Clean codebase with Knip, harvesting energy for headset, agentic AI, my new site.

Un progetto DIY di una lampada da comodino controllata con un gesto della mano

Thoughts on shifting from U.S.-based software to European alternatives, touching on privacy, digital sovereignty, AI tools, and personal DIY projects.

Insegnare le basi dell’elettronica e dell’informatica con Arduino alle scuole medie é utile e possibile, anche se non si é esperti.

Indice completo del Percorso Arduino per Scuole Medie: 9 lezioni pronte all’uso per docenti non tecnici. Arduino in classe senza stress e senza preparazione complessa.

Notes and readings from the web: music coding, reflections on modern software, local AI models, visual book recognition, jQuery 4 and new phishing techniques

Foto-trappole, accelerometri e interazioni fisiche per raccontare la ricerca scientifica, dal lato di chi costruisce gli strumenti.

Un percorso didattico su Arduino pensato per i professori delle scuole medie: 8-9 lezioni pratiche, codice semplificato, materiale pronto e una lista della spesa sostenibile per portare davvero le STEM in classe, anche senza competenze tecniche avanzate.

Software open source per fare semplici quiz vero/falso da utilizzare a scuola.

November it’s running fast to the end: my Bookbuddy app moves slowly, something nice with Arduino and makers stuff.

October’s tech picks: updates to my Timy app (timesheet + planner), ideas on data centers in space, fractals in JavaScript, Three.js for 3D web, Edge AI with Microsoft’s course, and Balena WiFi Connect for easy Raspberry Pi setup.

Lezione n.6 del corso di Arduino per scuole medie. Costruzione di una barriera laser.

Sometimes we need to build things from scratch.

Un pulsante per accendere un led.

Working on my framework and Replit exploration

Alcuni led con resistenza.

Discover Invisible UX, AI tools (Neuron AI, Ollama RAG), gesture interfaces (HoloCraft, micro:bit), GEO optimization & weather radar insights.

Come interrogare un database in linguaggio naturale usando PHP e il framework Neuron AI. Un progetto passo-passo per costruire un data analyst virtuale capace di esplorare i dati di un CRM/ERP senza scrivere query manuali.

Discover AI trends, tools like Make.com & MCP, hands-on experiments with landing pages, PWA tips, and more in my June tech reading roundup.

GDPR-compliant tracking now available in AdAdmin with CMP support and TCF-based consent control.

Con una Wemos D1 Mini, un sensore reed e un display, abbiamo monitorato per quasi due anni l’attività notturna del criceto, raccogliendo dati e riflettendo sul tema del benessere animale.

Spesso pensiamo alla scienza come a una serie di colpi di genio individuali. Ma la storia ci mostra che molte grandi scoperte sono avvenute “in parallelo”, come se il mondo fosse pronto per quel passo.

May was a month of hands-on creativity, AI exploration, clever hacks, and deep reflections on tech evolution.

Batteria dell’auto a terra? Eh già, se la macchina sta ferma capita. Questa volta la carico con l’alimentatore da banco.

Tech readings in April

IR transmission it’s not as simple as it seems.

List of articles and interesting readings collected in March 2025

Sensori ad infrarossi per sentire la presenza e misurare le distanze. Una barriera ad infrarossi con VS1838B.

Free time at school

A simple quiz tool for my students, playable at school in the classroom.

Quando ti fai delle domande…

A led matrix and an accelerometer in a wooden case: pixels act as single balls in a box, a realistic and interactive device.

Testing a simple lightbox javascript in my wordpress theme.

I’ve built a custom Arduino bike speedometer

An Arduino library to program the Penguin Bot by Elegoo in an easier way,

The Rabbit r1 has been the talk of the tech world lately, here you can find a review after a week of hands-on experience by a tech enthusiast.

Analizzo il codice del Penguin Bot di Elegoo per capire se ci sono dei pin liberi per collegare altri sensori/attuatori.

Un trucco per generare sempre password sicure e, soprattutto, memorizzabili.

Thoughts about Venn’s diagram and making software.

