• General

    Princeton Dante Project

    I have recently found a very interesting project managed by Priceton University about Dante’s works. On the pages of the Priceton Dante Project, you can read all Dante’s work, including the full text (English and original) of the Divina Commedia, and find various comments and information about them.

  • General,  Linux

    Qoppa PDF Studio: Edit PDF on Linux

    I have just found a very useful application to edit PDF’s on all major operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux): Qoppa PDF Studio. You can edit, add comments, underline and make various other changes to your PDF files with a very easy to use interface.

  • General

    New blog look!

    As you can see, I radically changed the look of my blog. After many attempts, I finally decided what theme to use to replace the old one which served me for a long time!

  • General

    Coffee…

    Today, in a discussion with some friend I found out that there is a lot of confusion about how coffee is prepared and what is its caffeine content. Let’s look at it a bit more closely. First of all, the coffee preparation is a process that technically is called solid-liquid extraction. The water (liquid) goes through the coffee, and in the meanwhile extracts the substances that will give it the taste and the consistence. In other words, it is water that acts as a solvent for certain substances contained in the coffee powder. The preparation of a coffee does not involve steam, and surely is not an extraction with steam!…

  • General

    Send your name to the moon!

    If you want to go to the Moon, you might be interested in this initiative to send a list of all the names who supported the mission of the LRO spacecraft, bringing NASA back to the moon. To have your name added it’s simply enought to fill the form and submit. You’ll be able to download a certificate proving your support to the mission. My certificate is here!

  • General

    Big Buck Bunny arrived!

    Big Buck Bunny, the movie created using the open source software Blender and Gimp, is ready! You can see the trailer directly from the official site or buy the DVD. Great movie!

  • General

    Reiman gardens

    Today I visited Reimand Gardens in Ames, where I could admire various beautiful butterflies in the fascinating Butterfly Wing, where, after a very nice explanation about the varieties of butterflies present in the garden, you can literally walk among butterflies flying around you and admire them in all their beauty. The garden offers also Peter Pan’s path for kids, where you can sit surrounded by a very pleasurable set of trees and flowers, and an external path, where you can admire the roses collection (still not visible due to the long winter of this year), a nice small lake, birds, and of course flowers. You can see the pictures I…

  • General

    Food!

    Someone asked me what I eat in the United States. Well, with some rare exception at lunch, when I’m at work, I exercise my cooking skills and prepare Italian food at home (Some simple examples here). With some effort I was able to reproduce almost everything I used to eat in Italy, and it’s not too difficult to find Italian products like pasta Barilla, various brands of our olive oil and other products. The hardest thing to find is real Espresso coffee, but I’m trying the number of coffees I drink to zero, so its lack is helpful!