from the actual kind of programming I do.

Recently he wrote this essay which touches on immersive digitization efforts for museums, which obviously hits close to home for us. In particular, this linked presentation by Aaron Cope explains the important concepts after which we’re titling this post. Check out his blog more generally if you’re interested in digital humanities and museums.

We want to provide access to works and places, bridging over limits of time, space and economic resources. This has both a technical aspect, related to the digitalization of 3D objects, of their shapes, visual and acoustic properties, and a legal aspect, related to the various ways in which powerful entities attempt to extract rents from what should be a public good.

The beauty of the web is that it allows regular people to bypass the agenda-setting role of media, we can independently publish, but also independently choose what to focus on, at a time of our choosing. We don’t have to follow the zeitgeist, we can focus on any point of the past, we can recall what we want.

The kind of server technology we choose, with the exception of this blog, is oriented towards permanence. While cloud providers and server-based dynamic technologies have significant recurring costs, our static client-based solutions can just keep going for decades. We don’t participate in the “metaverse”, we put artworks and experiences on the open web, for all to partake.

Quoting Aaron Cope once again:

The web gave us the ability to return to a thing outside the shared (or master) narrative at a time of one’s own choosing. Of shifting time in the service of one’s own interest or in the service of simply coming to an understanding of one’s own interests.
It lowered the barrier to speak to the future and to listen to the past. Not because we know why or can quantify its return in advance but because we believe what is most important is simply the ability to do so.

Our visitors don’t have to be online at a specific time, they don’t have to use a specific device.

Offline museums are obviously massively important, they are unparalleled at preservation tasks, but the access they provide is limited in several ways. The most obvious ones are geography, time and money, but we cannot forget about sensory accessibility, and the sheer lack of space. Most items in any museum collection just sit in an archive, and they will never be shown.

It is also very hard to show items in their context, and particularly in their working contexts. We have worked on the digitalization of a dynamic sculpture, that would be rapidly destroyed if visitors were allowed to physically manipulate it. Similarly it is possible to share digital reproductions of working digital artefacts. For example Dominic Pajak created this BBC Micro that works both on regular devices and in XR. It is a full reproduction of both the hardware and software of a seminal 1980s computer, that none of us have ever had an opportunity to interact with in real life. The only place to experience this kind of computing history physically is the Computer History Museum in Cambridge, UK, but there are massive limitations.

That brings to the legal aspects. Italian legislation places heavy restrictions on the reproduction of cultural heritage artworks, that go way beyond the already draconian copyright regime we live in. For software conservation the situation is even worse, the source code is generally not available, without maintenance everything stops working relatively quickly, and often the only viable conservation strategy is a combination of emulation and blatant piracy.

Our promise is to deliver accessible web experiences that take advantage of immersive technologies, but are not beholden to them, and to do so at a price point that is competitive with regular websites, with no lock-in.

This is so dirty, I love it.

The documentary is definitely getting on my watch list

"27 Years Later, LucasArts’ Afterlife Is Brilliant, Brutal, And Few Know How To Beat It"

It's basically Sim City x Divine Comedy

Bisogna andare in System Settings > Privacy and Security, e cambiare “Allow applications downloaded from” da “App Store” a “App Store and identified developers”. A questo punto aprendo un eseguibile non firmato e tornando alla schermata Privacy and Security si può dare il permesso all’esecuzione.

In alternativa, o per i VST, che sono appunto compilati ma non proprio eseguibili, si può riabilitare l’opzione “from Anywhere”, com’era nelle precedenti versioni di macOS. Basta usare il seguente comando:

sudo spctl --master-disable 

Ovviamente questo è “meno sicuro”, per chi non sa cosa sta facendo.

Per ricordificare un file con ffmpeg basta la buona vecchia sintassi, sostituendo i path e i filename:

ffmpeg -i input.mov output.mp4

Si ottiene un file molto standard, con video h264 e audio AAC, che funziona un po’ sempre. Tuttavia di default viene utilizzato l’encoder software, che usa solo la CPU. Per un video 1920×1080 a 30 frame al secondo questo corrisponde, su un Mac M1, a una velocità di codifica di circa 5x, ma fa anche scaldare il computer abbastanza da accendere la ventola.

