Venice in the morning.

The grand canal of Venice with two boats and a Bastille in the background, with a slightly cloudy sky.

Vincent’s post about Tinylytics recognising www sub-domains is a welcome one. I’ve had a domain setup for a week in Tinylytics that was recording zero hits. I thought it was because I placed the script tag in the header. But, no: I naturally forgot the “www” when registering the URL. 🤦

Dealing with the coin laundry driers suck. You buy more time by putting more money in, but the laundry points don’t make it clear that you’ve already paid for time and all you need to do is press start on the machine. I paid for drier time I didn’t want twice on this trip.

I was wondering what to do for my second day in Bologna until something told me that Florence was less than an hour away. So I decided to take a day trip.

Florence skyline, with the dome of the cathedral, and buildings alongside the river.

Spent a bit of time in the small but lovely university botanical gardens in Bologna this morning. Walking around a new city, I’ve found myself being attracted to parks and gardens. A bit more serene than the hussle and bussle one finds at buildings or squares.

Under the shade of green trees of various species.

Breakfast in Parma. Naturally parmesan cheese is on the menu.

Plate on a place-mat with a wholemeal dinner roll, some parmesan cheese, slice of Jarlsberg cheese, and prosciutto. A silver knife and fork are beside it.

Helped someone set up their eSim this morning. His phone only allowed an eSim setup by scanning a QR code, so I had to take a photo of the Airalo QR code, just so he could take a photo of my photo. The process worked, but the experience was utter crap (fix your software, Samsung).

Front of the Palazzo del Governatore, in Parma, on a warm and lazy Sunday afternoon. The street was closed off for an event but most of the other streets were just as quiet.

Front of the Palazzo del Governatore, a two story palace made of yellow stone, with a clock tower in the center. The front consists of umbrellas for outdoor dining of the cafe. In front of that is a street made of cobblestones, surrounded by bollards, and with trolly-bus overhead wires. The sky was sunny and cloudless.

On the shore of lake Como. Plenty of boat activity on the water today. For myself, I was happy to stay on dry land.

Lake Como, a large body of water with some small waves, with a fountain in the middle distance, with green mountains in the background, with a slightly cloudy sky

Oof! It looks like one of my friends I’m traveling with, the one who did all the planning and was the most enthusiastic about seeing the places we’re visiting, has come down with something and is out for the day. Poor guy. I feel so bad for him. Really unfortunate timing.

View from the top of Torre Castello San Vigilto, in Bergamo.

Houses near the terracotta tiled roofs near the top of a hill, in the near distance, with mountains in the background

On the subject of Google Maps, I think it’s time the app had something akin to tabs, so we can have multiple instances of Google Maps at one time. If I have a journey in progress, and I need to search for something at our destination, the only way I know how to do it is to stop the active journey, do the search, and start the journey again from scratch (which involves entering all the details again).

I’ve started getting around this by opening Google Maps in a browser tab, but it’s just not as good as the mobile app. Having separate map tabs would go a long way here: have the active journey in one tab, do searches in another, and simply switch between them without loosing anything. You could even use it to plan jouneys in advanced, then when you’re ready to start them, just go to the tab and tap “Start”.

A resonably elegant solution to avoid backing out of active navigations or typing things in three or four times.

TIL you can save planned journeys in Google Maps for later. You make the plan, select a suggestion from the list, and instead of starting it, you “Pin” it. Then you can recall that journey from the “Go” tab. Not the most intuitive UI there is, but I’m glad that this feature exists.

A day of site-seeing around Milan. Going through the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II on our way to Duomo di Milano, the cathedral.

The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, an open air mall with four spokes eminating from a central point. Around three stories up is a glass ceiling with a dome at the central spot. This was taken from one of the longer spokes, facing the dome and the opposite long spoke that opens out to the plaza.

Another sunning building, the Duomo di Milano. A lot more “traditional” than the Sagrada Família but still very impressive.

Inside the Duomo di Milano, the cathedral. Looking through the stone pillers and valted ceiling towards the alter and stain glass window at the back of the cathedral.

On The Reddit Strike

Ben Thompson has been writing about the Reddit strike in his daily updates. I like this excerpt from the one he wrote yesterday:

Reddit is miffed that Google and OpenAI are taking its data, but Huffman and team didn’t create that data: Reddit’s users did, under the watchful eyes of Reddit’s unpaid mod workforce. In other words, my strong suspicion is that what undergirds everything that is happening this week is widespread angst and irritation that everything that was supposed to be special about the web, particularly the bit where it gives everyone a voice, has turned out to be nothing more than grist to be fought over by millionaires and billionaires.

That, though, takes me back to Bier’s tweet; the crazy thing about the Internet is that said grist is in fact worth fighting over.

It’s easy for me to say this, as I’m not a user of Reddit, but I have full sympathy for the striking moderators.

You spend much of your free time volunteering to keep a community on a site, producing value for it’s users and owner, with the expectation that the site would recognise your efforts and reciprocate by serving your needs with, say, an API. I can understand how enraging that would feel when they turn around and “alter the deal” while expecting the mods to continue as if nothing has changed.

So good on the moderators showing that they too have leverage.

And as to OpenAI using the API to train its model: well yeah I can understand the CEO of Reddit feeling shitty about that, but I would’ve hope he would have the ingenuity to solve that while maintaining the needs of those that actually provide value to the site. Either he doesn’t which, given that he’s one of the founders, I find hard to believe; or he just doesn’t want to.

Arrived in Milan. It could just be the trams, but this feels like the closest city to Melbourne that I’ve visited so far. Of course, Melbourne doesn’t have buildings like the Castello Sforzesco.

Front of  Castello Sforzesco, a castle, with a large tower above the front gate, with a slightly cloudy sky

This safe uses a curious choice of font for the keypad. I’d guess they wanted to go with something more interesting than boring Helvetica? But they didn’t go all in with maintaining the allusion, breaking it for the B, which would normally be shown in lower-case on a real seven segment display.

A numerical keypad on a safe with digits 0-9 and the letters A and B on either side of the zero in a seven segment display font. The left side of the B is a solid line, used to distinguish it from the loops of the B which are represented as they would appear on a seven segmented display. To the left is the safe's breading, which is a T in a circle.

Currently reading: The Song of Significance by Seth Godin 📚

Genova’s got this fun little lift near where I’m staying. It travels along rails to the end of the corridor, then goes around the bend to a transfer station, where it transitions to a traditional lift that rises to the street level at the top of the hill. Such a unique little thing.

Empty lift car showing red fold-up seats and hand-loops on the ceiling. There are windows on all three sides of the inside of the car showing the corridor.The horizontal section of the lift, which is a corridor with rails heading into the hill and fluorescent lights on the right wall.

Walking part of the Cinque Terre trail today. It was hard work — lots of steep runs of stairs going up and down — but it was great to be able to get out into nature for a bit of a hike.

Shot of the coastline along the Gulf of Genova, on a slightly cloudy day, with large hills descending down to the Ligurian Sea. Photo shot through branches of nearby trees.