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I've always been very sensible about environmental issues and sustainable development. I'm really convinced that our society can develop and improve without burning out all Earth resources.

I'm linking below the video of Paul Connett's conference on Zero Waste: a sustainable alternative to waste management.

Paul Connett is professor of Chemistry at the St. Lawrence University (NY - USA) and is very active in fighting incineration and landfills by promoting a different approach.

If you are interested in audio/video conversions and general manipulation you should really have a look at ffmpeg.

ffmpeg it's a little command line utility which will let you do some really great things with multimedia files.

During the time, I collected some examples of usages of ffmpeg which I found useful. I posted here some and continue to update this page everytime I find a new ffmpeg trick.

I worked on my cousin's notebook to fix a strange problem: the notebook was freezing randomly and sometimes after freezes it started emitting a strange beep.

Well, I investigated the problem for some time, used some antivirus, anti spyware etc. but the problem was still there.

Then I started looking for similar problems on the Internet where I finally found this forum post.

The more I use Python, the more I love it.

This programming language is simply awesome: with it's simple api and the huge amount of freely available additional modules creating complex applications is really easy and fast.

For example less than 15 minutes ago I wondered: how can I capture an image of the computer screen using Python?

If you don't know Python you might think that this could be pretty a complex task.

I own a Toshiba Tecra A7 notebook. I've got it on April 2008 and I was pretty satisfied by it.

Unfortunately, after I got back home last September I started having problems with the notebook. After some time with intense computation (video encoding, compiling software, etc..) with 100% CPU the system simply shut down.

So, I started investigating the problem. The reason, confirmed by the thermal sensors, was pretty obvious: overheating. Some times the CPU passed 100°C.

Thanks to the help of jchan, christopher_skauss, whispero and the free time of Christmas Holidays I've been finally able to create two release candidates for Drupal CSS module.

The CSS module is a Drupal module which add inline CSS editing to Drupal nodes. This is pretty useful for Drupal power users / designers which are able to create CSS based complex node designs.

Maybe you already know that, in some countries, the number 13 is associated with bad luck and some people are really frightened of it.

Personally I don't care much of all this stuff.. I don't believe such things.

But seems that Drupal version 5.13 had pretty an unlucky life given that it had been out just for a couple of days and later replaced by the new version 5.14.

The next 3 days I will attend the UPA Europe 2008 which will be held in Torino, my city.

In the last year I've got more and more interested in usability in general. It's really a fascinating research area and I judge it essential in the success of a IT project.

I've been pretty lucky that the conference is held in my city, just at about 30 minutes from my home. Moreover, as a student and a UPA-I member, I got a very cheap price. Cool, isn't?

X.org version 7.4 with xorg-server 1.5 introduces a new way of handling input devices (keyboards, mouses, touchpads, trackball, etc..).

Instead of using some configuration rules in xorg.conf like in Xorg 7.3 and previous versions, input devices are now automatically configured and enabled in Xorg once the system found them.

If you are a web developer, sooner or later, you will have to play (or fight) with HTTP Headers handling.

HTTP Headers, even if hidden in the server-browsers interactions, are a fundamental element of the web.

Also a strong usage of HTTP Headers is done in SEO - Serach engine optimization, where they are used to keep Search Engines Caches updated.