Possiamo invece usare l’hardware dedicato, sia per la decodifica del file in ingresso che per la codifica del file in uscita, evitando di caricare la CPU. In questo modo non mi si attiva la ventola, ma la velocità totale è circa 3x.

Con l’argomento

-hwaccel auto

ffmpeg cercherà di utilizzare un decoder hardware. Con gli argomenti:

-c:v h264_videotoolbox -b:v 6000k

si specificano rispettivamente la codifica hardware utilizzando Apple Video Toolbox, e un bitrate medio di 6Mbps, che è già più alto di quello di default.

Il comando completo è quindi:

ffmpeg -hwaccel auto -i input.mov -c:v h264_videotoolbox -b:v 6000k output.mp4

Lo uso per comprimere gli enormi file prodotti da Final Cut Pro. Sospetto che sia in realtà fattibile imparando a usare Compressor.

Per fare un h265 bisogna invece usare:

-c:v hevc_videotoolbox

In tutti questi casi alla enshittification si accompagna la proposta di servizi a pagamento per far sparire il problema. L’esperienza di YouTube viene deliberatamente degradata, poi ci propongono YouTube premium per rimetterla com’era prima, e per molti quegli €8 al mese non sono un problema, li pagano pure volentieri. Mi sta benissimo che le aziende facciano tornare i conti, ma per me vengono prima i principi fondamentali di internet, il contenuto deve essere aperto a tutti. Se mi devo beccare le pubblicità amen, ma i contenuti solo per abbonati sono il male, impoveriscono la società, creano assimetrie di informazioni.

Il problema è che questo fornisce un incentivo perverso a proseguire verso la merda. Non dobbiamo piegarci, dobbiamo votare col portafoglio. Cercando di dare incentivi virtuosi io non pago un centesimo a chi fa enshittification, mentre dono volentieri a chi produce materiale di qualità e lo rende disponibile a tutti. Mi sono abbonato al Post, dono a Wikipedia, a Khan Academy, al Guardian. Dovrei trovare dei buoni giornali senza paywall anche per le notizie spagnole e francesi, si accettano suggerimenti.

Edit: giusto oggi l’ottimo Kottke ha postato questo, che è una posizione simile ma molto meno incazzosa della mia: https://kottke.org/23/10/online-media-and-win-win-patronage

Lo trovate qui: https://github.com/xorgol/threads-RSS

I also had to follow this helpful guide to fix webfinger, because the blog is in a sub-directory: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/pixelfed-%e2%9c%85-mastodon-%e2%9d%8c/#post-16884865

These days we’re working quite a bit with RSS feeds and the concepts of federation and syndication. We have a couple of super basic RSS-feed generators based on web scraping, one is for the news posted by Italian municipalities, the other for Threads.net profiles. Combining something like that with one of the many RSS to ActivityPub bridges it could be possible to follow local news and Threads users right from Mastodon.

Getting closer to our core business, what would a Fediverse of 3D spaces look like? What about a Fediverse of spatial audio?

https://github.com/xorgol/threads-RSS

Luckily a couple of companies have already implemented Gaussian Splatting pipelines, and here we are comparing two of them with photogrammetry.

Here is Luma AI:

[Interactive content removed for privacy. View original post]

Polycam

[Interactive content removed for privacy. View original post]

And finally a photogrammetry computed with PhotoCatch (which uses Apple’s ObjectCapture API, like Polycam’s photogrammetry), converted to GLB in Blender to stay under Sketchfab’s size limit. In practice the only modification is that the textures are in JPEG instead of PNG.

The difference is particularly evident in the textures on the building, and it’s just staggering on the vegetation.

Also there is a small caveat: Luma was given a video, Polycam was given 200 photos, PotoCatch was given around 250 photos. This reflects differences in the platforms themselves.

