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Infinite Curiosity

~ Exploring ideas related to tech, code, finance, markets, adtech, AI, humor and more!

Category Archives: Uncategorized

AI Tools you can use *today*

15 Tuesday Mar 2022

Posted by Grynn in Uncategorized

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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 🤌

Apple Earnings Call – Jan 27 2021

28 Thursday Jan 2021

Posted by Grynn in Uncategorized

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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)

June 2020 🔥🔥 New JS Bundlers/Builders

15 Monday Jun 2020

Posted by Grynn in Uncategorized

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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.

CoronaVirus Updates (Good News Only)

17 Tuesday Mar 2020

Posted by Grynn in Uncategorized

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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)

(Virtual) Server Pricing

04 Tuesday Jun 2019

Posted by Grynn in aide-memoire, tech, Uncategorized

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My goto services:

#FREE => Heroku (but only one “VM” is free, then $7/mo for a 512Mb “Dyno”)

Super Cheap => OVH
don’t have an affiliate program AFAIK, cuz they’re so low cost 😦

Blend => Digital Ocean
Use my aff. link to sign up, you get $100, I get $10, everyone’s happy 🙂
Here => https://m.do.co/c/728c8434e1b1

Digital Ocean
Special sauce: Incredible UI/UX, super fun to use. I’ve stopped thinking about it anymore, when I need a VM, I just go to DO.

Downsides: Many (probably most?) of the IPs are blacklisted for email. Most aren’t great exits for VPN services either for the same reason.

CLI tool (doctl) has pretty shit UX; could have been so much better. But still it’s there and works in a pinch
$5/GB of RAM
Linode$5/GB of RAM
OVH
Special sauce: The lowest cost option, but it’s Canada and Europe only. No SE Asia, no USA.
$1.68/GB of RAM
Yep it’s 66% cheaper than everyone else.
Vultr
Special sauce: awesome plans with $2.50 for a node with IPv6 only, 512Mb RAM.
$5/Gb
Amazon LightSail
Special Sauce: oh well, it’s the IBM of servers, so I might as well document it here: They have this clone of Digital Ocean, called LightSail, that s3cks, obvs. It’s the same price as Linode/DO/Vultr. Available in a few more locations than most of the above (incl. Mumbai; Digital Ocean has Bangalore).

When to use: All the rest of your infra is on Amazon Cloud and you’re pathethic.
$5/GB of RAM
Heroku #FREE (owned by Salesforce, not indie and chill like they pretend)
Incredibly good tooling; 1x 512Mb Dyno is free (1000 Hours/mo if you verify with a credit card). Gets very expensive very fast though — because you are subsidising the development of developer tools and the “free” tier.
$14-$50/Gb of RAM
Prices as of June 5, 2019.

I may update this page someday, but then again I may not 🙂 Bookmark if you’re adventurous (ctrl + d, or cmd + d)

My ‘goto’ SpeedTest Services

13 Saturday Apr 2019

Posted by Grynn in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

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

Top Extension Categories

09 Tuesday Apr 2019

Posted by Grynn in aide-memoire, Uncategorized

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(From IE Edge Chromium Store April 2019)

  • Adblockers and password managers
  • Education
  • Social and entertainment
  • Shopping
  • Productivity
  • For developers

Cloud Storage Pricing 7/Apr/2019

07 Sunday Apr 2019

Posted by Grynn in Uncategorized

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ProviderStoragePer Year
Google Drive (searchable)2TB $          100
Apple iCloud (can be shared with family)2TB $          120
Dropbox (searchable, best sync engine)2TB $          200
Backblaze B22TB $          120
Mega1Tb $          144
pCloud2TB $          100
OVH SoYouStart2TB $          360
DreamObjects (DreamHost)2TB $          600
OneDrive1TB  $          70
MediaFire1TB  $          30

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/

Gmail iOS URL Schemes

10 Monday Sep 2018

Posted by Grynn in aide-memoire, Uncategorized

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Open specific message

googlegmail:///cv=13eafcee7cc82901/accountId=1&create-new-tab

Open compose message

googlegmail:///co?subject=<subject text>&body=<body text>&to=

For Google Inbox use inbox-gmail:/// instead of googlemail:///

macOS Productivity Apps every dev needs!

