Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Claude recently helped a techie find his misplaced iPhone although the Find My iPhone feature was disabled by his organization's Mobile Device Management (MDM) policy.  Claude generated a Bluetooth RSSI meter in about one minute & by tracking the phone's Bluetooth signal strength he was able to locate the phone. Commenting on AI's growing role in enabling instant, bespoke software creation for immediate practical needs without traditional development, he  tweeted : " Apparently, you can just create the tool you need now. " That line stuck with me. As a weather enthusiast, I wanted a simple web app to see how the weather differs between localities in my Hyderabad neighbourhood, side by side, before deciding whether to step out. So I built it with the help of Claude & the WeatherUnion API . The visual template came from an unlikely place — ICFOSS's IoT-based Micro Climate Monitoring System for Kerala . It's a public dashboard tracking humidity, tempe...

This Week I Learned -  * " Models learn from "exhaust," the prompts people write, the tools agents use, and especially the corrections people make when the model is wrong. Every correction is distilled into institutional know-how.  In consuming intelligence, you are creating intelligence. If learning flows in only one direction, economic value converges toward the owners of the learning infrastructure rather than the creators of the knowledge itself. In the cloud era, enterprises accumulated data. In the AI era, they accumulate learning. A company should be able to use a model without giving up the knowledge that makes it unique. " - Satya Nadella * Wire services such as PTI, ANI, Reuters, AP, and AFP provide verified facts to other outlets, which then adapt the content to their own style. Their business model depends on reader trust in the accuracy of the wire’s reporting and on receiving compensation for the verification work. While search engines direct readers t...

As cloud architects, we spend our days designing systems in the cloud. Load balancers, autoscaling, fault tolerance, multi-region deployments—we know them inside out. But when was the last time you looked up at the original cloud? A children's book recently reminded me that the sky has its own architecture, complete with naming conventions that sound suspiciously like service tiers.  Clouds are mostly made of tiny water droplets, tiny ice crystals, or a mixture of both suspended in the air. The first well-designed "cloud taxonomy" predates cloud computing by about 220 years. In 1802, English pharmacist and amateur meteorologist Luke Howard borrowed Latin words—cirrus (“curl”), stratus (“layer”), cumulus (“heap”), and nimbus (“rain cloud”)—to create a cloud classification system so elegant that it’s still the global standard more than two centuries later. It's a reminder that well-designed taxonomies can stand the test of time—whether they're describing the atmosp...

After learning that 2023 was the world’s hottest year on record, I began tracking the weather more closely. Then 2024 surpassed it , becoming the first calendar year to cross the 1.5°C threshold and set a new record. 2025 brought a series of extreme weather events , with multiple COP climate change summits taking place that have not yielded any concrete results. To stay aware of what's happening around the world and make personal changes, I plan to keep taking notes this year too and adjust my expectations. I've set up a dynamic chart to display weather data for my area (Miyapur) using Zomato's WeatherUnion API like I did in 2025 .     It fails to return data occasionally but seems to be more reliable than the  data provided by Telangana State Development Planning Society which has fewer weather stations (Kukatpally, Serilingampally) and farther away from where I stay. Comparing values from both sources reveal a big difference in minimum temps (avg 6.1°C) b...

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Observing various weather aspects through charts offers a clearer understanding of seasons and climate compared to analyzing raw data. Datawrapper has an option to update charts, maps, and tables automatically , without republishing.  To handle continously updated data, Datawrapper has a free data hosting service . It can pick up your original data hosted on any external data source like Github or Google Sheets and copies the CSV to its own server at certain intervals (every minute on the first day, then every hour the next 29 days). The chart above is an experiment to see how it works for my data.  By hovering on one of the interactive chart, you can see tooltips in the other charts. Related: Zomato Weather Union: Real-Time Weather Data for 60 Indian Cities via Public API

In 2023, countries used weasel wording to "contribute" to "transitioning away from fossil fuels" at the COP28 climate change summit in Dubai, a statement that sounded like a goal but acted like a mirage in a desert of inaction. Carbon emission increased between COP28 and COP29!  2024 became the first calendar year to pass the 1.5C threshold, as well as being the world's hottest year on record. The 1.5C threshold refers to the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. This target was established in the Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty on climate change that was signed by 196 countries at COP 21 in 2015.  To understand Climate Change better I tracked major  Weather events that made headlines in 2024 . I'll keep updating this page as such events unfold this year. -0- December * The United States and parts of Europe are seeing unusually warm winter weather, leading climate scientists to call it a w...

Climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns. Human activities have been the main driver of climate change, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas. While individual actions & awareness are important, addressing climate change requires a unified and concerted effort from local communities, cities, and nations working collaboratively to tackle its challenges. The first climate COP meeting was held in Berlin, Germany in March, 1995. The Paris Agreement, adopted at COP21 in 2015, is a landmark international agreement on climate change.  Its main goal is to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels.    In the 2023 COP28 summit in  petrostate   Dubai, all that participating countries could do was commit to "contribute" to "transitioning away from fossil fuels". At a time when fossil fuels should have been significantly r...

As extreme weather events become more frequent and unpredictable, nowcasts are becoming more crucial than traditional forecasts, especially with phenomena like urban heat islands. These days, even the best-laid plans can fall apart if weather isn't factored in. Zomato is offering real-time weather data from 60 Indian cities through a free public API called Weather Union , gathered via a crowd-supported weather infrastructure. I've extracted the latitude and longitude of the weather stations that Zomato has provided in PDF format and shared the CSV file on GitHub . About half of these locations use an Automated Weather System, while the rest have Rain Gauge Systems that only track rainfall.  For stations with rain gauges, the API provides data only on rainfall, and fields like temperature, humidity, and wind speed return null values. I’ve created a simple code sample using Zomato's public API, which you can check on GitHub .  The sample also includes an external link that d...

This Week I Learned -  *  Learning Roadmap for Gen AI developers   * Jonathan Ross, the visionary behind Groq, was instrumental in the creation of Google’s groundbreaking Tensor Processing Unit (TPU). Initially a 20% side project with a single colleague, Ross’s work on the TPU eventually evolved into the core of this specialized machine learning accelerator. The power of this custom chip was on full display when Google’s AlphaGo AI sensationally defeated South Korean Go master Lee Se-dol. * "If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything." - Ronald Coase * "Part of storytelling and songs is to explore ideas and allow certain feelings or emotions to come to the forefront because they exist in all of us." - Vince Vaughn * Ads and digital content that mix words in Indian languages and English including transliterations in English are becoming a thing Interestingly, AI assistants can also understand some Indian languages when you type the native words ...

This choropleth map illustrates what a brutal summer India is experiencing this year.  Source - Hindustan Times 14 out of 36 regions in the country have baked through over 15 heat wave days between March 1 and June 9 as per data from the India Meteorological Department (IMD).  Since normal temperatures vary across India, the criteria for declaring a heat wave also differs.   Generally, heat waves are declared when temperatures on the plains exceed 40°C, exceeding 37°C in coastal areas, and exceeding 30°C in the hills.  There's also a deviation factor involved, where temperatures must be 4.5 to 6.4 degrees Celsius above the average maximum for at least two consecutive days.  If the deviation is even higher (over 6.4 degrees Celsius), it's classified as a severe heat wave. The impact of these heat waves is further aggravated by factors like high humidity, high wind speed, and the duration of the events. 

This Week I Learned -  *  Oracle and Google Cloud have announced a Multicloud partnership to simplify cloud migration, multicloud deployment, and management * A nice comparison of AI tools by PashooTech *  How LLMs Work, Explained Without Math * The average hospital generates 137 terabytes of data daily.   *  AI Toolkit for Visual Studio Code simplifies generative AI app development by bringing together cutting-edge AI development tools and models from Azure AI Studio Catalog and other catalogs like Hugging Face.  * In an innovative approach, MIT Media Lab has developed a website where users can interact with a personalized digital representation of their future selves . This artificial intelligence-driven experience is meant to inspire more long-term thinking and behavior by allowing users to imagine and plan for their future. The future self, however, is not a crystal ball; it's simply a model generated from user-provided survey data and existing ...