Breve riassunto del progetto del telefono vintage

Very clever project using a simple AI (linear regression) on Arduino. https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Use-AI-in-Arduino

Appunti per tenere traccia dell’attività svolta.

An educational project for my mechatronics students, a tube equipped with two LDR sensors to measure the speed of a ball inside the tube.

How to add a link preview to all the links of your site

Three different ways to use AdAdmin software to rotate and sell banners on web sites.

Solo un test di scrittura con AI.

Alcuni appunti riguardo all’installazione di una versione privata di un software GPT come ChatGPT.

A nice solution found by chatGPT

A javascript error in CMP blocks my site.

With version 4.0.4 you can use clickTag to track clicks everywhere.

Costruire un Theremin con Arduino Nano e due sensori

Alcuni appunti sull’utilizzo di ChatGPT, occhio con la matematica.

This is a collection of articles I’d like to read.

Collection of notes and thoughts on Wordpress Gutenberg blocks development.

Notes about Core Web Vitals optimization challenge

A PHP function to to quickly search complex, nested php structures for specific values.

Use scrollIntoView instead of jQuery animate.

Collection of links and notes while approaching React.js, next.js and related topics.

Una serie di appunti per la realizzazione di un bot di controllo di un gruppo Telegram, non è un vero e proprio tutorial, ma è sicuramente utile per ripercorrere il progetto.

When press on “Update” refresh a custom metabox under gutenberg editor.

Collection of links related to developers’ stuff

Collection of links about projects and arduino community

Collection of links about Machine Learning topic, built while studying ml

Version update out now.

Coinbase commerce, user permissions flags and more improvements

How to customize css styles in ad server AdAdmin

A sticky banner on the footer with AdAdmin

How to properly configure a vignette ads position in AdAdmin

Document.write is going to be obsolete and deprecated…

Update info news.

Re-use the same ad position in the same page

Using video banners in AdAdmin

Corso base su reti neurali, elenco slide:

Seconda parte

Updated version info.

Come riciclare vecchi cellulari e rientrare in contatto con la natura

New version updates

How to update AdAdmin software.

A lot of code in the last two months brought AdAdmin in a new professional level in ad server software

Google Photo non sarà più gratis senza limiti

Standard web banner sizes, both mobile and desktop (banner should be responsive).

AdAdmin software is a full featured ad server that delivers ad banners to your websites. Last version has added support for location based marketing, with geo-location.

Cos’è e come scegliere il rivestimento conforme (o conformal coating) quando si stampano i PCB

Seconda parte del tutorial su come stampare PCB

Google sheet trick to count cells

Stufo di saldare? Proviamo a fare i PCB

Come costruire un saturimetro rudimentale con Arduino, modificando un sensore KY-039 per il battito cardiaco.

Retrofitting di un vecchio zaino, hacking di un oggetto vintage, l’ho migliorato? O l’ho peggiorato?

Snippets for sending emails with Wordpress

Come recuperare brillantemente un vecchio Lumia 435 con Windows Phone. Eh sì! Si può fare con qualunque cellulare.

Scegliere le icone, cambiare lo sfondo e altre amenità possono costare caro.

Sharing a taxonomy between different post types

Use mysql variables to create a counter in SQL, PHP code to use an SQL counter and what does the i mean in mysqli?

How to modify the language attribute in your Wordpress theme using a specific value

How I’ve beat the php mysterious fatal error unknown in Wordpress caused by caching plugin WP Fastest Cache

Sometimes Instagram embed doesn’t work, why?

Modificare il sistema di irrigazione della Claber per utilizzarlo con Arduino e una app realizzata ad hoc

A code snippet to prevent WordPress to send notification emails when you manually create new users. It uses a pluggable function.

A used valve modified with a Wemos becomes a connected sprinkler for my plants on the balcony garden.

Il condizionatore di casa non è connesso ad Internet e non può essere azionato da remoto, possiamo migliorarlo e renderlo IOT? Ecco come controllare il condizionatore da remoto.

The standard air conditioner not connected you already have can be hacked to be used with a smartphone

Come trovare cancellare in blocco messaggi di Gmail e fare pulizia nella propria casella.

