Microsoft announced the new Surface Ultra RTX Laptop today. Of course I want the RTX Spark Machine! Who doesn’t? It is awesome! I am being nostalgic about my original Microsoft Surface Pro from 2013 though. I have fond memories of developing and testing Windows 8 Apps and Windows Phone Apps(remember those?) on it. The spec sheet of my Surface Pro 1 from 2013 is ancient: 3rd-gen Intel Core i5, 4 GB of RAM, 128 GB SSD. Windows support ended years ago. ...

The goal was to figure out whether a small model running on my own hardware could do the job of intent classification and structured parameter extraction well enough for one of my use-cases - read a request like “add 8 spare tent stakes to the camping box” and turn it into something the application can act on. I created an agentic fine-tuning and evaluation loop with a custom evaluation harness: an AI agent proposes one change at a time, a custom evaluation harness measures it against a frozen test set, and every run gets appended to a log with its settings, result and next decision. The agent does the all the work of dataset generation, training, evaluation and diagnosis. ...

Device Code Flow has been built into OAuth2 for years, originally designed for TVs and game consoles. It works just as well for a Docker container. It requires no credentials stored on the agent machine. It gives you narrow, revocable access that the agent cannot exceed. I have OpenClaw deployed in a sandboxed docker container on a dedicated host. I communicate with it via a Telegram bot, in a locked-down chat. ...

OpenflowSight is a Streamlit application for searching, filtering, and analyzing Openflow telemetry data, inspired by Azure App Insights Search UX. It’s a log explorer focused on Openflow telemetry. It helps you quickly identify relevant events, see when they spiked, and which processors were involved. Search, group similar events, and export results for deeper offline analysis. Openflow is an exciting new unified data integration tool from Snowflake based on Apache NiFi. Logs, traces, and metrics emitted at runtime are written to the Event table which supports the OpenTelemetry data model. OpenflowSight surfaces this data to enable convenient, efficient monitoring and analysis of Openflow operations from a graphical dashboard—instead of using SQL queries. ...

What I learned while creating Bookshelf (open source RAG Application) I had the opportunity to speak at the AllThingsOpen.ai 2025 Conference recently. It was a wonderful experience to learn from and share with so many amazing fellow presenters and attendees. All Things Open AI 2025 session recordings are available now. I spoke about several key aspects of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and vector databases. The main topics I addressed included The Core Concepts of RAG, Embedding Models vs. Inference Models, Handling Multiple Embeddings and various Optimizations Beyond Naive RAG such as chunking strategies, enrichment with metadata, auto-merging retriever, and reranking models. Finally, I touched on Local Execution and GPU Utilization. ...

I’m excited to announce the release of SPCHR. Pronounced as “speaker”. I know, I know. My apologies, it was too late at night and that’s the best I could come up with ;) It is a Windows desktop application for speech-to-text transcription. You can use it to “add” voice input to applications that don’t natively support it. It works anywhere you can type or paste text. You can use it entirely locally on your PC if you like, so it is private and secure. Key Features Flexible: SPCHR can use either Azure Speech Services or a local OpenAI Whisper model, giving you the flexibility to choose between cloud-based and local transcription. Zero Configuration: The application works immediately with local Whisper processing - no account setup required! Global Hotkey: Start and stop recording from any application with Ctrl+Alt+L. Seamless Integration: Transcribed text is automatically pasted into your active window. Getting Started Clone the repository Build the solution using Visual Studio and run it Press Ctrl+Alt+L and start speaking Watch as your words appear in your active window For those wanting cloud-based transcription, simply add your Azure Speech Services credentials to the configuration file. Open Source SPCHR is released under the MIT License, and I welcome contributions from the community. Whether you’re interested in adding features, fixing bugs, or improving documentation, your help is appreciated. ...

Do you remember which one of those boxes in the garage has your old phone? Or that toy your child wants to play with again? Or the tripod you need for your weekend trip? Oh what about that massager that you could really use right now! You would probably have to dig through those boxes to find it. Same problem when moving. There are always some boxes that you don’t want to open right away, but you wish you could open just the right one when you need something. ...

Bookshelf is a Generative AI application built as a rudimentary, but fairly capable, RAG implementation written in python. It can use an open source LLM model (running locally or in the cloud) or a GPT model via OpenAI’s API. The application is created using streamlit. I used llama-index for orchestrating the loading of documents into the vector database. Only TokenTextSplitter is currently used. It does not optimize for PDF, html and other formats. ChromaDb is the vector database to store the embedding vectors and metadata of the document nodes. You can use any open source embeddings model from HuggingFace. Bookshelf will automatically use the GPU when creating local embeddings, if the GPU is available on your machine. You can use OpenAI embeddings as well. There is no way to use a specific OpenAI embedding model or configure the parameters yet. Use OpenAI API or any OpenAI compatible LLM API (using LMStudio, Ollama or text-generation-webui) of your choice. There is a live demo on streamlit cloud - https://bookshelf.streamlit.app/ The demo allows only OpenAI integration. You can run it locally for accessing Open Source embedding models and LLMs. Live demo - https://bookshelf.streamlit.app/ ...

Creating the ideal prompt can be the key to transforming a less than average outcome into one that is remarkably relevant. Discovering the right prompt often involves numerous revisions and a method of trial and error. I felt the need to refer to my past attempts, modifications made to prompts, LLM models I tried and other LLM settings as well relative cost of these combinations. There are a few options to help with this : promptflow, langsmith, LLMStudio and others. ...