Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Nothing definitive is known about Shakespeare but Bill Bryson’s brilliant research and laugh-out-loud writing makes you feel like you’re actually strolling through Elizabethan England, dodging questionable street food and dodging the plague, while reading the Bard of Avon’s biography. Shakespeare is believed to have been born in 1564 and died in 1616, but many records of his estate vanished in the Great Fire of London in 1666.  More than 80 different spellings of his name have been recorded. The one we all use isn’t even the Oxford English Dictionary’s top pick (they prefer Shakspere). It was fun to know that over 50 candidates have been proposed as the “real” Shakespeare. Some people just can’t accept that one guy achieved so much. By his early thirties, Shakespeare was earning a comfortable 200 to 700 pounds a year – solidly upper-middle-class for the time. He married Anne Hathaway, who was eight years older (a man ahead of his time).  Shakespeare wasn’t just a writer – he w...

I/O '26 Recap: Everything You Need to Know     Google processes 3.2 quadrillion tokens per month.  It now has 13 products with over a billion users each.  Google's new model Gemini Omni can create anything from any input. It combines Gemini's intelligence with the best of its generative media models for a new level of World understanding, multi-modality and editing. Software engineering at the tipping point Build core skills to thrive as an AI-era developer     Three fourth of all code at Google is written by AI. What's new in the Gemma open model family    What's new in Chrome Create advanced data driven Gemini API apps Unlock modern web capabilities in your AI coding workflows   Build your website for the agentic era   Vibe design to build incredible web UI Elevate the Chrome Extensions developer experience   Break boundaries with Gemini in Chrome DevTools   A fireside chat on the evolution of the developer craft

This Week I Learned -  *  web.py was originally published while Aaron Swartz worked at reddit.com, where the site used it as it grew to become one of the top 1000 sites according to Alexa and served millions of daily page views. Reddit was rewritten using other tools after being acquired by Condé Nast in 2006. * Markdown is used widely by websites including Reddit, GitHub and Discord using it, as well as LLMs such as Claude using it to format the files that store accumulated memories. * Grok Build is xAI's coding agent for the terminal, serving as a direct competitor to Claude Code and the OpenAI Codex CLI. * Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months.  * Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% t...