when was the last time you were excited about a new phone?

The days of double-digit smartphone growth are over — and the next decade may start to see smartphone sales decline. From roughly 2007 until 2013, the smartphone market grew at an astonishing pace, posting double-digit growth year after year, even during a global recession.

Worth reading. Phones are now ubiquitous and almost everyone who wants once has one. Growth will be in the next billion users once they have 4g data networks, not new phones to the existing billion users.
From We're No Longer in Smartphone Plateau. We're in the Smartphone Decline.

Capturing text from any Mac Application into Emacs org-mode with Automator and org-protocol

After decades of using vi and Vim I switched to Spacemacs which is an amazing vi keystroke emulation layer running on Emacs and configured with an amazing set of preconfigured layers for different tasks. I decided to give it a try after seeing Org-Mode in action and seeing it was a nice taking system with integrations with almost anything imaginable. A few weeks ago I found out about org-protocol and followed this post by Jethro on using a bookmarket to capture from the Web to Emacs. This page assumes a few things You use Emacs on a Mac You are using org and understand how to use capture and capture templates. You need to yank text from random apps into Emacs You don't need to be using Spacemacs and this should work with any install of Emacs that supports org, org-capture and org-protocol. Creating Automator Action Start Automator. It's this icon. I'm guessing many people have had this for years and have never used it. Open it and pick Quick Action Grab the...

Using Google Colab for REST API exploration and testing

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...

AI Spec coded Python Flask Applications with and without prompt assistance

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 ...

Salvatore Denaro

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