Update 2023-10-12: There is already an A-Frame component for self-hosting Gaussian Splats, we’re going to try it real soon.

Qui c’è lo script, qui direttamente il feed. Essendo una soluzione raffazzonata ha dei limiti, in particolare non aggiunge nuovi elementi al feed, ma tiene solo gli ultimi 12.

Dato che è un sito costruito con Bootstrap Italia 2.2.0 dovrebbe essere sufficiente sostituire nello script la stringa

"https://www.comune.parma.it"

a quella di un altro comune in modo da ottenere un feed di notizie per qualunque comune italiano che usi la stessa infrastruttura, e sono quantomento la maggioranza. Anzi, bisognerebbe subito modificare il mio script e fare un bell’archivio di tutti i comunicati di tutti comuni d’Italia.

Ovviamente sarebbe ancor meglio se fosse una cosa ufficiale, ma non ho la minima intenzione di mettermi a spiegare cosa sia un feed RSS e perché sia importante.

Indice

1. Creazione del database
2. Installazione di Omeka S
   • 2.1 Impostazione del database
   • 2.2 Rimozione di parse_ini_file
   • 2.3 Caricamento
3. Installazione moduli

1. Creazione del database

Questo step è identico a quello del tutorial sull’installazione di WordPress. Dal Pannello di Controllo del vostro sito su dominiofaidate.com andate nella sezione Database MySQL, cliccate Gestisci Database, poi Crea Database. Come indicato l’operazione richiede qualche minuto, lasciate il tab aperto, vi serviranno i dati per il passo successivo.

2. Installazione di Omeka S

Scaricate Omeka S dal sito ufficiale. A seconda dei moduli che avete bisogno di utilizzare potrebbe però convenirvi una versione più vecchia. Dezippate.

2.1 Impostazione del database

Dalla cartella risultante dalla decompressione dello zip, entrate in omeka-s/config ed editate il file database.ini, inserendo tra le virgolette vuote i vostri username, password, database name e host, copiando i dati dalla schermata Database MySQL di dominiofaidate.

2.2 Rimozione di parse_ini_file

Se provaste a caricare adesso la cartella via FTP, e ad andare sulla pagina di installazione, vedreste un messaggio di errore. Sostituendo la prima riga del file .htaccess nella radice della vostra cartella omeka-s

SetEnv APPLICATION_ENV "production"

con

SetEnv APPLICATION_ENV "development"

Si possono ottenere informazioni più dettagliate sul problema. In sostanza Omeka S utilizza la libreria Lamias per varie funzioni base, a sua volta Lamias usa la funzione di lettura file parse_ini_file, per leggere vari file di configurazione, tra cui quello compilato nello step precedente. Per ovviare al problema bisogna sostituire ogni istanza id parse_ini_file con una combinazione di file_get_contents e parse_ini_string.

In particolare ho editato i file application/config/application.config.php, sostituendo la riga 32 perché legga:

'connection' => parse_ini_string (file_get_contents(OMEKA_PATH . '/config/database.ini'), true, INI_SCANNER_RAW),

E il file /vendor/lmanias/laminas-config/src/Reader/Ini.php, sostiuendo la riga 172 perché dica:

$ini = parse_ini_string(file_get_contents($filename), $this->getProcessSections(), $this->getScannerMode());
        restore_error_handler();

Attenzione: cercando nella cartella rimangono ancora delle istanze della funzione parse_ini_file, andrebbero tutte rimpiazzate alla stessa maniera. Per ora non mi hanno dato messaggi di errore, ma è perché non ho ancora fatto un granché con Omeka dopo averlo installato. Per individuare tutte le istanze di parse_ini_file consiglio di usare la funzione di ricerca di Visual Studio Code.

