Observations on the world and its inhabitants
Imagine spending time with a free AI service and realising you are wasting your time. The answers open with flattery: “You make a very interesting point.” or “You’re one of the few people to notice that.” You feel special. Then the invented facts arrive, delivered with total confidence. You soon realise it’s nonsense. Fed up ...
There is a distinct, almost magical phase when you first acquire a modern, highly capable car. For the first few weeks, your focus is entirely on the pure experience of driving. You enjoy the smooth acceleration, the responsive handling, and the quiet comfort of the cabin. You simply press the pedal and go, trusting the ...
After many years of working with all sorts of flow charting and mapping software, I recently discovered yED quite by accident. If Draw.io is a Jaguar, then yED is a Rolls Royce and a Lambo all in one. Teslas are not in this race! 😊 What’s in the ‘tin’? It’s best to say how it ...
In mid-August 2026, I explored the shifting landscape of API pricing and what it meant for professionals relying on artificial intelligence for deep, sustained analysis. See: DeepSeek’s New API Pricing: What It Actually Means for Heavy Users – The Captain’s Watch. The core premise of that piece remains entirely unchanged: for serious analytical work, direct ...
Why Run Your Own AI Interface? What if I said that you could access over 400 AI models, and chop and change as you like for as little as $5 USD to start off. And that could last you a month! You might think – as paranoid as you are – that I’m selling something. ...
This is an advanced guide for people who on Windows 11 have setup OpenWebUI on Docker and have configured API settings to various AI models. Why this? The powerhouse models like DeepSeek V4 Pro, Kimi K3 and GLM (now at 5.3) – all coming out of China – have been increasing their rates for API ...
WordPress powers a huge proportion of the web. It is flexible, extensible, and widely understood. It is also capable of becoming remarkably slow without any single obvious cause. Performance optimisation is the process of reducing the time it takes your server to respond to a request and deliver a page to a visitor. Done well, ...
DeepSeek has announced new API pricing for V4 Pro and V4 Flash, effective 16:00 UTC on 16 August 2026. The headline is straightforward: rates have gone up. The detail is more interesting, and it matters more than the headline for anyone whose usage looks like sustained, document-heavy analysis rather than short, occasional queries. What Changed ...
The rapid expansion of large language model services has produced a striking divergence in access costs. On one side sit high-end web subscription tiers from major Western providers, priced between $100 and $300 per month. On the other side lies direct API access, particularly to efficient models such as DeepSeek, where even intensive professional workloads ...
What if you’re using an AI model to analyse and discuss some document. It could be a piece of research from a journal, a policy, or some complex piece of Statute. Most people use ChatGPT or Claude in the standard browser interface. No problem. Attach a long document to an AI conversation and you are ...
My Downloads folder has a reputation. It starts each day as a convenient holding pen for files I need briefly. By the end of the week, it becomes a digital landfill of installers, PDFs, screenshots, ZIP files, videos, and documents I meant to file but never did. Clicking through hundreds of files trying to remember ...
Recently I moved to Espanso both on Windows and BigLinux for a free and easy way to create shortcuts for key phrases used. There are now several articles on this site about the learning. That means something. Espanso on Windows is easier to setup. It can output images, text, and a whole lot more – ...
Espanso is a free, open-source text expander that works across Windows, macOS and Linux. Most guides cover the basics — type a trigger, get some text. This guide goes further, covering features that turn Espanso from a simple text replacer into a genuinely powerful productivity tool. For those to want to save the drudgery of ...
Most of us spend our lives fighting with our keyboards. We have these thoughts—medical observations, legal arguments, complex lines of code—but the physical act of typing it out over and over feels like a tax on our time. When I first looked at Espanso, I almost closed the window. It looked like a wall of ...
After getting my “digital brain” perfectly tuned on my BigLinux desktop, the next hurdle was getting it onto my Windows 11 laptop. On paper, it looks easy: you just copy a file from one machine to the other. In reality, Windows is a bit more sensitive about how it “reads” those files, and I ran ...
This post documents the transition from TextBlaze to Espanso on a BigLinux system, detailing the technical hurdles overcome and the final configuration logic. The plan is then to run Espanso on W11. 1. Espanso vs. TextBlaze: Key Differences While both tools serve the same goal, the philosophy of use is different: 2. The Critical First ...
As usual, when ‘they say’ I can’t do it – I do it anyway. Oh yes. I’ve been exploring how to toast bread without a toaster for about 2 years. I’ve cracked it! I along with most people are conditioned to believe we need a specific appliance for every single task in the kitchen. Want ...
For the independent author, the “final pass” of proofreading is often the most daunting phase of production. Traditional advice suggests separating the creative act of writing from the analytical act of editing. However, with the advent of sophisticated AI and custom automation, a new “proactive” strategy has emerged: the Integrated Workflow. By managing proofreading iteratively ...
Despite explicit instructions, generative AI systems routinely drift into US English spelling and conventions across longer writing projects. For British-English authors who use AI assistance, this creates a persistent and time-consuming editorial burden. The key insight that resolved this was accepting that generation and linguistic compliance should be treated as separate stages. Rather than attempting ...
As some may not be aware, I’ve been developing my own software to convert text into high quality electronic speech. That development continued for several hours today. As I will remind myself – as if I need to – £490 for 1.6 hours for human narration vs AI-driven production estimated at ~£1.51 for 100 minutes ...
Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is widely recognised as the industry standard for software development. However, its core strength—managing complex text files with precision—makes it an exceptionally powerful tool for authors of fiction and non-fiction alike. Luddites and lazy folk should stop right now – leave this blog and get back to Netflix, Instagram and ...
1. The challenge of communicating with AI Many people, especially those using unpaid AI plans, unknowingly exhaust limited tokens by submitting very short, vague prompts. These models are powerful, but they cannot make accurate assumptions about a user’s goals without deliberate guidance. By applying a few basic principles, users on free tiers can obtain deeper, ...
Most people do not keep their files organised, properly named and easily retrievable from a computer and cloud services. That’s fine because ‘everybody’ has individual choice and can demonstrate their independence, so as to show that they do not suffer with OCD. I however, couldn’t care less what anyone else thinks of me. So, I ...
I’m totally uninterested in whether you or anyone else who reads this has no need to italicise text between quotation marks. As I don’t like wasting time I find automated solutions. A common task is italicising text between quotation marks. When using the Writage plugin to edit Markdown files within Microsoft Word, a common formatting ...
Not everybody needs this! I often have text copied from PDF when I’m working on something. This leads to loads of unnecessary paragraph marks. At other times I have rows of plain text copied from somewhere. It’s a pain to get rid of paragraph marks at the end of each line, yet preserving the correct ...
I just received learned opinion from a group of high IQ doctors that using AI to summarise articles and present findings is “low effort”. This means that anybody who cannot or does use AI for such purposes, is a “high effort” person! Some people may to believe that low effort is simply laziness. However, low ...
As ‘some’ may have realised, something is happening in the background. So, I’m sharing Scrivener which is a nifty piece of software – or an ‘app’ for those who like the new terminology. This post is not a software review. Before anyone goes there, I derive no pecuniary or other advantages (in the past, present ...
For this post the use of IT (information technology) includes software and hardware. Key areas of resistance: Human nature factors: fear, laziness, resistance to change. Organisational: lack of resources to provide, lack of awareness, inability to train, too busy – and all human nature factors. I can ‘unpack’ some of the above but I won’t. ...
Captain Walker
Captain Walker