10 Monday Sep 2018

Posted by Grynn in aide-memoire, Uncategorized

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Window Management/Misc Util

Spectacle, Free, Open Source
BetterTouchTool, Donationware
Magnet , Mac App Store, about $2.

Winner: BetterTouchTool

Spectacle App is really, really good window management; shortcuts to dock windows to left/right half (or quadrants, or top/bottom) of screen. Some stuff, like hitting the ‘dock right’ shortcut (ctrl + cmd + right) twice makes a window use the right third then right half then right 3/4ths etc. It’s just magically good. Having said that you can replicate (95%) the functionality of Spectacle App with BTT and since BTT does Window Management and Keyboard/Mouse Remapping and so much more – it makes sense to use BTT alone. 

Magnet is Spectacle App with the added ability to dock windows on drag (i.e. drag to top of screen to make a window full screen). BTT does this out of the box too; but takes it further… BTT lets you define snap areas / layouts and activate them using the mouse alone!

BTT does not come batteries included, so you have to make your own shortcuts and assign window management operations to them. There’s a community forum for sharing presets but it’s still a chore. Also BTT can do Touchbar based Window Management (though I’ve not found that very useful; and I hate the touchbar anyways).

Application Launcher / Search Everywhere

Alfred, Freemium

Better spotlight, including deep integration with Google / Gmail / Drive and other custom searches (via plugins). Really good, no competition here. No discussion, just install it and thank me later.

Alfred Workflows

  • Alfred Workflow Todoist
  • Dash

Note Taking

OneNote, Free, Proprietary 

The best note taking app out there. Period. I’d say Apple Notes is now the best note taking app out there, because it’s so fast and has great integration with iOS & macOS. The web version is not too shabby either. It’s not very cross platform though and if you have thousands of notes (as I do) sync breaks every now and then. It doesn’t have all the “nice” touches of OneNote – like napkin math or keyboard shortcuts to apply styles like Heading 1, Heading 2 etc.

Screen Sharing / Collaboration

ScreenHero (now owned/murdered by Slack)

AnyDesk

TeamViewer: The free version just randomly stops workign for me — it says commercial use detected and stops. So AnyDesk, though TeamViewer is very good.

Other:

CleanMyMacX, Freemium 

Itsycal, Freemium

Developer Tools 

  • PHPStorm
  • Visual Studio Code
  • Homebrew,

Homebrew packages/bottles: 

brew install php swaks htop telnet ffmpeg mysql pstree aria2 pv q jq autojump keychain nmap readline node redis beanstalkd ripgrep rsnapshot wget rsync bzip2 git xz yarn speedtest-cli parallel composer go sqlite curl grep sshfs coreutils

Other Stuff

Google Chrome, FireFox, Microsoft Edge (Chrome)

XCode

Office 365

Parallels Desktop

Coconut Battery

WhatsApp (Desktop)

Blackmagic Speed Test

Amphetamine

Reeder

Dropbox

Tinkerwell

VLC

Beyond Compare: Don’t leave home without this!

Paw

SuperDuper

(Git) Tower 2

Docker

Pocket

SecurePDF

XQuartz

Calibre

Intel Power Gadget

Mailplane

Backup and Sync from Google

MacDown

WireGuard

MySQL Workbench

Skype

OpenAudible

Resolutionator

Local By Flywheel

JetBrains Toolbox

Trello

GIPHY Capture

Yoink!

OpenInTerminal

MacsFanControl

Trader Workstation (IB)

 

← Older posts

Recent Posts

  • macOS Allow CLI binaries from third-party devs
  • AI Tools you can use *today*
  • YouTube Revenue Stats (2010-2021)
  • Thoughts on Bitcoin/Crypto
  • Apple Earnings Call – Jan 27 2021

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