Ciaranfi AI Land is my online magazine about artificial intelligence, technology, smart homes, robotics and video surveillance. I write about what is changing in these fields in plain language, without pointless jargon, for people who want to understand the technology and actually use it in everyday life.
The site was born in Italian and most of the archive is in Italian. This English edition collects translations of the guides and news I think are most useful to readers outside Italy, and it grows week by week.
What you will find here
- Original articles written by me: practical guides, step-by-step tutorials and explanations.
- Selected news from the main tech publications (in the Italian edition): for each story I show the headline and a short excerpt, always with a link to the original source.
How I work
I always credit my sources and I don’t copy other people’s articles. If you are a publisher and want to report a problem with how your content is used, email me at flavio@ciaranfi.org and I will deal with it as soon as possible.
Who is behind the site
I’m Flavio Ciaranfi, an IT systems engineer and consultant from Genoa, Italy. My career started in the late 1990s and has touched almost every corner of professional IT: technical support for large telecom operators, local network administration, enterprise Microsoft systems and training.
Along the way I worked as a Microsoft systems engineer for companies such as Omnitel Vodafone, in development and support, and Plasmon Italia, in systems support and help desk. I carried out consulting work for Ferrovie dello Stato (the Italian state railways) at their Genoa offices and worked as a senior systems engineer in environments where much of the job was done remotely on users’ workstations. Today I’m a senior systems engineer at T4Tech, a company that promotes digital culture, and I also work as a freelance IT consultant, both remotely and on site.
From system administration to the smart home
The topics on this site are also things I have built in the field: remotely controlled video surveillance systems and home automation managed over local networks and GSM lines. That’s why my guides on cameras, smart homes and security start from what really works, not just from what the spec sheet says.
Teaching, not just fixing
Since 2013 I have also taught IT in training courses funded by the Liguria Region, from basic computer literacy to hardware, email, the Internet, Office and responsible use of social networks. Teaching people who start from zero taught me how to explain technology simply, and that is the style you’ll find in my articles.
The “Angels with mud on their T-shirts”
After the Genoa flood of 4 November 2011 I was one of the faces of Angeli col fango sulle magliette (“Angels with mud on their T-shirts”), a group born from a Facebook page created on the very day of the flood. By that evening the page was already calling volunteers to meet with shovels and boots on Sunday 6 November, and within hours it had passed forty thousand members. It was never an association and never raised money: it is a citizens’ movement that coordinates volunteers and requests for help, and it was reactivated together with the authorities after the October 2014 flood as well.
The group did not stop at the emergency. In 2012, with Genoa’s Centro Est and later Levante district councils, it launched a project to adopt public flowerbeds and green areas. In the Priaruggia neighbourhood, for example, we involved about a hundred schoolchildren, families and residents in reviving the gardens of Villa Stalder, with an idea I have always defended: the spirit of free cooperation born in an emergency should become part of the city’s everyday life.
The group was invited to tell its story at the Quirinale, the palace of the Italian President, and to speak at national conferences on emergency management. It was also presented as a case study at Crisis Camp Italy, an event on the use of social media in emergencies, and, as the group itself recalls, it received an award from the newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore for the social and humanitarian use of the web.
Co-founder of Open Genova
I’m one of the four founding members of Open Genova, together with Enrico Alletto, Chiara Pieri and Raffaello Giannelli. The project took shape in November 2012 as a community wiki for citizens’ ideas and became a non-profit association in 2013, with the mission of spreading digital culture and digital literacy to everyone. Over the years it has worked with the City of Genoa, several district councils and the Liguria Region on free Wi-Fi and open data; in 2016 it won the crowdfunding campaign to bring free Wi-Fi to the Lanterna, Genoa’s historic lighthouse.
A Genoese entrepreneur
Genoa is my city. Since 2014 I have run a company based there, and for years I managed A Ruménta, a bar with live music in the historic centre, until spring 2020. Many people in Genoa know me simply as “Fly”.
Want to suggest a collaboration, report something or propose a topic? Write to me at flavio@ciaranfi.org. The full version of this page, with all sources, is available in Italian.