CC By-Sa - Feel free to use it, provided that you give credits to this website.

Cop15 is getting closer, so it's time to publish a couple of things I've done recently.
On the left you can see a green logo for the city of Copenhagen. It's basically a green replacement of the original one. I would say that bikes and wind turbines represents Copenhagen even better than Tivoli.

And if you go on reading the post, you'll be able to see a very simple video of my usual bike ride in Copenhagen in the morning.. It's good to see just bikes and some buses riding on a big street, isn't it? But the wonder of it all - maybe I'm biased because I'm italian - is the silence.

I embedded the video using the HTML5 <video> tag. So you'd better use a modern browser which supports HTML5, such as the last Firefox release. Anyway, a fallback to flash player is provided for those of you who use older browsers.

Tuxguitar 1.1 supports polyphony

Until a couple of months ago, the only Windows proprietary application I needed on my GNU/Linux box was Guitar Pro, a shareware tab-editor available just for Windows and Mac. The free/libre alternative, TuxGuitar – despite the important benefit of running natively in Linux, that is without using Wine – could not satisfy me because it did not support polyphony. As I write mostly music for fingerstyle guitar, I do need to be able to display correctly the two voices (upper and lower) which define every fingerstyle piece.

This interview was first published in late December 2008 on GNUvox, the italian blog of FSFE: so you can find the italian version here and here.
The english translation is my work...so I'm the one to blame for all the errors! :-)

Hi Raffaella, recently I attended the FSCONS conference in Gotheborg, where I had the chance to come across a lot of videos released with open content licenses: among the several CC shorts, I was impressed by your Acqua, a short movie entirely made by 7 years old children. Then I found out that you had coordinated the production of other shorts made by children. Can you tell us how these experiences inside the school happened to find their way and which was the purpose?
To be honest, everything happened by chance. In 2006 I started teaching Visual Arts, as a stopgap, to a 7 years old children class. I decided to propose an unusual and challenging activity in order to fight boredom and the banality of a kind of teaching I hadn't really chose. That was for the children's good, but especially for my own good. I thought I would have proposed to the class just experiments of pre-cinema.. but then, watching the first animated scene (just 30 pictures!), it was love at first strike: passion overwhelmed us. We shot a second scene, then a third and after some weeks of work, surprisingly, we had an animation with a beginning but especially with an end: that's how our first work, "Il viaggio di Babbo Natale" [Santa Claus' journey], was born.
"Acqua" [Water], our second work, was our chance to put into practice all the tricks learned from the errors of the first production. After a one year experience it was clear that this activity had a huge educational potential and deserved to be organised in a project. So we launched Esperimenti di cinema [Cinema Experiments].

You can find the original italian version of this article in the number 2 of Piratpartiet.it, January 2008. Here is the link to the archive.

A beautiful land in danger
Val di Noto - an unspoiled land in south east Sicily (Italy) – was declared UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2002, mainly because it is an outstanding testimony of late Baroque art and architecture. Curiously, just two years after the Sicilian Region consented to Panther Oil, a Texas company, carrying out hydrocarbon searches in the land. The local community immediately stood up for the defense of its land and its local economy: in fact the UNESCO nomination had furthered a lot of touristic and agricultural initiatives, which obviously felt threated by the upcoming drillings.
This fact reached the mainstream media in the June of 2007, thanks to an appeal by Andrea Camilleri, famous writer and creator of Inspector Montalbano, main symbol of Sicily in the modern italian imaginary. The day after this appeal was translated and republished by foreign newspapers such as Times, Guardian and Le Monde. As a result, a week after Panther Oil decided to give up the drillings... but just in 10% of the land.. so it was a bluff, the story continues..stay tuned here: www.notriv.it

Here we go! This is a quick post to introduce what I'm going to publish here.
I'm going to post articles about Free Software, Free Culture and Cyber Rights. You will find a post in english plus either an italian translation or a link to the website where the italian article was originally published.