Jumping on the bandwagon of the default apps for 2023 blog trend. What a time to be alive.

After the obnoxious events of last October, I had no hope for November. If you recall, I was exhausted, psychologically drained, and quite certain that I would have started digging. Instead, the thing that happens every time I stop caring happened: I start doing things without overthinking them, I put myself in unpredictable situations, and – as a consequence – things changes.

October was supposed to be ”The Month.” After a complicated summer and an awful September, I had my October well planned. It was meant to be filled with things I wanted to do, fun events, enjoyable travels, and inspiring experiences that could have helped me reverse the spiraling downward momentum of the last few months. Instead, everything went down the toilet.

In early September, I found myself in an emotional slump. For the first time since late 2019, I was overcome by crippling anxiety and disheartenment. It’s not that I hadn’t experienced anxiety since 2019, but I had never reached this level of intensity (which isn’t a bad accomplishment considering I had to navigate a global pandemic). Fortunately, I have some experience with these situations, so I was able to regain control in a week instead of the three months it used to take.

I often use SingleFile to archive the page I like. One day, I’ve found out that Readwise was injecting 2Mb of JavaScript in each page. That is a lot of wasted space. Luckily, there is a (not simple) way to filter out custom tags from archived pages.

I know, I am late, but I have a good excuse: I was on a short holiday break in my nearby town of Terracina. I had also planned to publish this article on one of those lazy afternoons. However, when I arrived, I noticed that the mobile connection was practically non-existent (I hadn’t seen 1kbps since the early 2000s), so I gave up. No real damage, I suppose. I guess nobody lost any sleep over it.

ElevenLabs offers the best text-to-speech API on the market, and it is my go-to service when I want to have very good results. I had to add text-to-speech to Unity’s demos a lot of times in the last months, and I decided to share the basic script I use to do it.

I am writing a series of posts about the development of a new blog theme. In the second part, I describe how I conquered my fears, and implemented a responsive layout and a hamburger menu in pure CSS.

Time tracking is a popular productivity technique. Many people swear by it as the most effective intentionality tool. However, it never worked for me. It made things worse. Here, I explain the three reasons why it failed me.

Notwithstanding the Sud-European heatwave, I survived. This is already a good result for July, per se. Hailstorms and high-speed winds scourged Northern Italy, while forest fires tormented Southern Italy. I, in the middle, only had to endure 45°C. If you look at this in perspective, it is not so bad. However, surviving was not enough. While the world slowed down, burdened by the sluggish progression of an overheated July, I felt more in tune with myself.