Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - * Meta has acquired Moltbook, the viral "social network for AI agents" where bots (many powered by OpenClaw) interact while humans observe. * Meta acquired Manus, the AI agent startup for approximately $2 billion.  * OpenClaw’s creator, Peter Steinberger, has joined OpenAI. * The OpenClaw project has been moved to an independent open-source foundation to ensure it remains free and accessible under its MIT license. *  The Batch - - The U.S. military uses AWS to run the unclassified version of Anthropic Claude. - Claude is integrated with Maven Smart System (MSS), a system for targeting and logistics built by Palantir. - Claude/MSS played a role in the January operation that captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, but the actions in Iran are its first use in “major war operations.” - The Qwen3.5 family of open-weights vision-language models includes impressive larger models as well as a smaller one that outperforms an OpenAI open-weights model 1...

This is the first in a series I've planned to document unusual and quirky sightings on the Weird Wide Web. While most websites have a disclosure in the footer in small font that they place cookies on your device, Ogilvy generously lists out the exact varieties of cookies they use, like chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin 😉 - As a wise movie character in a recent movie pointed out, the environmental changes we're seeing aren't just a case of global warming - they're a global warning ! A funny exchange in "Murder Mubarak" I was intrigued to see weather info and alerts on the Microsoft Edge browser Start page that led me to interesting graphics and visualizations that I've not see before for local weather.  I feel these type of visualizations are a great way to inform the general public about weather conditions rather than plain numbers.

This Week I Learned -  * MERN stack is a popular JavaScript framework used for building web applications. It is an acronym for MongoDB, Express.js, React, and Node.js. *  Postman Student Programs are programs designed to promote API literacy amongst students and educators. * While in technical parlance the “Cloud” might refer to the pooling of computing resources over a network, in popular culture, “Cloud” has come to signify and encompass the full gamut of infrastructures that make online activity possible, everything from Instagram to Hulu to Google Drive. The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. -  Steven Gonzalez Monserrate , anthropologist and PhD candidate at MIT * Copilot GPTs let you customize the behavior of Microsoft Copilot on a topic that is of particular interest to you.   * Soon, Copilot Pro users will also be able to create their own Copilo...

This Week I Learned -  * "When pressure rises in companies you often have to prove your worth as a developer. And as lines of code are easy to measure, this is often the hammer used to hit the nail in the coffin of company trust.... lines of code are often seen as productivity or even quality of a developer. And that’s nonsense...Often the best code is the one that didn’t need to be written." -  Christian Heilmann *  The Prime Video team at Amazon has published a rather remarkable case study on their decision to dump their serverless, microservices architecture and replace it with a monolith instead. This move saved them a staggering 90%(!) on operating costs, and simplified the system too.   What makes this story unique is that Amazon was the original poster child for service-oriented architectures .  *  Microsoft's Data Modernization Planner can help you in finding out where your data platform maturity stands, and provide business recommendations ...

I like mobile web apps more than smartphone apps . A while ago, I discovered Minhaz's amazing HTML5 QR Code & Barcode Scanner JavaScript library . Using that I built a minimal web page that can scan a product barcode through a smartphone's mobile browser and then redirects user to the equivalent product's Open Food Facts web page to display its nutrition information. I have now extended that sample to scan an EAN-13 barcode off a packaged food product and then fetch just its name, image, Nutri-Score & Nova details using the Open Food Facts REST API .   Screenshot of the output in the Microsoft Edge browser on an Android phone Try out the no-frills  NutriScan 🥫🔍  web app and please let me know what you think. Here's the code if you're interested - Typically, the JSON returned by an API call looks like this - {     "code": "8906005504395",     "product": {         "image_thumb_url": "https://images.openfoodfacts...

Smartphone barcode scanners typically require installing a dedicated app. But what if your web app could access the camera and scan codes directly — no app required, just HTML and JavaScript? I tried Minhaz's nifty HTML5 QR Code & Barcode scanner and I'm bowled over by its simplicity. With hundreds of GitHub stars and forks , it's clear I'm not the only one impressed! I adapted Minhaz's sample code into a minimalist web page that scans a product barcode and redirects to Open Food Facts to display its nutrition information. Here's the code : You can also try it out live. Related:  *  Scanapp   *  HOW TO scan a barcode with an Android smartphone camera from a web page

This Week I Learned -  * StackExchange & Reddit host forums on niche topics like Reverse Engineering , Web scraping , open source products , social behavior . *  Web Dev Handbooks by Flavio Copes * Data gravity refers to the idea that as large amounts of data amass in a location or system, they attract additional applications and services, making data relocation more difficult and more expensive.  According to the Salesforce  State of Data and Analytics Report  Analytics and IT Leaders’ are taking a multi-pronged approach to address Data Gravity - * AI is like the trojan horse of Data Management - Wendy Batchelder, Chief Data Officer, Global Data Governance Leader, Salesforce * LongShot's GenAI product FactGPT fact checks your content and cross-references it with credible sources. *  Ninite.com curates popular & free desktop apps. It tracks software updates so when you have to install, you know you're getting the latest version. * Intere...

ipapi is an IP Location API that can fetch the location of a user - their city, country, Latitude / Longitude based on the IP address it detects from the browser making the function call. It can also get the Time Zone, Calling Code, Currency among other things.  Here's a minimal JavaScript code sample showing Geolocation with IPAPI API - Also see - Public APIs you can use

This Week I Learned -  * A permalink or permanent link is the address (URL) of a web page that is not expected to change throughout the lifetime of a page.  Permalinks are often rendered simply, that is, as clean URLs, to be easier to type and remember. Sometimes URL shortening is used to create them. * According to Jason Mayes' newsletter , there has been an exponential growth in the Web AI community (I feel like a proud father seeing his child grow up) due to a significantly huge push from folk even beyond Google's core Web ML teams ( TensorFlow.js , Chrome , MediaPipe Web ) who are really embracing Web AI thanks to commitment from companies like Hugging Face ( Transformers.js and HuggingFace.js ) and Microsoft ( Onnx runtime web ) investing in the web space giving Pytorch users a way forward to embrace client side web deployments in the browser too. He predicts that  in 2024 AI in JavaScript, client side in the browser, using technologies like WebGPU, WebAssembl...

