5 great tools you can use for everyday tasks …

1. Coding: Github Copilot  

Your AI pair programmer
Guesses what you want to write and writes it for you. Hard to describe how good it is. 

2. Writing, like Blog Posts, Headlines, Flyers, Reports…: Copy.ai
Improve the quality of your writing in seconds. A “Bicycle for writing”, http://copy.ai is a tool that helps you craft great copy by giving you prompts and examples to get started/inspired.

3. Background Noise Removal during Zoom / other calls: krisp.ai (mainly desktop)
(Also iPhones now have a voice isolation mode that is spookily good – try calling someone from a noisy playground – it just works, though hard to turn on/off and know when its been turned on etc).

4. Image cleanup: Magic Eraser
Remove unwanted things from images in seconds

5. Image Super-resolution: Image Enlarger

Honourable mentions; stuff so good you probably already use it and don’t know it:

• OCR on all images on iPhones
• Google Translate is 🤌

Notes from earnings call/transcripts:

• 40% GM with 20% rev growth!

• Rev up 21% YOY to $111B (Annual Rev: $300B)
• EPS up 35% YOY
• Operating Cash Flow: $38.8B
• Gross Margin: 40% (39.8%, up 0.16 pts, products GM: 35.1%)
• R&D Spend Last Qtr (Sep 30, 2020) grew at 21% YOY
  • Was 11% in June Qtr
  • This continues to be predictive…
• USA sales: 36% of rev (64% international)
• Installed Base: 1.65B devices
• Services: $16B revenue (65% GM)
• iPhone: 17% YOY Growth (installed base 1B)
  • #thought iPhone 12 looks visibly different ∴ China sales up
    • Also China, Korea => 5G well established; all new phone sales need 5G, which could have driven upgrades. USA, EU well behind, could have upgrade growth in the coming quarters.
    • Confirmatory Kremlinology; “I think you’ve seen that our performance has been particularly strong in China” – Luca
  • Vol growth is underestimate because of late launch; this is insane growth.
  • Both switchers and upgraders grew!
  • Mix skewed to higher ASP models (Pro, Pro Max). Oddly the iPhone 12 despite being fantastic value seems be under-represented
  • Tim Cook sees “opportunity” in India? HUH? 1% penetration, so where is this opportunity? 5G from Airtel + Jio (too small?), why was this bought up/mentioned?
• iPad: 41%
  • #thought WFH favours iPads? It’s great for Zoom calls, great for kids schools. Was it something else? “And as COVID-19 kept us apart, we saw the highest volume of FaceTime calls ever this Christmas.” from Earnings Call Transcript
• Mac: 21% ✔
  • M1 getting started, next qtr they will fix the touchbar, magsafe and the then it’s gonna be perfect 👌
• Wearables+Home: 30% (WFH?)
• Search Advertising: aka blackmail biz: going strong dude, thx for asking! (per Tim Cook)
• Cash: $200B (approx)
• Projections: Next Qtr:
  • Wearables+Home will be weaker;
  • AirPods Pro / Max will do great (supply constrained)

A new generation of JS bundlers that use modern browser’s native ESM support promise to be much faster than the Webpack/Rollup style bundlers; They seem to be getting a lot of traction / tweets of late (search twitter)

Snowpack: https://snowpack.dev
HMR for Svelte mentioned in the Readme, which makes it a winner for me!

npx create-snowpack-app --template @snowpack/app-template-svelte new-folder

“Snowpack is a faster build tool for modern web apps. Snowpack leverages ESM imports in your application to remove unnecessary bundling work during development. The end result is a build tool that starts up instantly and wastes no time rebuilding on every change. See changes reflected in the browser instantly.”

Other contenders:

esbuild: https://github.com/evanw/esbuild

• Does not support Svelte (https://github.com/evanw/esbuild/issues/8)

Vite: https://github.com/vitejs/vite

• Native-ESM powered web dev build tool. It’s fast. “
• By vuejs
• HMR for React, Preact, Vue. Svelte not mentioned…

Kinda related:

Sucrase (https://www.npmjs.com/package/sucrase) is like babel-lite; smaller scope, assumes modern browsers, upto 20x faster than babel and typescript. Instead of ts-node index.ts, try running sucrase-node index.ts.

Deno takes some inspiration from Go and pulls deps directly from GitHub without npm (or a package manager). I have yet to wrap my head around it … but conceptually I like the idea that a deno script is a “single” file rather than a pile of files. OTOH, PHP’s phar never gained as much traction … I mean when was the last time you downloaded a “cli script” that was actually a phar? Also deno is uses typescript natively.

There is a lot of negativity all around re: coronavirus. It’s depressing. So, in the next posts, I am going to highlight positive developments.

With nearly every smart person on the planet working to find a cure – it’s only a matter of time before we have one. Looks like there are 2 possible treatments (meds) already:

* Remdesivir

* Chloroquine – generic, cheap and easily available – (if you’ve every had malaria, like me, you’ve probably had some version of chloroquine. I remember it tasting bitter’ish but otherwise had no side-effects on me)

Fast.com: Provided by Netflix, this runs on the same server and infra that Netflix runs on. So it’s a good check of Netflix speed and whether your ISP throttles connections to Netflix. Also few ISPs are optimizing (faking) results to fast.com as yet (because it’s not trivial to do so without also making all of Netflix faster)…

proof.ovh.net: OVH is by far the cheapest and probably the best hosting / colo / dedicated server provider in the world. How fast you can get to OVH servers is a good proxy for general internet speeds. (France, Canada, Singapore, Sydney). Mostly you just need to check speeds to the USA/Europe/Singapore/Australia.

speedtest-cli: Much easier to use than the advertisement laden, anti-user speedtest.com site. Easier to script too 😀

brew install speedtest-cli ripgrep #mac
sudo apt install speedtest-cli #ubuntu

#List all servers
speedtest-cli --list

#Test with 3 random servers
for server in `speedtest-cli --list | rg -i 'India\b' | cut -d')' -f1 | sort -Ru | head -n3`; do speedtest-cli --server $server; done

Notes:

• 2TB is the sweet spot for me; YMMV.
• iOS does not seem to search Google Drive like it does Dropbox
• Google’s One (https://one.google.com/) may make Google’s offering more attractive
• Google does a lot of rate-limiting apparently
• Microsoft is giving you Office 365 (which you’d have to pay for anyways) with the 1Tb
• pCloud: I’d trust Google over pCloud… and Drive is searchable, has an excellent API and is probably supported by a lot more tools and services.
• iCloud: The worst by far in terms of performance; sync is slower than molasses from India. And they ($AAPL) don’t care. With Google Photos, iCloud’s limited advantage of deep integration with iOS Photos is not as relevant.
• MediaFire: No search;

Also see https://rclone.org/