Blogs

Intro I recently wrote about gptel - the Emacs package for interacting with LLMs via APIs. It’s brilliant, but every query costs money and requires an internet connection. For quick tasks like code explanations, refactoring suggestions, or drafting text, those API calls add up. Enter Ollama and Ellama. Ollama lets you run LLMs locally on your machine, and Ellama provides a clean Emacs interface to interact with them. No API keys, no costs, no internet required....

I use Emacs and Org mode extensively for managing notes, documents, and related assets. One recurring friction point in my workflow has been accessing Org attachments outside of Emacs, particularly when I need to copy files into other tools such as PowerPoint, Word, or other document systems. Org mode’s attachment system (org-attach) is excellent at managing and organising files, but its interaction model is primarily Emacs-centric (via Dired). Sometimes, however, the fastest path is to open the attachment directory directly in the operating system’s file explorer....

In large enterprises, responsible AI lives or dies in the gap between strategy decks and what actually ships. The WEF “Advancing Responsible AI Innovation” playbook gives a useful language for that gap - but it only becomes real when it’s translated into operating habits across product, risk, and technology teams. Here I want to spend some time thinking about how the nine plays in the framework can be used as a practical scaffold for enterprise AI programmes, rather than a poster on the wall....

Last week we received the worst possible task - we got nursery homework for our 2-year-old. Could we, please, prepare some photos from holidays and send them over1. Now, this could have been worse. They just wanted a number of photos that we could email over with some explanation. In the past this has included printing and sticking too - something that took far longer than we had anticipated. We started this by grabbing a few photos from Google Photos and downloading them....

I’ve been seeing lots about how AI, and the ever-growing use of LLMs, is creating slop that is killing the internet - making us angry and breaking our brains. I wrote about how this might impact scientific publications in 2023, but I think we should revisit this topic in light of a quote that shifts how I think about content today. In her video, My 17 Minute AI Workflow To Stand Out At Work, Vicky Zhao makes the point that, “in 2025, it will take you longer to read something and comprehend it than the amount of time it took to create it”....

I started using emacs in 2020 after reading a long-lost article about using org-mode as a blogging platform. It hit at the right time as I was looking for a tool that enabled auto-generated, centralised, todo lists - something that was surprisingly difficult to do at the time.1 I have written quite a bit in the last five year, including a peer reviewed journal article and use Emacs every day in my corporate job, both during my science days but also since my move to IT....

I am a big fan of building tools for your workflows. Here is another quick example. To create these blog posts I need to create a markdown file with some front matter. An example of this is below - indeed this is the front matter for this post. --- author: Timothy Johnson title: Emacs - Quick Blog Function date: 2025-05-27 draft: False featured_image: "" tags: ["Emacs", "personal", "tech"] --- Each time I write a blog I need to do this, I hate duplication of work!...

Learn the tool once, benefit for a decade. That’s compound interest for your career. If you’re committed to long-term projects—whether it’s a PhD, a book, or building your career—then mastering the right tools and workflows isn’t optional. It’s foundational. A John Kitchin quote that’s stuck with me for nearly a decade captures this perfectly: Scientific publishing is a career-long activity, and one should not shy away from learning a tool that can have an impact over this time scale....

Very quick one today. Recently I’ve started to feel the need to build out some predefined window pane layouts within emacs. This started when I realised I was spending quite a bit of time flipping between various windows while I was under utilising screen space. Double this with some (forced) time spent in a VSCode for work and seeing what an advantage having a file tree, main code window and terminal would be - even when just playing with text....

Introduction In the hype around quantum computing, it’s hard to separate genuine opportunity from science fiction. As someone who’s been tracking this space, I’ve noticed a clear pattern: industries fall into one of three camps – the overly excited (often without understanding the technical details), the dismissive skeptics (“call me when it works”), or the genuinely confused. What I feel is missing is a straightforward way to think about how quantum computing might actually affect specific industries without getting lost in complex physics or marketing buzz....