Tech

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....

Alec over at Technology Connections recently posted a video that I suspect might just put words to the issues many are facing today. I have written before about the energy barrier needed to get change to happen and how, doom-scrolling and short-form contents are the opposite of mindfully approaching content on the internet. I have seen significant improvements now that I actively stop this - taking time to seek out long form articles, essays and news sites that I trust and can learn from....

Motivation A key task at the moment is individual 1-to-1s/catch-ups. These come around quick, and I often don’t have a huge amount of time to deal set them up. I have stared to tag things in Emacs with peoples name so that I can run queries against my agenda and pull out all tasks that I’ve tagged for someone - a great way to get info to the right people....

Motivation I am doing lots or recruitment at the moment - some weeks it can be near 15-25 % of my time. It is for this reason I wanted to think about my workflow and put in some automation to help me with the process. I am currently living almost exclusively in denote - the fantastic notes package by Prot. The real aim here is to remove as much cognitive load as possible and reduce the amount of time needed in preparation of interviews....

I have heard wonderful things about gptel - the Emacs package that gives an interface to various LLMs. I will admit however I really struggled to get this working using my OpenAI API key with the Docs in their GitHub. Below is a quick guide for anyone else that got stuck - running a Linux machine. First things, get gptel installed - add the below to your config: (use-package gptel :ensure t) (setq gptel-api-key (getenv "OPENAI_API_KEY")) You will notice here we have to specify out OpenAI API key....

When it comes to quickly pulling in images into my org documents, org-download is superb. This package is a critical part of my workflow and I use it daily on my Windows work system. Having a Windows system at work1 means that some of the cool functions that work with org-download do not function due to the limitation put on my by corporate policy. One of those is pasting images from the clipboard....

Intro I wanted to share a quick tool I’ve been using recently to up my writing - emacs-langtool. This is a tool that bring spell and grammar checking tools you would expect in modern word processing suites into Emacs. It is also free, open source and can be run locally without an internet connection. Set-up Download Languagetool and extract it into a folder on your system. Also make sure you have Java installed too....

Intro Change has an energy barrier. To do anything new you need help to get over that hump, make a change, and enjoy the rewards of your new situation. I have written in the past about my efforts to remove distractions by limiting my phone’s functionality with, if I’m being honest, the aim to remove doom-scrolling and short form content. Ideally becoming a more present person who, when they do consume content, consumes high-quality content mindfully....