Tech-savvy time-saver
Hard-to-find tips on otherwise easy-to-do tasks involving everyday technology, with some advanced insight on history and culture thrown in. Brought to you by a master dabbler. T-S T-S's mission is to boost your competitiveness with every visit. This blog is committed to the elimination of the rat from the tree of evolution and the crust of the earth.
Sunday, December 07, 2025
Check Your AI/ML Mastery. Will Zuck Pay *You* a $100m?
Saturday, November 15, 2025
The Cocaine Cobra Effect. Are You Surprised?
In Colombia, the FARC used to finance its anti-govt activity by growing and selling cocaine.
Peace deal done, now the coca growing has to stop. But, it's hard to make a living selling legitimate crops like cauliflower,
Now, if you're a former coca farmer, you get a handout from the govt. Really?
The solution for the poor nobodies? Become a "former coca grower". Even if you weren't growing coca before, start growing coca so you can ask for a handout to stop. Cute?
Bonus : The govt. sends soldiers on sorties to the farms to uproot the coca plants because glyphosate (Roundup) spray from the air (planes, at Trump's behest) is not as effective as they wish. This leads to clashes. Do you see a role for robots?
The Cobra Effect
- During British rule in India, the government wanted to reduce deadly cobra snakes in Delhi.
- They offered a bounty for every dead cobra.
- People started breeding cobras just to kill them and collect the reward.
- When the government canceled the bounty, breeders released their now-worthless cobras into the wild.
- End result: more cobras than before.
Tuesday, October 28, 2025
Israel Has Anti-Missile Lasers, but They're Useless Against Drones? Really?
Going by "The Tech Wizardry Need to Stop Drones," you'd think we're stumped.
| Cait in all her g |
Dan Michaels: This is very urgent because unlike some security concerns that are in the future or potential, this is happening now. Drones, as you say, are showing up over cities, military bases, airports across Western Europe, not just along the front line. We saw Russian drones going into Polish airspace and crashing. There have been drones in Munich over a military base in Copenhagen, over the airport. So it is a clear and present danger.
Caitlin McCabe: Got it. So clearly a very pressing need for this, but how easy is it to actually intercept these drones?
Dan Michaels: That's the issue here. It's not at all easy. Listeners may be familiar with the Patriot anti-missile system, which is, by all accounts, a very impressive system, but that's designed to hit missiles that are following a steady, linear path. One difference with drones, aside from them being much smaller, is that they can zig and zag and stop and start again more like a tiny helicopter than a rocket. And even the best computer, which might be able to track a missile in flight, isn't going to know what a drone is going to do three seconds later. So there are a lot of very complicated technical challenges involved in just locating the drones to try to knock them out of the sky.
Caitlin McCabe: And so Dan, can you walk us through some of the tech that's been developed so far?
Dan Michaels: Like with so many other situations, defense planners and engineers are trying to develop layers of systems to stop drones. The first thing you want to do is spot them far away and hit them as far away as possible.
How does this work? A laser weapon can handle a missile doing 1000 mph, but we can't figure how to use them against drones that fly MUCH slower? Go figure.
Friday, October 24, 2025
Maybe Vijen Patel Knows What It's Like for the Whiners
This is the one I mean : https://www.hindustantimes.com/trending/us/indian-tech-couple-earning-over-1-million-unable-to-build-a-life-in-us-we-are-miserable-101753611546908.html
What's the Vijen connection? Talking to Guy Raz of NPR's HIBT, they couldn't raise funding for PressBox and bootstrapped. His savings were $120k. How do you figure that? He worked three years at McKinsey and two years in private equity ("I was making $300k a year in SFO and I went to paying myself $40k" (in Chicago, running PressBox))
Tuesday, October 21, 2025
Hot Wheels Are On a Roll. But Do You Know Why?
Sunday, October 19, 2025
Have You Heard of Neil Dagger? I Hadn't.. (chatGPT --> $$$)
Full disclosure, I did not expect him to look like
| Neil, a graduate in CS from University College, London lays claim to a small fortune from using and teaching others how to use chatGPT |
To make more $, use the oracle for:
💸 Monetization & Passive Income
1. Ebook Creation & Self-Publishing
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Generate book ideas, outlines, and entire drafts with ChatGPT
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Use it to refine grammar, tone, and formatting
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Sell on Amazon Kindle or Gumroad
2. Blogging & Affiliate Marketing
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Use ChatGPT to write SEO-optimized blog posts
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Automate content calendars and posting strategies
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Insert affiliate links and monetize via traffic
Resources : Read More button. Read Aloud button
3. YouTube Scripts & Video Ideas
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Get help writing video scripts, titles, and descriptions
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Plan channel growth strategies with AI
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Automate comment replies and community engagement
🧠 Expert-Level Prompting
4. Prompt Engineering for Freelancers
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Offer “prompt-as-a-service” to businesses or creators
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Build prompt libraries and sell them on platforms like PromptBase (BTW, congratulations Ben Stokes
)
5. Coaching & Course Building
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Design full lesson plans, quizzes, and instructional content
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Position yourself as a niche expert using ChatGPT as a backend assistant
⚙️ Automation & Time-Saving
6. Business Email Writing
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Draft cold emails, client proposals, and customer service responses
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Translate messages into multiple languages
7. Social Media Content
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Create post calendars for Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter
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Draft captions, hashtags, and image ideas
📈 Entrepreneurship & Branding
8. Business Idea Generation
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Brainstorm startup ideas, app concepts, side hustles
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Validate ideas by simulating “customer feedback” dialogues
9. Landing Pages & Ad Copy
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Write persuasive sales copy and A/B test variations
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Use it with website builders to generate full landing page content
🔄 Niche Services & Gig Economy
10. Resume & Cover Letter Services
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Offer resume/CV editing powered by ChatGPT
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Create tailored templates for different job roles or industries
11. Legal & Technical Drafting (with caution)
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Draft basic contracts, disclaimers, or privacy policies
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Translate technical documents into layman terms
Key takeaways
- Finding the right topic and niche to target.
- Conducting research
- Organizing and structuring the content
- Creating engaging content in the right style
- Formatting for different devices (kindle, etc)
- Proofreading and editing
- Cover design
- Promoting and marketing
- Pricing
Saturday, October 18, 2025
SaaS → PaaS → RaaS (Quilin > Asahi Brewing)
Economist : They were hit so bad, they were forced to take orders by fax!
The big bad wolf : Qilin RaaS - Russian-speaking criminal group. Double-extortion specialists - steal data and demand ransom and also threaten to leak it. The group's toolkit is advanced and includes customizable encryption modes, anti-forensic techniques, and the ability to spread across networks
Investments in hacking tools have paid off big time for the Chinese apparently: In 2011–2012 Chinese-linked actors reportedly penetrated major Israeli defence contractors and exfiltrated data related to Iron Dome / missile systems.
