I often find people asking if the T7 is a good bike for new riders, specially for tall new riders.

I think It’s a fantastic bike for this use case, so I decided to write this post, so I can copy and paste it every time I stumble on those kind of requests.

• It’s a Yamaha, so it’s a reliable bike by default, and its CP2 engine is probably the most reliable engine available on the market.
• It has the perfect amount of power for any kind of usage, on the road you can overtake everything you want with no problems and on offroad it has the right amount of power to give you traction without any electronic control
• It’s a very forgiving bike for a new rider, its transmission let you start the bike in 2nd gear or even 3rd gear without stalling or burning the clutch.
• Older models with no electronic aids or controls are the perfect teachers for new riders, they are very forgiving about mistakes because they are not too powerful and they have a very smooth and linear engine progression, but they let you feel the bike, feel how she behaves, feel the transmission and feel if you’re about to make a mistake. Traction controls or other electronic aids will hide these things, they are invasive and they won’t let you understand if you’re about to make a mistake, so you’ll never learn with them.
• It’s a big 200 Kg bike, but still it’s one of the lightest bikes among adventure bikes.
• It’s a tall bike, and if you’re a tall guy you won’t find many other bikes that fits you like a glove like the T7.

With that said let me add a few advices from a newbie rider to other newbie riders:

• Ride solo, it’s better, it’s safer and it’s the best way to learn.
  If you ride with a group you’ll end up forcing your pace to the group pace, and that’s very dangerous, don’t be stupid.
• Forget about social media and motorcycle influencers, don’t buy a bike or ride because you saw some cool guy on social media, it’s stupid.
  Buy a bike and ride because you wanna do it, because riding makes you feel better, because you find it fun, not because you think it’s cool or because you wanna do the same things you saw on social media.
• Travelling by bike it’s exhausting, it’s not like travelling by car. When you are exhausted you make mistakes, sometimes fatal mistakes.
  Don’t underestimate fatigue, stop frequently, take your time and when you are about to think “one more hour of riding and then I’ll stop” It’s already time to stop and rest.
• Don’t buy any optional part before you’ll ride your first 10.000 Km, but specially don’t buy motorcycle parts because you saw some influencer on social media talking about that thing.
  It will take time to understand your bike, to learn what’s ok, what’s not ok, and what you really need; don’t waste money on parts, spend them on fuel while travelling.
• Your bike is already perfect to ride all around the world as it is when you get her from the dealer, don’t trust people that say you have to change springs, dampeners, mufflers or whatever other part.

That’s it.

No, I’m not 20 years old (those days are gone looooong ago…), exactly on July 14th 2006 I started this blog.

And you know what? I’m pretty proud of it, I never ever ever imagined It could last for so many years.

During my twenties I worked as a videogame reviewer and with a bunch of friends we created RPGPlayer.it, which was the best Italian site on computer role playing games. Soon we started to have some success and we became part of Multiplayer Network, one of the biggest Italian networks on videogames.

I really enjoyed It and It made it possible for me to interview also some big names of the PC videogame industry, but sadly like all the beautiful things It can’t last forever, and after several years I ended my collaboration.

But regardless this I still wanted to play, review and write, so I though “Why not open a blog and publish my own reviews?”, this is how this blog started.

Obviously many other topics started to pop on my mind, as soon I got my first flat rate internet connection I setup my first home server on a VIA Epia mini-ITX board (used previously on an advertising kiosk at work) and this became another interesting topic (and one of my most viewed ones), then came my experience with mmorpg games like Lotro and Eve Online, then my bike and in the middle hundreds of other topics and ideas.

Then after many years I started to think that maybe this blog could also be a nice place to put solutions on problems I encountered daily at work, or configuring my own services at home, and I started to write about them.

But at that point I thought that maybe writing in my own language (italian) could be a problem for people from other countries to make use of my suggestions and posts, so I decided to switch to english.

