Salvatore Denaro

Bluesky has become my preferred starting point to check what is trending in the news. Back when I was still using Twitter; way back when it provided a useful free API tier, I had a script that would pull my favorites from Twitter to an RSS feed.  I recently decided to recreate that for Bluesky. While the old script just provided favorites, the new one provided feeds for both favorited and bookmarked items. I also hacked up a way to deal with multiple accounts. This time, I used FastAPI and python rather than Sinatra and ruby for the old one. Why bother? I enjoy bookmarking things to read later and this mechanism lets me pull my bookmarked items into my RSS reader. And this time, the code was mostly generated by Gemini 3.1 Pro via Google Antigravity. You can check it out here .

Spec coding Like everyone else, I've been playing with using LLMs as an app generation tool and like most people, I have been disappointed. The code being spit out has not been very good. And like many others, I was interested in finding ways to improve code creation.  Gemini.md I had stumbled upon this medium article and then took a look at the Gemini CLI github repo.  Much like claude, cursor and github copilot, it is possible to have standing instructions for Gemini. Just write up instructions on how you want your projects laid out, what language and libraries you want to use and how you want the LLM to prioritize things and in theory, Gemini should build an app closer to your spec. After a using gemini-cli for a few weeks I started to gather a few prompt sets from reading what others have done with claude and cursor. Laying it out in a markdown file was easy enough but I was curious if it really had any real effect. As a test, I decided to try the same prompt twice, once ...

Almost every discussion about using LLMs seems to eventually leads to people mentioning they ways they've adjusted their writing style, prompting style and expectations to get the most out of their LLM. So it makes me wonder if the LLMs training us as we are training them as there is plenty of precedent for new communications media creating new rules for communication.  From smileys to emoji Back in college when I was just starting to use email to contact people I noticed that sometimes people used smileys at the end of a subject or at the end of an email to suggest that something was being said in as a joke. These were sometimes modified with other ascii characters. An O to suggest a halo when you claim you're innocent or an & replacing the ) to suggest you're tongue tied. Eventually, smileys would be added to subjects or to the first line of an email as a hint that there would be something funny in the email. Smileys became a new form of punctuation that were only us...

New York City's Office of Technology Innovation provides a collection of useful APIs that let you access City data. For the past few weeks I have been playing with the APIs looking for useful application ideas and I've been using Google's colab product for that exploration. These APIs are free to access and you can sign up here . If you are new to Colab, Google provides an introduction notebook that covers the basics. If you've used jupyter  with Python you should be good to go. While Colab is frequently used for data science and AI, I think this is a great platform for building internal tools. For one specific type of user, users with lots of domain specific knowledge who may not know an API or tool, Colab is useful as a way of bundling instructions and code in a way that allows them to be productive.   Minimal code example for connecting to an end point This is a minimal test script. It connects to an API, uses a secure way of holding the API keys and allows the use...

I have been spending more time on LinkedIn the past couple of months and every time I want to facilitate an introduction between people I find myself thinking there should be a better way to do it. It's somewhat annoying that a platform for networking lacks a way to link people in.   Right now, LinkedIn lets you message a person and include in that message, a third person's contact. This would be ok as an introduction but it lacks what I think are two important features that should be part of LinkedIn's communication options-protection of the privacy and seeking the consent of the two people being introduced.  As an example, let's say I wanted to introduce a student I know named Adam to a business strategist who is looking for a part time worker. We'll call him Bob . I know Bob will find Adam to be the perfect fit-a motivated communications student at a local school who is looking for a part time summer gig. Starting from Bob's profile, I would pick the more op...

I am not a hardware guy and my Brooklyn apartment lacks true workshop space but we were able to put together a reasonably well done candy chute robot able to deliver candy directly into Trick-or-Treat's candy bags.  My wife wanted the robot to blink lights and wave an arm. I decided to use a servo motor driven by a Raspberry pi pico running MicroPython. The pico and MicroPython were chosen because I had them already from prior projects with my son.  Legos, chopsticks and leftover screws. Only the best. Cardboard, aluminum foil and Tupperware to protect the electronics. Those are the bags of candy and we managed to go through all of the candy by dark. This is what it looked like up on our balcony. How do you get the candy down to the trick-or-treaters? A dryer duct. Last time we used plastic sheeting and zip ties. The $25 to get a duct was worth it. We tested it with fun sized chocolate, smarties, double bubble gum, skittles and m&ms. The bagged candy, skittles and M...

There are plenty of blog posts explaining how to add Twitter Card integration to your Blogger posts but I haven't seen any that are written for the newer Blogger UI. The code that does the integration hasn't changed since this article in 2013 , but the steps to add it to your theme have.  If you haven't logged onto Blogger, do so. You should see this panel on your left. Pick "Theme" and you will see something that looks like this on the top portion of your screen. First things first, make a backup. Click on the little arrow If you are using the classic themes, it will look like this.  After clicking on the arrow, pick Backup. Download the file. It's the same for classic themes. Pick download. Save the file somewhere just in case you need to recover your theme. While editing your theme will not destroy any of your pages or posts, it can cause problems for the theme you are using if you make a mistake. If you've spent some time editing your blogroll and cust...