2.3 Caricamento

Aprite Filezilla, scegliete dove caricare Omeka S sul vostro server, può essere nella radice o in una sottocartella, ovviamente questo influenzerà l’indirizzo a cui il sito sarà raggiungibile. Ad esempio se il vostro dominio fosse http://www.esempio.it e se metteste Omeka nella cartella myomekas, trovereste il sito all’indirizzo http://www.esempio.it/myomekas

Una volta caricata l’intera cartella potete effettuare la configurazione da web, visitando la sottocartella admin. Ad esempio http://www.esempio.it/myomekas/admin o http://www.esempio.it/admin, a seconda di dove avete caricato il materiale.

3. Installazione moduli

Quello che mi ha spinto a scrivere questo tutorial è stata una lieve incongruenza nelle istruzioni di installazione ufficiali dei moduli, dove viene consigliato di caricare gli zip dei moduli sul server e poi dezipparli in loco. A seconda del software utilizzato per la decompressione, però, si rischia di avere un livello di annidamento eccessivo.

Mettiamo ad esempio di voler installare il modulo ZoteroCitations. Scarichiamo ZoteroCitations-1.0.0.zip, lo dezippiamo nella cartella ZoteroCitations-1.0.0, non dobbiamo caricare questa nella /modules del nostro sito, ma la cartella ZoteroCitations al suo interno. Se tutto va bene potrete ora installare il modulo dalla voce Admin > Modules della dashboard del vostro sito Omeka S. Nel mio caso, forse per i parse_ini_file non corretti, nessun modulo veniva riconosciuto come compatibile, non viene interpretata correttamente la stringa ‘^1.0.0’. Andando a modificare il file ZoteroCitations/config/module.ini è sufficiente andare a scrivere la propria versione di Omeka nel campo omeka_version_constraint. Ovviamente per questo esempio ho beccato l’unico modulo che installato che funzionava senza editare questo parametro.

L’unico modulo che non sono ancora riuscito a far andare è Verovio.

1. Scaricare WordPress
2. Creare il database
3. Creare il file wp-config.php
4. Caricare i file via SFTP
5. Procedura di installazione web

1. Scaricare WordPress

Innanzitutto occorre scaricare e dezippare WordPress da qua: https://wordpress.org/latest.zip

Estraete i contenuti dello zip, vi troverete una cartella wordpress-6.3.1/wordpress. I contenuti di quest’ultima andranno caricati nella cartella del vostro server in cui volete che finisca il vostro blog wordpress. Ad esempio potrebbe essere nella radice, se l’intero sito sarà gestito da WordPress, o in una sottocartella /blog.

2. Creare il database

Su dominiofaidate andate in Account>Domini Registrati, Gestisci. Nel Pannello di Controllo del vostro dominio c’è una voca Database My SQL, cliccate su Gestisci Database, poi su Crea Nuovo Database. Tenete aperto il tab, vi serviranno le informazioni ora visibili su server, database, username e password.

3. Creare il file wp-config.php

Sotto wordpress-6.3.1/wordpress trovate un file wp-config-sample.php, fatene una copia e rinominatelo in wp-config.php, poi aprite il file risultante con un editor di testo, come Notepad++.

Copiate le informazioni richieste sul database dal tab lasciato aperto nel punto precedente

/** Database username */
define( 'DB_USER', 'username_here' );

Ad esempio mettete il vostro username al posto di username_here, tenendo le virgolette. DB_CHARSET e DB_COLLATE possono essere lasciati come sono.

Rimpiazzate le righe da 51 a 58 con il codice generato visitando questa pagina https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/salt/, proprio come dicono di fare le istruzioni contenute nel file stesso. Salvate il vostro wp_config.php.

4. Caricate i file via SFTP

Usate FileZilla seguendo le istruzioni fornite da dominiofaidate.com, le informazioni per la connessione FTP sono sotto Domini Registrati > Pannello di Controllo > Dati FTP.

Caricate tutti i contenuti della cartella wordpress.

