I've had Gigabyte's version of Nvidia's DGX Spark, the AI TOP ATOM, on my desk since July, and the two numbers that actually matter about it are 128 and 50: 128GB of unified memory, and roughly fifty watts at the wall while it processes. The box itself It's a lovely little box. Dark grey, 150mm... Continue Reading →
[Academic Tech] – The M5 MacBook Air review
Ugh. It pains me to say it, but this is probably the best laptop in the world. And it's not even close. Shame about macOS, though. I've been lucky enough to be generously provided with a MacBook Air (thanks Beth!) primarily so XMALab gets compiled and built properly for macOS. It's the base model —... Continue Reading →
[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 →
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 →
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; so very nearly there. My experience with Bazzite has me almost leaving Windows.
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 →
[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 →
[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 →