Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Ctrl + Shift + V (or Cmd + Shift + V on Mac) is often referred to as "keep text only" or "paste plain text" due to its widespread use in applications such as Microsoft Teams, Word for the web, Google, and Gmail.  The Paste Text Only shortcut is now available in Word for Windows and Word Mac . The keyboard shortcut for Copy Format Painter is Ctrl + Alt + C while Ctrl + Alt + V is for Paste Format Painter Microsoft Word, which has been available since 1983, celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. Over time, industry standards for keyboard shortcuts have evolved, leading to changes from Word's original implementation. Consequently, some of the existing keyboard shortcuts have been updated.

This Week I Learned -  * Azure VMware Solution is available in in 33 Azure regions globally including India Central.  *  Power Automate now brings AI innovation to robotic process automation (RPA) by giving users the option to train the desktop recorder in a more natural and flexible way. Multimodal AI recording for desktop flows uses screen understanding and speech processing to let users teach the desktop recorder how to automate a process. AI flows leverage the simplicity of natural language and the power of rapidly evolving large language model (LLM) abilities to create more intelligent, flexible, and dynamic automation. Instead of building out complex rules-based processes from beginning to end, users work with AI to create an automation plan. When the plan is executed, the LLM considers all the resources available to it and dynamically selects the most appropriate actions to achieve the desired outcome.  * There are separate Microsoft 365 offerings for ho...

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This Week I Learned -  *  C3 makes it easy to generate D3-based charts by wrapping the code required to construct the entire chart . * Meta's PyTorch is a counterweight to Google’s TensorFlow * Google has introduced Gemini Flash 1.5 (builds on Gemini 1.5 Pro's features), Gemma 2, Project Astra (real-time, multimodal AI assistant), Veo (video generation model to compete with OpenAI's Sora), and Imagen 3 (image generation model)  at Google I/O 2024 .  * An A.I. robot named Sophia gave a commencement address at Buffalo’s D’Youville University. - NYT * Under a new law, Florida’s state government is no longer required to consider climate change in energy policy. The law also repeals grant programs encouraging renewable energy. - NYT * The India Meteorological Department (IMD) provides a range of alerts related to rainfall forecasts, including color-coded warnings for heavy rainfall, extreme weather events, and monsoon progress tracking. A red alert indicates heavy ...

This Week I Learned -  * The original sources of MS-DOS 1.25, 2.0, and 4.0 are available for reference purposes on Github * While India generates about 20 per cent of the global data, its share in data center capacity is just 3 per cent. * TimesFM from Google Research is a time series forecasting model pre-trained on an extensive corpus of 100 billion real-world data points. It is open-source under the Apache-2.0 license and can be utilized commercially, offline, on a local computer or an engineering laptop. * India is fast emerging as a hub for data annotation services with flexible workers, mid-tier business analysts and even skilled data engineers contributing to build high-quality datasets. Data annotation, or simply data labelling, is the most crucial and foundational step for building high-quality datasets to train AI models, enhance accuracy, curtail hallucinations and build safety guardrails against inappropriate or harmful content - ET *  YTVideoTranscript  is ...

When a PDF is open, you can pose questions to the Copilot Sidebar in Edge browser regarding the document.  Questions you may ask include: • Summarizing the document or page • Generating five questions about the document • Identifying the author of the document • Determining the publication date of the document Copilot sends the content of the document to the model to generate a summary.  For a PDF document that I asked Copilot questions about, I got useful answers in most cases. Copilot notified me that it was not saving the conversation to protect privacy. In Edge there is no need to explicitly upload a PDF document, you just have to permit Copilot Sidebar to read the document that is already open. AI Assistants such as Cohere's Command, Perplexity, and Claude also have the  capacity to analyze the content of uploaded PDF documents & text files and answer any posed questions. There are however restrictions on the size of the files and content. Grounding Panel i...

