Day-to-day tools for a macOS user in 2024: Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text, Paste, 1Password, and more. Discover essential desktop, terminal, and online services for productivity.

Day to Day Tools, the 2024 edition

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....

June 16, 2024 Â· 4 min Â· Russ McKendrick
Discover how CrewAI revolutionized my blog's AI-generated music roundups, enhancing content quality and accuracy. Unlock the potential of collaborative AI for your creative projects.

Updating my blog using CrewAI

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↗ ....

May 6, 2024 Â· 16 min Â· Russ McKendrick
My new book, the second edition of Learn Ansible is now available for pre-order.

Announcing the second edition of Learn Ansible

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....

April 21, 2024 Â· 2 min Â· Russ McKendrick
A step-by-step guide on installing and running InvokeAI on macOS for local AI image generation using Conda and Python.

Installing and running InvokeAI on macOS

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:...

April 14, 2024 Â· 7 min Â· Russ McKendrick
Learn how to efficiently manage Python environments on your MacBook Pro using Conda. This comprehensive guide covers installation, creating and activating environments, installing packages, and best practices for streamlining your Python development workflow.

Conda for Python environment management on macOS

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....

April 6, 2024 Â· 9 min Â· Russ McKendrick
For the first time in nearly a decade, I updated my dotfiles blog post.

Updating my dotfiles

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....

April 2, 2024 Â· 3 min Â· Russ McKendrick
Discover how Azure Logic Apps save you money by automating tasks like stopping and starting VMs and App Gateways. Follow this step-by-step guide to deploy cost-saving automation efficiently.

Saving money with Azure Logic Apps

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 đź’°. 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....

April 1, 2024 Â· 25 min Â· Russ McKendrick
A step-by-step guide to installing Ollama on macOS and running large language models like llama2 and Mistral entirely offline. Learn how to interact with the models via chat, API, and even remotely using ngrok.

Running LLMs locally with Ollama

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....

March 29, 2024 Â· 15 min Â· Russ McKendrick