It looks like I have written about the tools I use day-to-day since 2017; I wonder how much has changed. 🤔 Info As you may already know, I am a macOS user, so all of the tools covered in this post primarily run on Macs. 🍎 Desktop Apps 💻 Visual Studio Code : This is still my primary IDE; I use it for all of the infrastructure as code I write along with any other code I need to write and debug, and trust me, there is more debugging going on than writing most of the time....

I have been reading a lot about CrewAI recently and as it was a long weekend I decided to tip my toe in the water and do something with it, but what? About a year ago, while bored, I added a Python script to this blog which used the OpenAI API to write a blog post based on what I had listened to the previous week using data from Last.FM ....

Exciting News! I’m thrilled to announce that the 2nd edition of my book, “Learn Ansible: Automate your cloud infrastructure, security configuration, and application deployment using Ansible” is now available for pre-order on Amazon and Packt Publishing’s website! 📣 🎉 📚 Amazon ( 🇺🇸 ) Amazon ( 🇬🇧 ) Packt Publishing ( 🌍 ) Whether you’re a beginner or an intermediate user looking to take your Ansible skills to the next level, this hands-on guide will empower you to automate your infrastructure and application deployments consistently and efficiently....

Just a quick post this week, following on from my last post last week about using Conda and also the one from a few weeks about about running LLMs locally using ollama I decided to explore the world of AI image generation on my local macOS machine. To do this I thought I would revisit a tool I dabbled with about a year ago called InvokeAI , the tool is described as follows:...

As mentioned in a previous post, I recently finished writing the second edition of Learn Ansible. This had me using Python a lot, and my one key takeaway is that managing Python has become a massive chore. Now, with the book complete, I thought I would strip back on my machine, start from scratch - or as close to clean as I could get - and develop a cleaner, more streamlined way of managing Python on my local machine....

I decided to spring clean my Dotfiles repo , as it had been a while. Then I noticed that the last time I mentioned them on the blog was nearly ten years ago, so I wanted to give a quick update. The most significant change is that I have moved to using Zsh and Oh My Zsh since Zsh became the default Shell in macOS. Warning This is all VERY customised to my requirements, and there are a lot of hard-coded bits in there....

During the day job, I have to get a little creative with controlling costs for Azure resources; there are some everyday tasks and scenarios where Azure Logic Apps can help you save money 💰. The first is quite a typical scenario: stopping and starting Azure Virtual Machines. There was a time when I would have just used an Azure Automation Account and the Microsoft-supplied workflow. Still, Automation Accounts are a little (well, a lot) too reliant on PowerShell for my macOS using / Linux administrating tastes....

As I am coming to the end of writing the second edition of Lean Ansible (more news on that coming soon), I thought now would be a great time to have a look at what exciting developments have been happening in the six months now that I have a little more free time. One of the things I have been keeping an eye on is the state of Large Language Models (LLM for short), especially since the introduction of open-source models such as Llama from Meta and Mistral 7B , which you can run locally....