• General

    The EU plans to fight planned obsolescence

    The European Union plans to address planned obsolescence. While the resolution was voted by the EU Parliament in 2017, and the implementation is still undefined, I think this is very important move, and it is relevant for a lot of modern devices, particularly electronics, but also home appliances. Want some examples? Try to replace the battery of an electrical toothbrush or of a smartphone without causing any damage.

  • General

    Happy 2019

    I wish a happy new year to all my friends and colleagues, and I hope the new year will bring less divisions and a more rational and unite approach to the challenges we are facing.

  • Free software,  General

    Bug bounty program from the EU for FOSS

    The European Union is starting a bug bounty program for key Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) used in the Union. Further details can be found here. This seems an excellent initiative to support broadly adopted free-software products, which hopefully will evolve in stable funding initiatives for relevant projects.

  • CFD,  General,  OpenFOAM,  Research,  Science

    Contributing research work to open-source projects

    As the main developer of OpenQBMM, an add-on for OpenFOAM which implements quadrature-based moment methods for the solution of generalized population balance equations, I have been recently involved in the transfer of the copyright on the OpenQBMM code base to the OpenFOAM Foundation, to be able to contribute the corresponding source code to them. I summarize here some motivations, lessons learned and some advice that may be useful to others who want to follow the same path. Why contribute? This is a question several have asked. Why contribute a code base that took four years of work to be build (and quite some nights, holiday, weekends too), including research, overcoming…

  • General

    Leaving social media

    I have recently stopped using my personal social media accounts after several attempts to balance the use I had for them. My motivations are a quite complex mix of privacy concerns, tiredness of the social media bubble, in which too many seem to feel authorized to be unacceptably aggressive, serious concerns about the role social media platforms are playing in our society, and their slow, often only cosmetic, response to address these concerns, and lack of actual need to use them. Discussing these aspects could be an interesting topic for a series of blog posts or for a conversation in the future. For now, if you want to stay in…

  • General

    Developing for OpenFOAM on Windows 10 – Part 4

    Customizing colors in the WSL terminal The default colors in the Ubuntu WSL terminal are not very readable. In particular, the blue color does not read well on the black background. While it is possible to customize colors in bash, a simpler workaround is to change colors using the Windows settings. To do this, click on the Ubuntu logo in the top-left corner of the WSL terminal window, and select Properties. This will open a dialog box with the specific settings to customize the launcher of the Ubuntu WSL terminal: Choose the “Colors” tab, and set: Screen text: Black Screen background: White Popup background: leave unchanged (purple) Popup background: White…

  • CFD,  General,  Linux,  OpenFOAM,  Windows

    Developing for OpenFOAM on Windows 10 – Part 3

    Enabling support for graphical applications in WSL with Xming The Windows Subsystem for Linux does not officially support GUI applications. However, it is possible to successfully run several of them using a Windows-based X server as Xming. The steps to follow are simple: Download Xming (please, consider a donation to support the developer!) for your version of Windows Install it accepting the default settings Open the Ubuntu bash terminal and type echo "export DISPLAY=:0" >> .bashrc Load the settings with the command: source ~/.bashrc Test the setup as follows: Start the Xming server on Windows. An icon will appear in the notification areas Type paraview in the Ubuntu bash terminal.…