Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 September 2024
Announcing the winner of last newsletter's competition (and also giving the answers in case anyone is still struggling to identifiy the 16 book titles).
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 September 2024
Five tribute acts played in 5 different venues on successive days of one week in September. Can you use your skills of logical deduction to work out who played which venue when, and what the capacity of each venue was? The incentive is a chance to win our monthly fifty-pound prize.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 04 September 2024
Learning to use AI tools has been a journey for us, although not one which we thought would take in broccoli cats and Neanderthal film reviews. In this blog we look at the 3 best and 3 worst things we've found when using AI tools like ChatGPT.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 04 September 2024
We have always provided the best courseware, exercises and standard of training in the industry, but now we have the CPD certification to prove it!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 01 August 2024
In creating our two-day course on using AI tools we found a few sources of help particularly useful, and thought we'd take this opportunity to acknowlege them.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 22 July 2024
Having recently compared the 4 main AI tools for text prompts, I thought I'd do the same for image generation tools. In this blog series we compare Dall-E (via ChatGPT and separately via Copilot), Firefly, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion for 3 pre-defined tests to see which ones score most highly for cost, ease-of-use, speed, editing ability and above all for quality of image.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 16 July 2024
I'm sick of reading blogs pretending to explain how Large Language Models work, when the truth is that few people on earth can ever hope to understand how they are constructed. This blog is my attempt to explain as much as 99.99% of us can ever hope to understand about how AI works, and why the other bits will always remain opaque to most people.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 15 July 2024
In this blog we'll compare OpenAI's Chat GPT 4, Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude 3.5 and Microsoft's Copilot to see which AI tool gives the best results for different types of queries.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 04 July 2024
We've created clues to help you identify 16 different books (they're all well-known). The more you can guess, the greater will be your chances of winning our £50 voucher!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 03 July 2024
"Is the periodic table yummy? Well, it depends on the element." Any website containing this text bears further investigation. Watch the epic spaceman shrink down by a factor of 10 every 20 seconds until he's the size of an atom, find out how to repair Oreo biscuits using the Japanese art of Kinstugi and learn which elements of the periodic table you should and shouldn't eat: all (and much more) at the Kottke archives.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 20 June 2024
In computing it's enough to solve a problem, but as a bonus it's nice to do so in the most elegant way (although elegance is a subjective quality). This blog gives my 3 favourite ways to solve last month's Excel desert island competition.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 06 June 2024
This month we ask you to travel to the terrifying Skull Island and find the hidden treasure buried there, armed only with some - unlikely - Excel clues
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 June 2024
Apologies for making this word search slightly harder than usual - you can see the answer in this blog, as well as discover who was the lucky win of the month's prize
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 June 2024
StackOverflow and OpenAI have announced a partnership, but I think it's fair to say that not every StackOverflow user is sold on the idea ... !
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 June 2024
The Northwest Computer Museum not only has a vast array of old hardware, software, documentation and games on displays, but allows you to interact with much of this. Time to brush up your BBC Basic programming skills?
Posted by
Andrew Gould
on 09 May 2024
It's my 20th anniversary at Wise Owl this month! I'm celebrating in style with a Power BI data model and report summarising some statistics from the past two decades of teaching IT courses.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 08 May 2024
You can now add Copilot to your 365 licence, although it isn't cheap - this review looks at whether the benefits outweigh the costs.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 03 May 2024
Congratulations to Samantha Wareham of Mid Cheshire Hospitals NHS Trust for winning our Easter quiz (out of the 47 answers received, hers was the entry chosen by our randomised Excel sorting hat). You can see some further analysis of the answers in this blog.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 03 May 2024
Our grid contains 24 hidden thematic treats. Once you've found them all, the unused letters will spell out a message. Email this to us and you have a change of winning a £50 voucher!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 03 May 2024
We've created two new sections in our website: to house full-blown tutorials and (at the other extreme) short tips.