In the meantime I moved from shared hosting services to VPS and back to shared hosting several times, I suffered a small downtime during a fire accident in one of the OVH datacenters in France because my VPS was exactly in that datacenter (but I recovered swiftly thanks to my backups and I continued using OVH VPS services for several years) and then I moved to self hosting this blog on my own infrastructure elsewhere.

I started with WordPress when this php cms was almost ignored, I thought to change to a static site generator many times but honestly It works so well for me that I don’t see any reason to change.

Same for the site theme, I know it’s not top notch, it’s old, it’s not responsive and it’s barely readable on today’s big resolution screens (but works very well if you zoom a little bit :D ) but honestly I don’t give a damn about it, I never really cared about aesthetics or design and I don’t think I’ll start today to change this.

What else can I say? Well I hope to be able to celebrate another anniversary in 2046, for now stay tuned!

I would like to address a small message to motorcycle riders on social media, because every time I see some picture or video of riders doing stupid things it makes me mad.

I’m a motorcycle rider, I have a Tenere 700  since april 2021 and I rode mine for 60k Km, but every time I see some picture or video on social media about wheelies and stunts and people riding at insane speeds I think it’s stupid and these pictures and videos should be banned and prohibited, because they push other people to imitate these things, and that’s how people get injuried, killed and most important get other people get injuried and killed, people peacefully walking on the streets or going back home from work, or going to school etc etc…

And guys, don’t start with the usual “but I do wheelies only in an empty parking spot” because it’s false and it’s stupid.

Why do you ever exercise on wheelies?

The answer is simple: to do wheelies on the road, it’s not something you need to ride, it’s something dangerous and forbidden by the law, so don’t treat us like fools, we perfectly know that each guy practicing wheelies on a parking spot is preparing for some stupid video or photo on social media, and in the meantime people die or get injuried because of your stupidity.

Don’t be naive, each and everyone of us is free, but our freedom ends where start the freedom of someone else.

Each and everyone of us has the responsibility of what he or she publish online, and publishing wheelies or stunts or speeding photos and videos means you push other people to do the same, to push their skills and their bikes to the limits, and people die.

Instead publish videos and photos of good examples or riding, riding with proper safety gear, ride in the proper way, show good trick and examples or riding in a responsible way.

Five minutes ago I was posting a reply on Reddit about monitoring GNU/Linux systems and I suddenly realized something very basic but extremely useful that most of the people and most of the professional sysadmins ignore: this wonderful OS will tell you everything if you let it talk to you.

In more technical terms, every GNU/Linux distribution out of the box has everything it needs to send you notifications via email if something goes wrong, you don’t have to search anything, you don’t have to parse logs, you don’t have to look for clues.

To reach this objective you only need two things:

1. install an MTA (aka an SMTP server)
2. configure the OS to forward root emails to your email address

Let’s see how to reach this simple but fundamental goal.

First of all install Postfix as SMTP (forget about Sendmail), to do this you only need to use the OS package managers:

on Debian based distribution use

sudo apt install postfix

on RedHat based distribution use

sudo dnf install postfix

Once done make sure you started Postfix and configured it to start at boot with

sudo systemctl enable --now postfix.service

Ok you’re half of the way, another little step.

Once Postfix is started you have to tell the OS to forward root email to your email address, to do this you only have to put a like like this in the /etc/aliases file

root: [email protected]

If you find a line with only “root:” remove it, or simply change it as the example I wrote before. Obviously change [email protected] with your email address…

Now one last step, saving /etc/aliases with your new alias is not enough, you have to rebuild the aliases database, and then reload Postfix, to do these things you only have to launch this command.

sudo newaliases ; sudo postfix reload

Done, now if you try to send an email to the root user Postfix will forward it to your email address, for example:

echo "lorem ipsum" | mail -s "email test" root

Obviously your server must be able to reach the MX record host of your email address domain on TCP port 25, on top of that if you used a public domain email address you have to face several other problems regarding spam or sender email domain, or SPF validation… but these are topics for another more advanced post.