I’ve hacked a set of wooden letters with leds.

Trovata online per 5 euro e rivitalizzata.

Un Dart Fener parlante: ti metti davanti a lui e gli parli e lui risponde con delle frasi del film, rigorosamente a caso

Collegare una scheda ESP8266-01 ad uno schermo OLED è complesso, perché la scheda ESP8266-01 ha solo 8 pin di cui solo 4 utilizzabili.

Brand new avatars for WordPress Gravatar service

Add author’s image in WordPress without a plugin

Hai presente quando corri in stazione per prendere il treno al volo e, quando arrivi, ti accorgi che il treno ha 12 minuti di ritardo?

Pictures from the retrofitting of the old Lael voltmeter

I’ve learned a lot of things by disassembling and changing the way an old tester works

Old browser go home! :-)

A SEO filter on wp_title

Some more informations about the WPLight system

PDF previews needed in media gallery?

A toy gun hacked to become a distance measuring tool

Meteo site with fantastic wind visualization. There are available also other parameters, but the wind visualization is really perfect! Try…

Useful code to highlight text occurences in search results or in a text. How to highlight text in a string…

A page flip tool

If you want to remove the row action ‘view’ from the admin posts list within a specific custom post type…

Generator of avatars for community with funny unicorns images. [try unicorns avatar generator]

Flat avatars

Robot avatars for Wordpress

Convert an image to data:image to use inline

Old style patterns with pixels in css

Css3 helper

Custom li list item with pseudo classes

A relais triggered with a whistle!

Order by meta field in category.php

Customize your wordpress embed

A mess in Wordpress head tag?

Twitter doesn’t want you to see how many tweets your links did.

Bye bye twitter

Adding rel=”nofollow” to external link is a good SEO practice.

Social buttons for wordpress

Wordpress is optimizable?

Just one category for each post

Archives go home! :-)

Email problems with wordpress

Sometimes you find messages like “WordPress 4.1.1 is available! Please update now.“, in italian it is: “È disponibile WordPress 4.1.1! Aggiorna…

WP SUPER CACHE is one of the most used WordPress plugin for cache, but probably there is a small bug…

If you want to add your logo or the logo of your client above the wordpress login you have to…

To get date with get_the_time in Italian you should specify italian (it_IT) in the WP_LANG constamt in your wp_config.php file.…

VK SOCIAL METRICS VK.COM, also known as Vkontakte, is an important russian social network, which has over 270 million users.…

I’ve found a similar function to retrieve the number of followers of a Google Plus page, inside WordPress, but it…

You can use my plugin, which is totally custom for layout (you can change the image of the pop up…

Hi, I’ve made this tool for fast reblogging. It helps lazy authors to download images and upload directly in your…

I’ve found this article by Shawn McCool and I think it’s good for every developer, if you’re an expert probably…

I’ve found this tool to make online mind maps, just copy and paste the text with terms (properly indented) to…

This PHP function lets you reorder records on a table when you have a field used for save the position.…

Building a spider or a bot needs some knowledge of regular expressions, you must know and use preg_match or preg_match_all…

This small function returns an encoded string to embed images, inline, inside your html/css code and reduce the number of…

If you need an Email Validator Function, consider this version that includes also the check against common temporary mail services…

Instagram has an official API to interact with its database of images and users. If you have enough time to…

What is a spider? A spider is a program that automatically navigates web pages to find informations. These informations can…

If you’ve just switched to FULLTEXT indexes and you’ve just started playing with MATCH… AGAINST syntax, but you always get…

More than two years ago I wrote a post about sending push notifications from php to an iOS app called…

Codeigniter (aka CI) is an MVC framework that helps you building websites. You don’t know what is MVC? Bad. It’s…

Cron is a software utility, a time-based job scheduler in Unix-like computer operating systems. People who set up and maintain…

Often bloggers and site owners use galleries to have a greater number of pages, adding pages means adding clicks. Each…

Small PHP code snippet to make a quick detect if the browser that requests your page is on a mobile…