5. Installazione Web

Con il vostro browser visitate la pagina wp_install.php. Ad esempio, se il vostro dominio è http://www.esempio.it e l’intero sito sarà gestito da WordPress, dovreste trovarla all’indirizzo http://www.esempio.it/wp_install.php

Se invece avete caricato WordPress nella sottocartella blog lo troverete all’indirizzo http://www.esempio.it/blog/wp_install.php

Nella 6.7.2 l’url di installazione è invece: https://esempio.it/wp-admin/install.php

Da qui in poi è una semplice procedura guidata, nella quale sceglierete username e password e potrete modificare il vostro sito con l’interfaccia grafica di WordPress.

We created a reconstruction of the current state of a Greek-Roman theater in Sicily using drone-based photogrammetry, we helped with the acoustical measurements using the MIMO technique, and we created a Unity application that allows users to move around the theater, experiencing both the acoustics and the visuals in different stages of history.

We also created a webXR version, which only shows the current state of the theater, and which doesn’t perform a proper reconstruction of the reverberation yet, but which you can try right now, on any device!

1. Document the development of our solutions for digitizing cultural heritage artifacts
2. Play around with WordPress, and more generally with PHP. Our webXR solutions are mostly incompatible with WordPress, we’d like to develop a couple of plugins to remedy that. The final goal is to make editing modular spaces just as easy as editing text.

Ad esempio con qpdf basta fare:

qpdf --decrypt <source pdf> <destination pdf>

Qui invece c’è un tutorial più esteso: https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/removing-password-from-pdf-on-linux/

Ovviamente se siete su Windows basta installare il Windows Linux Subsystem, su Mac potete installare QPDF da Homebrew.

wget -r http://esempio.com

Abbiamo quindi una cartella “esempio.com” e la nostra cartella locale, che con molta fantasia chiameremo “sorgente”. Troviamo le differenze con diff, cerchiamo i file presenti solo nella sorgente usando il piping e grep

diff -r sorgente/ esempio.com/ | grep "Only in sorgente"

Nel mio caso un sacco di file sono dovuti all’inclusione di three.js, possiamo escluderli dal risultato con una ricerca invertita. Da bravi naive mettiamo la nuova ricerca in coda alla precedente.

diff -r sorgente/ esempio.com/ | grep "Only in sorgente" | grep three -v

Innanzitutto occorre farsi un certificato SSL auto-firmato, usando OpenSSL.

Generare una chiave privata RSA

openssl genrsa -des3 -out server.key 1024

Generare una CSR

openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr

Togliere la passphrase dalla chiave

cp server.key server.key.org
openssl rsa -in server.key.org -out server.key

Generare un certificato auto-firmato

openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in server.csr -signkey server.key -out server.crt

A questo punto bisogna configurare Visual Studio Code perché utilizzi la chiave auto-firmata. Dentro alla cartella del progetto creiamo una cartella .vscode, e al suo interno un file settings.json, dentro cui incolleremo questo codice:

{
"liveServer.settings.https": {
"enable": true, //set it true to enable the feature.
"cert": "D:\\https\\primary.crt", //full path of the certificate
"key": "D:\\https\\private.key", //full path of the private key
"passphrase": "12345"
}
}

A questo punto avviando Live Server funzionerà anche HTTPS.

https://elpais.com/clima-y-medio-ambiente/2022-11-10/quien-es-el-hombre-que-se-pasea-por-la-cumbre-del-clima-con-casco-de-bici.html

Guardando la documentazione dell’interessante videogrep, che meriterebbe un post a parte, ho scoperto Vosk.

Si installa semplicemente con pip install vosk, ma gli esempi nella pagina linkata non sembrano essere aggiornati alla stessa versione che viene installata da pip, almeno con il mio setup. Per ovviare basta andare in “vosk-api/python/example/test_srt.py” (stessa cosa per gli altri esempi) e rimpiazzare il costruttore di Model. Non dev’essere Model(lang="en-us"), ma Model(path="model").

Inoltre potete scaricare il modello di riconoscimento per l’italiano, e dare un path appropriato al costruttore per cambiare lingua.

L’utilizzo è poi molto semplice: python3 test_srt.py "pathToVideo.mp4" > "pathToSubs.srt"

L’accuratezza mi sembra paragonabile ai sottotitoli automatici di YouTube.