Make GNU/Linux work for you, end of part 1.

I love restic, I use it on every my server and since the developers added the backup compression feature (previously it has only deduplication) I think it’s the best backup software exisisting.

Using restic on GNU/Linux is a piece of cake and the peace of mind, but on Windows it’s a total different story…

The thing the bothers me the most on Windows is the awful Windows task scheduler and the total absence of notifications (who the hell regularly take a look to the Windows Event Viewer?).

Fortunately there’s a solution for those problem, which is Backrest, a nice web frontend to the restic that brilliantly solves both problems.

In this post I would like to show a nice solution for backup notification using Backrest and Telegram, in this way you’ll get a Telegram notification using Backrest Hooks every time a backup is successful, returns a warning or an error.

First of all open Telegram and find a user called @BotFather

Start a chat with /start and create a new bot with the command /newbot

Give a name and a username to yourbot (for example Backrest Buddy and backrest_buddy)

BotFather will give you a reply like this, the most important information is the API token

Use this token to access the HTTP API:
1234235:069:AAHgPEM2HJIh2Ci1G1l345u2QbbCs876CA
Keep your token secure and store it safely, it can be used by anyone to control your bot.

Open a browser and go to this url
https://api.telegram.org/bot<API TOKEN>/getUpdates

Then open Telegram, open a chat with your bot and write something to it, then get back to the browser and refresh the page, you’ll see some json output with a chat section with a chat id, copy that data, it’s the most important data with the API token.

Now create a powershell script (for example c:\Users\tas\backrest-buddy.ps1) with this syntax, just be careful to insert the API token and the chat id the right spots.

param(
[int]$ExitCode = 0
)

$BotToken = "<API TOKEN>"
$ChatId = "<CHAT ID>"

$HostName = $env:COMPUTERNAME
$Date = Get-Date -Format "dd-MM-yyyy HH:mm:ss"

if ($ExitCode -eq 0) {
$Text = "Backup OK`n------------------------------`n`nHost: $HostName`nDate: $Date"
} else {
$Text = "Backup FAILED`n------------------------------`n`nHost: $HostName`nData: $Date`nExit code: $ExitCode"
}

$Uri = "https://api.telegram.org/bot$BotToken/sendMessage"

$Body = @{
chat_id = $ChatId
text = $Text
parse_mode = "Markdown"
}

Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $Uri -Method Post -Body $Body

Now you can test the notification using this command for successfull backup (change the Powershell script path accordingly to your script)

powershell.exe -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File c:\Users\tas\backrest-buddy.ps1 0

or this command for a failed backup

powershell.exe -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File c:\Users\tas\backrest-buddy.ps1 1

If you receive Telegram messages from your bot for a successfull or failed backup everything works as expected.

Now one last step, let’s make Backrest use these powershell script to send us notifications.

Open your Backrest plan settings and go to the Hooks section.
Create three Hooks commands:
– on the first Hook choose CONDITION_SNAPSHOT_SUCCESS as condition
– on the secondo Hook choose CONDITION_SNAPSHOT_WARNING as condition
– on the first Hook choose CONDITION_SNAPSHOT_ERROR as condition

Now insert the same commands you used to test the Telegram notification as Hook commands:
– on the first Hook insert “powershell.exe -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File c:\Users\tas\backrest-buddy.ps1 0”
– on the second Hook insert “powershell.exe -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File c:\Users\tas\backrest-buddy.ps1 1”
– on the third Hook insert “powershell.exe -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File c:\Users\tas\backrest-buddy.ps1 1”

Insert ON_ERROR_FATAL as Error Behavior on all the three hooks.

Ok you did it, now you only have to launch a backup and check your Telegram notifications, if you want to test a failed backup simply add a non existent path to the backup and launch it.