How to detect if your user is using a mobile device in Javascript? You can do it by checking the…

Just released a plugin for WordPress that can be used to track your posts on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. When…

Disqus is a very nice tool to handle comments better and probably I will add it here soon, but I’ve…

Ok. You’ve added custom fields in wordpress, but how can you remove them? How to delete custom fields wordpress Two…

When your WordPress site has a great number of requests it could happen that your server can’t handle all the…

Here is a list of thirteen tips that can be usefull for your queries. If you know more tips send…

Twitter share button and Facebook share button are the most used buttons to share links on Internet. You can read…

I’ve written un updated version of the Facebook Connect Tutorial, you can find it in the top menu of Barattalo.it.…

When you add facebook like button to your site, probably, you also want to save the number of likes of…

When  you have to log something with php you can use fopen to create  a file and then use fwrite…

If you have to add an overlay to a site, here is a fast way to do it with an…

Hi, I’ve a big table with thousands of mp3 links. Sice these links come from an old database, many of…

So, you want to invote all your friends but the old hack doesn’t work anymore? With the last facebook friends…

UPDATE: 2013-12-04 I’ve made a method in the Mini Bots PHP Class that lets you retrieve images from instagram without…

Here is a function to read the concerts for a myspace band page. This code retrieves the “shows page” for…

This is a small function included in the Minibots Class that converts an address to a couple of coordinates Latitude,…

This small function returns the date (with the format you want) of the previous monday from a given date. If…

Sometimes in javascript you have the variable that you need to use in the url, as a parameter passed in…

How to get the file name of the page? When you need to read the file name of the current…

When you make a web application that let the user insert video embeds coming from YouTube or from Vimeo, or…

I have had to install phpbb forum on a website that already had a user table and I want to…

Twitter api authentication Since the 31 of august 2010, twitter made its API more secure, stopping basic authentication calls. So,…

Wikipedia, the collaborative and multilingual encyclopedia project, has a lot of usefull terms defined in its database, you can find…

UPDATE: 2013/11/18 This code no longer works, but you can check a similar function here: Sending push notifications with php…

Hi, I’ve modified the Mini Bot Class, I’ve fixed the Facebook status update and I’ve implemented the function to post…

I’ve spent about 30 minutes to find a javascript embed to print out a custom thumbs list of flickr photos,…

The “.htaccess” is a configuration file that works at directory level on the web servers (on Apache, not on Microsoft…

With these headers you can force a download from php, for example, to let the user download a csv frmatted…

This is a small piece of code that I use since many years. It removes all slashes from $_GET and…

Now there are 17 bots included in this class! Well I’ve updated the mini bots class with some new things:…

UPDATE 2013/12/12: Now, in the  Mini Bot Class there is a version of this function that is still working. You…

This small function receive a text as input and returns an html text with links if the source text contains…

Sometime designers put form labels and instrucions into html inputs. One of the common uses is for login boxes when…

I’ve found this great mini bot from Alste blog, and I’ve decided to add it to the mini bot class.…

I’ve just updated the Mini Bot Php Class with an improved version of the twitterInfo function, here is the code…

Ping-o-matic is a service that calls (ping) server engines and popular services to notify them that you have new contents…

Inside mp3 files there are often some usefull informations stored. Those data are called “id3 tags” and deal with Author…

Suppose you have a login form and you want to send the form when user press enter on his keyboard…

Spiders and bots let you take services from other web sites, this could be very cool, but also this could…

This PHP function search for tables in the active db, match table’s name with the regular expression passed as first…

This is a very simple script that starts from a string date in format yyyy-mm-dd and return the age. To…

I’ve found those functions around in the internet and I put them here just to remind how to strip tags…

This ASP function counts files of a specified extension inside a folder: this is done by creating a file system…

This class can solve many problems coming from user generated html content or to fix html content before making some…

This small php function is a recursive remove directory that remove non empty dirs recursively. It enters every directory, removes…

This small PHP function lets you calculate the dir size entering each sub dir and making the sum of the…

I’ve modified the previous post to use mysqli instead of mysql. Was it necessary? I think it was good step…

