Oh dear. Found this option in wordpress experimental features. Gave it a try. Is this useful to anyone? It weirds me out a bit. Anyway, transcript below: Pip: Prof. Peter Falkingham has been doing what academics do best: turning a simple question into a multi-week infrastructure project, then writing about it thoughtfully enough that you're... Continue Reading →
News/Blog
[Academic Tech] Asus ProArt P16 with RTX Spark announced: The laptop I’ve been waiting for – due Late 2026
I've written about the Asus ProArt P16 before. Back in 2024, I reviewed the original AMD CoPilot+ version with the RTX 4070 -- a beautiful and powerful laptop that I genuinely loved. Then in 2025, I upgraded to the revised model with the RTX 5090 Mobile, tripling my VRAM from 8GB to 24GB and doubling... Continue Reading →
The Local AI Treadmill – everything I’ve built will be obsolete in weeks
I've been writing posts here about getting set up with local AI, agents, harnesses, and what I've done with them. It's fun, and it stretches my computer legs in a way they haven't been stretched recently. But I can't shake this nagging feeling that it's all a colossal waste of time, because everything's moving so... Continue Reading →
My Linux Journey Is Nearly Complete (But There Are Still A Few Rough Edges)
I've been running Linux as my primary desktop for a while now — specifically Bluefin (the immutable Fedora-based distro with dinosaurs) on an ASUS ProArt P16 laptop with an RTX 5090 Mobile and AMD HX 370 processor. The migration from Windows is basically done, but there are still a few edge cases that remind me... Continue Reading →
Building My Personal AI Research Assistant: What I’ve Done So Far
I've been spending the last few weeks setting up Hermes Agent as a personal research assistant, and it's gone from "chatbot I talk to on Telegram" to "actually useful thing that does stuff" pretty quickly. Thought it was worth documenting what we've achieved so far, because some of it's genuinely useful and I suspect other... Continue Reading →
Getting Local AI Working for Me: LM Studio, OpenCode, and Hermes
I've been using Copilot in VS Code for a while now, and it's genuinely useful for the kind of small scripts I write regularly – visualising DEM output in Blender, sorting through CT scan data, that sort of thing. With an education account I get access to the top-end models, which is brilliant. But there... Continue Reading →
[Academic Tech] 2025 Asus ProArt P16 with Nvidia 5090 (vs 2024’s 4070)
I really rather loved my Asus ProArt P16 with Nvidia 4070. A beautiful and powerful laptop. But I was bumping up against RAM limitations with some CT data; 32GB was proving limiting, as was the 8GB VRAM on the otherwise fine nvidia 4070 GPU. So I solved that by upgrading the the newer version of... Continue Reading →
Leaving OneDrive, moving to kDrive
I've long been heavily embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem, and a big part of that has been having my personal (and work) data held by OneDrive. Last month I finally took the plunge and moved 700GB of personal data over to Infomaniak's kDrive, and so far everything has been great. OneDrive's placholders in particular have... Continue Reading →
Office 365 and Linux – trying to use Linux when your organization is all in and locked down with Microsoft
The problem - my employer is all in on Microsoft 365. They have flipped the admin switches that mean email can only be checked via Outlook (or Apple Mail, because executives like Apple, I assume). Meetings, data etc are all managed via Teams, and there's a tight integration between teams and Outlook. Data are stored... Continue Reading →
Linux 2: Even nearlier there… Moving to CachyOS, squashing bugs, and living the Linux life.
My last post was about trying out Bazzite. I'd installed it to an external SSD and gave it a good go for a few days as my main OS. It was a bit of a faff, needing to carry around the SSD with the laptop when I moved about, so I finally put on my... Continue Reading →
Prof. Peter L. Falkingham 