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28 Jul 2026 · 10 min read

Creating Opportunities With AI

I have come to realise that the biggest limitation of my local digital assistant is not its capability but my imagination. When situations arise where I know AI can help, it is usually obvious whether my local assistant is up to the task. There are certainly times when chatting with a frontier model through an existing subscription is going to be vastly more effective than anything I can run locally on my Mac. Even so, a relatively modest model integrated into a local assistant still has enormous potential — potential I was sure I was leaving untapped. My solution is to have my digital assistant generate ideas of how it could help me. In this post, I’ll be talking about my Opportunity Engine.

25 Jul 2026

Bleep My Mac

I create lots of automations to help me work more effectively on my Mac. One of the things I like to build into these automations is audible feedback to tell me when certain steps, phases, or overall completions occur. Rather than visual feedback, I tend to use audible cues. On macOS there are only a few standard audio files to choose from. And I like to have some variety so that I can actually associate an audible event with a particular activity, but I am always running out of good short sounds to use for those cues, so I decided to create something that would give me more options.

19 Jul 2026

Team Building For AI

While having a do anything and everything digital assistant is one approach, we all know that it’s team work that generally delivers the best results on projects. Well, when you have a good team to rely on that is. That was one of the points I took when starting to build out my digital assistant. Rather than just one do-everything assistant, I wanted to build up a team of AI specialists to support my digital assistant needs.

11 Jul 2026

Choosing An AI Brain For My Digital Assistant

In my previous post about my private digital assistant, I explained the challenges I encountered and how I ended up at Hermes Agent as my choice of framework. The next step on my journey was to give my digital assistant a brain. This process was happening in parallel and was intrinsically linked into every stage of what I discussed previously. It was painful, but I did find what seems to be a reasonable baseline.

30 Jun 2026

In Search of a Private Digital Assistant

Over the last three or four months I have been on a bit of a quest. I have been looking for a private digital assistant. Not another chatbot or the latest frontier model, but something I could run on my own machine. Something that would genuinely support me whilst keeping my data under my control. It has been a busy time with work and other commitments, but I managed to carve out an hour here and fifteen minutes there to explore some of the more exciting developments in AI. I think I have finally found what I was looking for. It is not some amazing secret project. Far from it. However, getting to this point involved a surprising amount of experimentation, frustration, and the occasional dead end. In this series I intend to share the challenges, discoveries, successes, and inevitable setbacks that I have encountered, in the hope that my experiences and insights might help some of you avoid the same rabbit holes.

28 Jun 2026

Capturing Links to Drafts

In the past I have employed numerous solutions to capture a link to a web page into another app. I think that in every case I was focused on working in that other app and pulling in a link to the current page, or perhaps a set of links for all open pages. This works fine for most of my use cases, but recently I encountered one where what I actually wanted was to stay in the browser and send the links to the other app rather than pulling links in from that app. That avoids constantly switching back and forth and pulling them in or leaving lots of browser tabs open. To that end I quickly put together something to let me quickly send a link to a web page into my favourite capture app, Drafts.

27 May 2026

Triggering macOS Operations Remotely

We have long been able to trigger processes on remote computers. It is what the World Wide Web is built on for example, and how we login to hugely powerful physical and now virtual devices, to carry out operations. We can also do the same with macOS. I’ve done it in so many ways in the past for my personal setup. Using Hazel and Dropbox to trigger commands via file sync, using browser bookmarks and Keyboard Maestro remote triggers, using remote screen sharing apps like Screens, and even via a home network VPN and connecting at the command line. Those are all still options, but in this post I am going to set out a way that I think is easy to set up and use, such that you will be able to trigger any number of things on your Mac right from your iPhone (or iPad).

Excursions into automation, productivity, and other things.

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