Even though I spend most of my time on mastodon baiting Linux users, I actually have been keeping a serious eye on Linux for a while. I like Windows 11 for the most part; I have it setup nicely with Windhawk, RayCast, and FilePilot such that it works very well for me. Launching and using... Continue Reading →
Using local AI/LLM in VS Code without third party software, on the CPU, GPU or NPU
I've found VC Code copilot to be invaluable in writing small scripts and the like for, say, visualizing my DEM output in Blender. Just a super way of speeding up tool-building in scenarios where you can immediately tell if it's worked or not. With an education account, you get access to all kinds of top-end... Continue Reading →
Major update to Open Source photogrammetry software Meshroom 2025.1
Meshroom has for some time been one of my top choices for open-source or free photogrammetry software, offering a really deep amount of customization and tinkering. However, while this blog made a big splash early on reviewing all the different open-source photogrammetry software, I've found they haven't really kept up with Metashape or RealityScan, and... Continue Reading →
[Academic Tech] XREAL Air Pro 2 – Immersive Augmented Reality Glasses
At the recent SEB conference, I traveled sans laptop, working on the assumption I could do everything urgent on my OnePlus Open. I could... but what I found was that some tasks just needed a larger screen (specifically remote-ing into a remote workstation was difficult to make out everything on the small 6-7" unfolded screen).... Continue Reading →
RealityScan 2.0 Released (formerly RealityCapture)
As I’d previously noted, RealityCapture has been re-branded to RealityScan, to align branding across desktop and mobile applications. With the rebrand come some major new changes: AI Masking Smarter Alignment Aeriel LiDAR Support Quality Analysis To install it, you need to fire up Epic Games Launcher, then I had to wait a while until the... Continue Reading →
Modern image formats – which is best? Experimenting with .AVIF and .JXL
Despite having a terabyte of OneDrive storage (which I've been enjoying for years, though I'm starting to look at Proton as an alternative - that's for another post), it's very nearly full, and a big portion of that is photos: normal snaps of holidays, family, and so forth, but also hundreds and hundreds of gigs... Continue Reading →
Setting up Zotero with Onedrive/Dropbox/Google drive etc
Whilst my academic career started with EndNote, I’ve been a purely Zotero user for several years now. I find Zotero to have a nicer interface, as well as being faster and more extensible than EndNote. Plus, biggest benefit of all – it’s free! Zotero looks far more modern than Endnote, and is generally faster in... Continue Reading →
[Academic Tech] Oneplus Open Apex Edition (after 2 months)
I moderately recently upgraded my phone from the Samsung Fold 3 to the Oneplus Open (OPO). As per usual with my tech, through a combination of selling the old gadget and picking the new one up 'as new' on ebay, I was able to keep overall costs very low. I've had the phone a couple... Continue Reading →
Dinosaur locomotion – Paper and online seminar
Well, we start 2025 off with a new paper in Biology Letters reviewing dinosaur locomotion. This is part of the 200 years of dinosaurs special collection, containing a bunch of reviews on different areas. The paper is available fully open access here: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2024.0441 As an added bonus, I was asked to do an online seminar... Continue Reading →
[Academic Tech] Asus Proart P16 AMD CoPilot+ Review: Incredible performance and design
Welp, it’s new computer time. My Surface Laptop Studio was starting to slow me down a bit with work, and wasn’t keeping up with games, even with the eGPU. I was also starting to feel like I was missing out on the new copilot+ PC stuff – I dabble with local LLMs and stuff, and... Continue Reading →