According to Armand Ruiz , IBM has completed 1,000+ Generative AI projects in 2023.  Top use cases include: ▪️ Customer-facing functions and experiences - Customer service: Empower customers to find solutions with easy, compelling experiences. Automate answers with 95% accuracy - Marketing: Increase personalization, and improve efficiency across the content supply chain. Reduce content creation costs by up to 40% - Content creation: ex. enhance digital sports viewing with auto-generative spoken AI commentary. Scale live viewing experiences cost-effectively - Knowledge worker: Enable higher value work, improve decision making, increase productivity. Reduce 90% of text reading and analysis work ▪️ HR, Finance, and Supply-Chain Functions - HR automation: Reduce manual work and automate recruiting sourcing and nurturing job candidates. Reduce employee mobility processing time by 50% - Supply chain: Automate source-to-pay processes, reduce resource needs, and improve cycle times. Reduce...

Scylla and Cassandra are both open-source, distributed NoSQL databases designed to handle large amounts of data across many commodity servers. They are often compared due to their similar data models and use cases. Scylla offers the horizontal scale-out and fault-tolerance of Apache Cassandra but delivers 10X the throughput. Scylla achieves the same throughput with a 3-node cluster as a 30-node Cassandra cluster.   This comparison chart from a ScyllaDB datasheet   [PDF] highlights the difference in features:

The free online beginner-level self-paced course Networking Basics from the Cisco Networking Academy is of 22 hours duration with 13 labs. It has the following modules: My Knowledge Check (beta) Course Introduction Module 1: Communication in a Connected World 1.0. Introduction 1.1. Network Types 1.2. Data Transmission 1.3. Bandwidth and Throughput 1.4. Communications in a Connected World Summary Module 2: Network Components, Types, and Connections 2.0. Introduction 2.1. Clients and Servers 2.2. Network Components 2.3. ISP Connectivity Options 2.4. Network Components, Types, and Connections Summary Module 3: Wireless and Mobile Networks 3.0. Introduction 3.1. Wireless Networks 3.2. Mobile Device Connectivity 3.3. Wireless and Mobile Networks Summary Module 4: Build a Home Network 4.0. Introduction 4.1. Home Network Basics 4.2. Network Technologies in the Home 4.3. Wireless Standards 4.4. Set Up a Home Router 4.5. Build a Home Network Summary Checkpoint Exam: Build a Small Network Chec...

Key points from the ScyllaDB technical paper  SQL to NoSQL: Architecture Differences and Considerations for Migration  [PDF] -  While RDBMSs are not fit for distributed deployments, non-relational databases are designed specifically to support such topologies. A number of alternative non-relational database systems have been proposed, including Google’s Bigtable (2006) and Amazon’s Dynamo (2007). The papers for these projects paved the way for Cassandra (2008) and MongoDB (2009).  Despite their origins in a long-forgotten technology cycle, relational SQL databases are by no means ‘legacy’ technology. Some SQL databases, notably PostgreSQL and MySQL, have experienced a recent resurgence in popularity. A new generation of NewSQL databases, notably Google Spanner and CockroachDB, leverage SQL as a query language and offer a distributed architecture similar to that of NoSQL databases yet provide full transactional support. Relational databases are defined in part by...

This Week I Learned -  * IBM has bought HashiCorp. HashiCorp Cloud Platform (the hosted Terraform, Vault, etc that HC manages themselves, their nominal secret sauce) runs on AWS today. * Venture capital firm Sequoia estimated that the AI industry spent USD50 billion on Nvidia chips used for training advanced AI models last year. But, in return brought home only USD3 billion in revenue – a concerning cost-to-profit ratio. - ET *  Teachable Machine is a web-based tool that makes creating machine learning models fast, easy, and accessible to everyone. The first version of Teachable Machine from 2017 can be used if you just want to quickly demo how machine learning works and don’t need to save anything. *  Google Family Link is a parental controls app that helps you keep your family safer online. If you're a parent, you can find your child's Android device location in Family Link once device location sharing is turned on. *  Sticker Mule 's Trace tool can e...