This Week I Learned -  *  Grocy is a web-based self-hosted groceries & household management solution *  DuckDB is an in-process SQL OLAP database management system. It is free & open-source *  DuckDB is designed to support analytical query workloads, also known as Online analytical processing (OLAP). It leverages a SQL query execution engine capable of running complex queries on large datasets. * DuckDB is the SQLite for Analytics . It is great for interactive data analysis jobs, such as joining or aggregating multiple large tables.  SQLite is an embedded online transaction processing (OLTP), whereas DuckDB is an embedded online analytical processing (OLAP). * DuckDB  is truly serverless like SQLite. No server, no infrastructure needed to use. DuckDB can query CSV or Parquet files available on an S3 bucket or locally. * DuckDB is way more versatile than Polars or Pandas. DuckDB is generally faster than Pandas when it comes to execu...

This Week I Learned -  * HTTP/3 builds on the foundations laid by HTTP/2 but introduces significant changes, primarily by shifting from TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) to QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) as the underlying transport protocol. - The Valley of Code * From the Chrome Developer Tools Network panel, you can override HTTP response headers and web content , including XHR and fetch requests, to mock remote resources even if you don't have access to them or the web server. * A VSIX package is a .vsix file that contains one or more Visual Studio extensions, together with the metadata Visual Studio uses to classify and install the extensions.  *  Replicate lets you run machine learning models with a few lines of code, without needing to understand how machine learning works. *  Chatbot Arena lets you chat with any two models among these side-by-side: GPT-3.5: GPT-3.5 by OpenAI GPT-3.5-Turbo-1106: GPT-3.5-Turbo-1106 by OpenAI GPT-4-Turbo: GPT-4-T...

This Week I Learned -  * Flavio Copes has a lot of useful Web development resources on his website including a curation of sample app ideas . *  Azure Developers - Python Day   2023 *  Amazon Web Services released the Simple Storage Service (S3) on March 14, 2006 . Netflix was the first to publicly make the decision to go 100% cloud in 2010.  * Designed by Google to process large image databases, Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) are powerful hardware accelerators specialized in deep learning tasks.  *  promptfoo is a tool for testing and evaluating LLM output quality.  *  GitHub Skills teaches how to use GitHub with interactive courses designed for beginners and experts. * The IBM watsonx powered AI Draw Analysis is a first-of-its-kind tennis statistic for the US Open that utilizes both structured and unstructured data from IBM Power Index & Likelihood to Win to project the level of advantage or disadvantage of all players in the singles ...

REST (Representational State Transfer) : Championing simplicity and ubiquity, REST stands as an architectural style that prominently leverages HTTP methods . Its design facilitates effortless interaction with resources, establishing it as a go-to model for numerous applications and contemporary APIs. SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) : As a heavyweight contender within the API landscape, SOAP thrives on complexity and potency. It employs XML to define structured communication. While it necessitates a SOAP client and server, it compensates with its resilience and robustness, akin to a well-constructed off-road vehicle conquering rugged terrains. GraphQL: Emerging as a luminary in the API cosmos, GraphQL offers adaptability and precision. It empowers clients to request precisely what they require, minimizing redundancy and enhancing performance. Think of it as a personal shopper—providing precisely what's requested, no more and no less. gRPC (Google Remote Procedure Call): Within ...

A nice example from the Machine Learning for Web Developers (Web ML) video course (47 videos) by Jason Mayes : A machine learning model is essentially an algorithm that transforms numerical inputs into numerical outputs used in applications.  On the left is a magnified image of a person. Now, as a human, you can probably make out where the face is pretty fast. But a computer cannot see objects like you and I can. It just sees numbers, as shown by the middle image. Here, numbers from 0 to 255 represent different shades of gray. And on the right-hand side is what would be fed into your Machine Learning model as an input. Do you still see the face in that? Well, as a human, it's nearly impossible to recognize in this form. But this is what your Machine Learning model must learn from and some how take these numbers to produce some output that represent how sure it is that a face is in those input numbers. And this is why the quality of training data is very important. Generally speakin...

This Week I Learned -  * Magenta is an open source research project exploring the role of machine learning as a tool in the creative process. This Tone Transfer demo link shows how to generate audio and turn your voice into a musical instrument of your choice.   * Joshua Lochner (original creator of Transformers.js), now at Hugging Face, has released a legendary demo that can transcribe your audio recordings super fast right in the browser powered by WebRTC and Web ML tech. - Whisper Web *  Gorilla is an  open-source , Apache 2.0 licensed (use commercially without any obligations) LLM tailored to serve API calls for your stated tasks. It is trained on three massive machine learning hub datasets: Torch Hub, TensorFlow Hub and HuggingFace.  With Gorilla CLI , you can simply state your objective, and the tool will generate potential commands for over 1500 APIs, including Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, Azure, and many more.  * The Gunicorn "Green Unicorn" ...