Here is my personal collection of 10 php function that I always include in my database function library. I think…

Sometimes it’s necessary fix data on the database. I had to fix on a Microsoft database: /* MSSQL syntax */…

I’ve added three more bots to the Mini Bots Php Class, now the version number is 1.4 and it has…

This function returns an array with the elements allowed in a ENUM or SET mysql field. This can be usefull…

It has happened to me that files uploaded with a small CMS cannot be downloaded with a FTP client for…

This post is part of the Facebook Connect Tutorial and it will show how to add “post to wall” function…

I’ve found this nice small bot on the www.php.net site, thanks to the author of the script on the preg_replace…

UPDATE: This function has been inserted in the Mini Bots PHP Class Here is a function that let you copy…

From a given url this function retrieves page title, meta description, keywords, favicon, and an array of 5 images to…

This function allows you to send an HTML email with a file attachment. To do this it’s necessary to read…

If you have to test if a local file exists you will probably use the php file_exists function, but if…

The first functions make short urls using tinyurl.com service. It’s a very popular function on the web, you can find…

This function validate a mail address in a smart way: if the address to validate has a correct syntax (checked…

Those two functions are usefull when you’re making Google Maps applications: When you show the coordinates of a point, it’s…

Google has many usefull functions that give you data fast, such as cinema infos, or for meteo forecasts. I think…

Thanks to Bank of Italy (Banca d’Italia), there are free exchange rates data that are easy to retrieve and parse,…

This class was built to handle session variables, I made this class because once I had to use session variables…

Javascript example for measuring distances on a Google Maps with a ruler.

In CSS version 2 there is a “min-height” property, but it doesn’t work in the same way in every browser,…

This function uses php server variables to detect the “possible” language of the browser of the connected user. This let…

Sometimes I’ve had to quickly put in a page a simple slideshow, the first times I’ve searched a lot around…

I’ve found this blog where Matthias Burtscher converted the Marker Cluster (like the Phoogle2) for Google Maps API v.3. Since…

This is a memo, because at the moment I don’t need to use this new API from Google, but since…

This two function returns the number of users connected to your site. Since HTTP is asyncronous, the only way to…

When you search in Google for a string, Google highlights with bold text the words you’ve searched in the results…

If you want to click on objects, anchors, table cells or any other html element to emulate the javascript behaviour…

If you are using JQuery framework and you want to set up the default value of some text box in…

This function is similar to the print_r php function: it runs over the elements of an object recursively and put…

Use with phoogle modified class: (see an example here) To use it in the phoogle modified class just turn it…

If you don’t use any javascript framework such as jquery.js or prototype.js the combo object isn’t so easy to use,…

Is there a css definititon to make cross browser opacity? Yes. I found this, and it seems to work: div.opacized…

How to add 2 days to a date in PHP? There are many ways to add days to a string…

This code does the same thing that Ucfirst function makes in PHP. “Ucfirst” means “Uppercase first letter”. ASP doesn’t have…

I’ve used so many time the php function ereg_replace that when I have to use ASP (‘cause sometimens you have…

When you have an html form and you want only alphanumerical [a-z0-9] chars in your input, you can use this…

If you have a user input that may contains some error you can try to check the spelling using Google…

This small code parse a javascript float number to a string. It converts the number to a string and let…

I was looking for a php class to use on Rockit.it to geo reference band, festivals, labels and other stuff.…

This is a thumb generator php class. I’ve been searching a lot for some code to make good thumbs on…

I’m italian and I always need to use special chars like è é à ù. The same need belongs to…

A couple of simple functions thar returns the first value and the first row of a result set. Very usefull.…

Mark each anchor tag (<a href…) with rel=”blinking” to make the tag blink (not very clever, but sometimes useful). This…

Php function that return true if the directory specified is empty. $bool = is_emptydir("./images"); function is_emptydir($which){ $dh=dir($which); $emptydir=true; while ($file=$dh->read())…

Simple old function to load a file into a string. $s = loadStrFile("file.txt"); function loadStrFile($filename) { $handle = fopen ($filename,…