Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -   * Addy Osmani open-source   web app lets you upload your image and let AI remove the background instantly. It uses Transformers.js which has enabled a whole class of client-side AI apps to come to the web. This is free for unlimited use (Canva is free for first-time) and does all processing locally and privately (nothing is uploaded to anyone’s servers). All of the processing happens client side. This means outside of just the bandwidth to serve the page itself there’s no cost to the person hosting it. * AI assistance in Chrome DevTools is now available with Chrome 131 * Instagram recently moved from Python 2 to Python 3. Dropbox also recently upgraded fully to Python 3 * OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji's article on how generative AI products violate copyrighted material. * AI Tier will replace backends - Satya Nadella *  Azure AI Agent Service is a fully managed service designed to empower developers to securely build, deploy, and...

Datawrapper is an online data visualization tool available at datawrapper.de that lets you create charts, maps and tables. Here's the list of the different visualizations you can create - Bar Chart Stacked Bars Grouped Bars Split Bars Bullet Bars Column Chart Stacked Columns Grouped Columns Lines Multiple Lines Area Chart Scatter Plot Dot Plot Range Plot Arrow Plot Election Donut Pie Chart Multiple Pies Donut Chart Multiple Donuts Choropleth map Symbol map Locator map Table It is self-funded by its customers’ subscription revenue. It also provides a good Free Plan .  The Datawrapper “Created with Datawrapper” attribution appears at the bottom of the chart if you use the free plan. However, you retain full copyright to your charts, maps, and tables. To remove the attribution, you’ll need to update to Custom or Enterprise plan. The Datawrapper River is a place to exchange charts and maps with other Datawrapper users. After adding a chart to the River, anyone can use it and customiz...

The Lock Screen on my Windows PC has started showing notifications with weather, air quality, stock information and today, Traffic status. Clicking on the notification led me to the Bing Maps Traffic page. I was pleasantly surprised to see a new service name - Microsoft Traffic and within the Traffic portal, the Insights tab contained useful local information that seemed better than what's on Google Maps. I was curious about how this is built and after exploring a bit, I found that there are Bing API endpoints that are available for anyone interested in customizing this traffic information for their own applications.  Going by the documentation, the geographic coverage for India is relatively better than for most countries with coverage for Road Data/Routing, Traffic & Geocoding though not for Truck Routing. The Bing Maps API which powers this Traffic status feature will be replaced by Azure Maps .  Azure Maps is expected to bring many of the Azure security and comp...