ARDUINO

ARDUINO

Nov 22, 2025 | TECHNOLOGY

Arduino is open source hardware.

Open source, magic words for me: software released with a free license that keeps the source code available, i.e., the basic structure that makes up the programs, for any modifications and implementations.

The main feature of Arduino was the Creative Commons license, which allowed for its increasingly widespread use.

But we were talking about open source hardware: Arduino is a printed circuit board that integrates several elements as well as a USB interface for connecting to computers.

Have you ever been unable to find a microcontroller that didn’t cost a fortune?

The students at IDII, the Interactive Design Institute Ivrea, have.

So their professor looked for a solution, giving rise to what is essentially the Maker movement, or rather: Make in Italy.

In practice, the microcontroller was created specifically to meet the needs of those international students inspired by multidisciplinary courses in physics, computer science, design, and creative programming.

It all began in 2003 when Hernando Barragån  discussed his thesis on the Wiring project. 

Wiring allows you to write cross-platform software to control devices connected to a wide range of microcontroller boards.

In 2005, associate professor Massimo Banzi, together with David Cuartielles and David Mellis, created Arduino.

The choice of name was also ingenious: easy to remember and certainly shorter and more appealing than the actual technical name.

The name was taken from a place of relaxation, breaks, refreshment, and coffee: the bar they frequented at the time.

I speak in the past tense because Bar Arduino no longer exists: it is now called Caffè Gioberti. 

The inspiration is still historical, but it differs from the tribute to King Arduino d’Ivrea, king of Italy in 1002. 

In fact, 20 years have passed since then, and many developers have used the small board that has “democratized” technology.

Arduino was recently acquired by Qualcomm, a California-based telecommunications, development, and research company.

Do you have a favorite bar?

If you had to name one of your creations after the cafĂŠ you frequent, what would you call it?

NOKIA

NOKIA

May 4, 2025 | TECHNOLOGY, TECHNOLOGY

Nokia for generation X equals phone.

By the way, may I say that I thought I was a boomer and instead my husband pointed out that we are not?

What generation are you from?

We are of the generation that grew up with the grey phones, with the dial wheel to dial the number and the short wire, attached to a socket somewhere impractical in the house.

We are of the generation that looked for tokens to call from phone boxes.

We are of the generation that when leaving the house went into a ‘no-go’ because geo-localisation was the stuff of science fiction movies.

Then came Nokia.

Actually Nokia is a Finnish city, whose name comes from the Nokianvirta river. 

Luisella you come in whenever you want 🙂

Thanks to its strategic location on the river, Nokia started to create products from the late 19th century: paper, boots televisions gas masks … up to the famous Mobira Cityman. 

1987

The same year as The Joshua Three, Dirty Dancing, the year when GIFs and The Simpsons were born, but above all the year when Ronald Reagan and Michail Gorbačëv signed the INF Treaty on nuclear missiles. 

During the next 20 years, Nokia mobile telephony evolved very fastly: in 1991, the first GSM call was made and by 1998, the vast majority of mobile phones in Europe were manufactured by the Finnish company.

Until 2007, the year of the first iPhone: the smartphone era was born, but Nokia, perhaps on the strength of its Nokia 1100, the best-selling mobile phone ever, did not understand the importance of innovating immediately.

In 2008, the Android operating system with HTC Dream dealt the second blow.

This was followed by top management reorganisations and belated agreements to try and limit losses, but the giant’s feet are now made of clay.

Have you had a Nokia?

This is a small representation:

NokiaNokiaNokia

and then there’s it: we call it the ‘muccino’ from the much dialect word which is a bit the opposite of the English meaning, in fact it means butt.

We call him little, but he is big: he has been my alarm clock for I don’t even remember how many years, but that’s a long time, and he has never missed a beat.

Nokia

Muccino testifies day after day to the quality and validity of a well-made, practically indestructible product, so the question is: it’s not enough to be good, you have to be able to ride time.

Never consider yourself ‘arrived.’

Never stop improving.

Be a visionary?

Also.

Even the Accademia della Crusca has reconsidered the negative meaning of the term. 

Federico Fellini said that the only true realist is the visionary.

In your opinion?

Is reality already a vision of the future?

However, the today we are living does not correspond to the idea of the future that most commonly populated the general imagination.

How many and which movies or books can we cite? 

I would say that unfortunately we have to revise our estimates, in the negative, and by quite a lot too.

Am I wrong?

Can you tell me something optimistic?

PEHI

PEHI

May 25, 2024 | INTERNET, INTERNET, TECHNOLOGY, TECHNOLOGY

Pehi is described as a proximity network.

In what way is this network ‘proximate’? What would you think of?

I found this description:
proximity networks (the networks of friends, neighbours, work colleagues …) represent the potential of relational resources that today’s individual can draw on to meet the challenges of an increasingly complex society.

Pehi may perhaps have something to do with work, but it is independent of colleagues and certainly not a relational resource.

Pehi is a service, which was presented during Venditalia: Vending Exhibition held from 15 to 18 May.

Vending has to do with vending machines, with which I immediately associate coffee vending machines 🙂

This service is a project born from the collaboration between
Confida: Italian Association of Automatic Vending
and
Illimity banking group as PSP: Payment service provider.

Payment service provider corresponds to what we are now used to know as PagoPA i.e. electronic payments by the public administration.

This is the proximity network: the possibility to pay through ATMs.

What do you think?

