Anyone who knows me well will know about my dislike for litter. I can often be seen wandering around Bathgate of an evening or weekend, litter picker, hoop and bags in-tow, trying to tidy up our beautiful countryside. I don’t understand why people litter in such a beautiful part of the world but that’s an … Read more
This is just a quick summary, for anyone who might find it useful, about some testing/mucking around I’ve been doing using AI to create images. In the past, where I’ve had issues finding Creative Commons Licensed images to use on newsletters, I’ve had some success generating images with AI – typically using ChatGPT or Adobe … Read more
I managed to catch the afternoon of this really interesting day of webinars organised by Phil Anthony from the University of Kent. I found the whole afternoon really interesting, and if you are interested in watching any of the presentations, they’ve already been uploaded to the Digitally Enhanced Education Webinars YouTube channel – super efficient! … Read more
People who know me or have read my blog posts before likely know that I’m a bit of an environmentalist. I litter pick in my spare time and recycle anything I can. I’ve been interested in digital sustainability for a while now too. However, some of you might be thinking… then why do you spend … Read more
I recently did a course on LinkedIn Learning about Cybersecurity. I know quite a bit about cybersecurity already (although I’m not an expert) but given my service management/ownership and development experience you pick things up. This was a bit of a refresher and I learned a bit more about some of the frameworks that underpin … Read more
So other than gardening and fence painting (it seems to take forever!), I’ve been doing a bit of the Anthropic Academy training on using Claude, whilst continuing to play with Claude Code in the background. What the training has helped me with is understanding how to use Claude more efficiently, which has been interesting – … Read more
Today I’ve been playing around in Jupyter Notebook, trying to learn how to do visualisations and data analysis in Python using a copy of the WDB_Accused data downloaded from the Survey page on Edinburgh Data Share. I was working through ‘Artificial Intelligence Foundations: Machine Learning’ by Kesha Williams in LinkedIn Learning but went away off … Read more
My last day at Edinburgh was the 29th of April 2026. My contract officially ended on the 15th of May so after I had a lovely send off, I then was set to have a few weeks holiday and to completely relax. The week after (and Myles, new Head of Digital Learning Applications and Media, … Read more
Claude and I have been working together to do more stuff since my first blog post about Claude. We’ve added a whole lot of new things to our prototype Survey of Scottish Witchcraft site including a chatbot to ask questions about the data (a challenge received by Lesley Greer), ‘stories’ which are AI summaries of … Read more
After almost 22 years working in a variety of different roles at the University, I’ve made the decision to leave. It’s been a hard decision as there is so much I love about my job but I need a chance to catch up with myself. I’d like to have a bit of time to swot … Read more