To do this all you have to do is access the ‘same app you use for food and beverage’ … app that I honestly didn’t know about, to get coffee I’m forever hunting for coins, and you?

I realise we’aren’t in the town here … tell me what the vending machines are like at your place.

If you have the app, just scan the QRcode and you pay ‘in the time of a coffee.’

What do you think?

Pehi is spelled with an h but sounds like the verb to pay.

Do you pehi?

VIRTUAL REFLECTION

VIRTUAL REFLECTION

Apr 28, 2023 | CARS, TECHNOLOGY

Remember when we talked about cooperation? 

We were left with the Improve-ments cue, yet unfortunately my ability to properly follow through on all the things I would like to do has not improved at all.

In any case, there is no use crying over spilled milk assuming you don’t prefer latte 🙂 so in case you missed the post on 2010: Escape from Polis I’ll bring the thread back here as well.

The reflection in question is not metaphorical but virtual.

I am referring to the cameras that some car manufacturers have introduced in place of the classic side glass mirrors.

These mirror cams become another small step in ONLIFE to use an author’s neologism.

Onlife is what is happening and being done as life flows by staying connected to interactive devices.

For now, these are only high-end cars, but do you think that what is still only an option now, could become commonplace for all cars in the future?

Without even talking about cost, the first question that came to my mind is about the consumption that will inevitably reduce battery life.

What is your opinion?

Have you experienced driving using these cams instead of the classic side mirrors?

Do you think you would have difficulty, or do you look forward to this innovation spreading to most vehicles as has already happened with digital dashboards, for example?

Real reflection or virtual reflection?

ChatGPT

ChatGPT

Feb 11, 2023 | TECHNOLOGY

GPT stands for Generative Pretrained Transformer.

Highsounding and even somewhat disturbing terms that “extend their hand” introducing themselves mellowed by the chat prefix.

There is a lot of talk about this “conversational” artificial intelligence able to chat and answer in-depth questions.

The official website lists among ChatGPT’s features the ability to admit mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.

All of this is done through machine learning using an algorithm trained with “phenomenological data” that is, data collected from interaction with language in a given  environment.

This algorithm is identified by another acronym: NLP short for Natural Language Processing.

Natural language would be “human” language as opposed to text data that no longer relies on predefined patterns but evolves flexibly.

Artificial Intelligence learns from us.

I don’t know about you, but I would have an immediate point to make in this regard.

OpenAI, creator of this system tells:

We launched ChatGPT as a research preview so we could learn more about the strengths and weaknesses of the system and gather user feedback to help us improve its limitations. Since then, millions of people have provided us with feedback, we have made several major upgrades, and we have seen users find value in a wide range of professional use cases, including writing and editing content, brainstorming ideas, helping with programming, and learning new topics.

Let’s try to dwell on the listed features:

– Content drafting and editing: indeed, this system can write text, surely better than me who never turn out to be good to the infamous SEO analysis 🙂

– Brainstorming ideas: at the level of creativity, I think to the possibility to create images by inserting only a few words.

In this sense the storm can occur with the results, as the creators themselves explain in this video

– Learning new topics: it also winks at education by presenting the chances as interactive and accessible to students.

On Feb. 1, however, a “pilot subscription plan”  is released with this premise:

We love our free users and will continue to offer free access to ChatGPT. By offering this subscription price, we will be able to help support the availability of free access to as many people as possible.

But aren’t users teaching?

I was also struck by another clarification posted on the official page ChatGPT Optimizing Language Models for Dialogue, a link leads to “aligning language models” and specifies the following:

We have trained language models that are much better at following user intentions than GPT-3, making them also more truthful and less toxic, using techniques developed through our alignment research. These InstructGPT models, which are trained with humans in the loop, are now deployed as predefined language models on our API.

Less toxic … I suppose toxicity refers to how previous projects have learned even elements let’s say not politically correct.

The difference between man and machine is just that: imperfection.

Am I wrong?

Do you think we will get to the point where we will be the ones learning from AI and not vice versa?

SHADOW

SHADOW

Oct 8, 2022 | TECHNOLOGY

Shadow, what is your first thought?

I start by quoting people: Nick. 

Then random: motors

Music

Movies

I could go on, more and more, would you like to mention other examples as well?

The world is full of shadows …

I wonder how the choice to call Shadow even a computer that can be accessed remotely came about.

It is is a powerful Windows PC that allows to use any kind of application without buying hardware, which as you know, tends to be obsolete very quickly, as well as expensive.

A faculty that opens up a kind of new and important revolution with respect to the use of technology in our daily lives.

Or do you see it more as another standardization?

The obvious and immediate benefits come in the form of being able to operate at maximum power without having to shell out large sums in equipment purchases.

Also at the level of the environment, the exploitation of certain materials would certainly be reduced, and above all, the need for disposal of many devices would be reduced, since everyone would be able to operate with the available device, simply by connecting.

However, connection may also be the first downside: if it goes off, all work would stop.

The same if the “server” would break.

And again: the conditions at the beginning may appear advantageous, but the costs could rise uncontrollably, as we are unfortunately seeing.

So there is a risk of finding oneself regretting the old PC, perhaps slow but working.

Light, or shadow?

While we decide, something “dark” undoubtedly is the cloud!

I can’t help but think about the scene in which Jason Segel yells at Cameron Diaz, “nobody knows what the cloud is!”

The infamous cloud: a kind of black hole where our data ends up, or a valuable opportunity?

To USerS 🙂 the harsh judgment.

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