A day in #sinaia Romania, Peleș castle is really quite something, like #Craigside in Northumberland but with the volume turned up to 11.

I'm going to have some strange dreams tonight. I've just #donatedblood, recently finished reading #Dracula, and I'm off to #Transylvania shortly. 🧛

At the oracle of #Zeus, Dodoni. There's an oak tree growing right in the temple of Zeus, which tradition holds is able to foretell things in the rustle of it's leaves, and a lightning shelter nearby in case the Gods are angered by mortals.

Out for a run over windy clifftops towards #bamburgh, the castle and beach. A strong candidate for my favourite view.

Back in the #peakdistrict one of the finest landscapes in England. Never been to Abney Moor before and it's amazingly quiet and far from the maddening crowds of Castleton

Just stumbled upon the Holy Grail in #Valencia. Indiana Jones could have saved himself a lot of bother coming here.

Spectating at the #Wakefield10K this morning. Decent weather and a great turn out. Well done to all the runners!

Power Platform for Good! (Melissa Hale), Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 6:30 PM | Meetup This lightning talk gives the attendees insights into how someone like me, with a scientific non-technical background ended up as a developer for a consulting company and a

Coming up next week on Tuesday evening. A great example of technical skills making the world a little bit better.
www.meetup.com/m365-north/e...

The UK press reacting to AI is fascinating. I've stolen Daily Star frontpages for my #CopilotStudio talks - like my "Psycho scumbag chatbots aren't all bad" outro slide. However, without getting political, surely the minister who's brief includes AI should actually be using ChatGPT?

Cross Country trains
Vs #ChatGPT4.5 round one. Doing some research on the train to Birmingham, and finding a conversational style of working with an LLM doesn't really work with the woeful 1995 style speed WiFi connectivity of the older trains.

Great to be speaking about #CopilotStudio at the National UK Dynamics 365 & Power Platform User Group in Manchester. Thanks to the sponsors and organisers. Looks like I'll need to update my slides with today's news around autonomous agents in #Dynamics365. #mvpbuzz #powerplatform

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I've been using #MicrosoftLauncher with my OnePlus phone a while, but recently suffered freezes. I tried this: Accessibility & Convenience -> Accessibility ->Downloaded Apps -> Microsoft Launcher - On (was off). Since then all good - not sure why!

A fun and thought provoking evening session talking #Copilot at @m365north.bsky.social. Big thanks to fellow presenters @simonjhudson.bsky.social, @simondoy.bsky.social and our audience.

I like work trips by train. A window seat, table and noise cancelling headphones makes a pleasant journey, but the old Cross Country trains are mobile deadspots with terrible wifi, and a true test of the Microsoft 365 offline experience if OneDrive hasn't fully synced before boarding.

It's taken a few days to finally get access to #DeepSeek, but I'm excited to see for myself what capabilities this disruptive outsider has brought to the top table of generative AI.

I've been reading about OpenAPI's #Operator. It's an obvious and useful idea to have an AI agent interact with web page on your behalf. But on reading that popular websites are being modified to make them agent friendly, it sounds like we're just reinvented the API again 25 years later.

My first talk of 2025 over in Manchester run by the good folks at the Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform user group. Great to see some many people in the tech community braving the miserable weather and traffic on a January evening! #CopilotStudio #PowerPlatform #communityrocks

Following on from my previous posting, I have blogged about my experience of using #Mermaid charts in #CopilotPages, and included a shameless LoTR reference to tie in with JRR Tolkien's recent 132nd birthday.

dylanhayes.github.io/Copilot-Pages/

An excuse for an early fail at Dry January. It is Friday afterall.

When doing demos that involve flicking between PowerPoint and a browser, I try to remember to first change the mouse pointer to large and bright yellow; which avoids the extra cognitive load of swapping virtual desktop and then trying to find the pointer again.

FancyZones makes a large screen truly useful. Equally useful for a large screen is 'find my mouse', which I stumbled on when I kept trying to figure out what I was doing to get the effect with the mouse, before I finally figured it out it was the double tap on left control.

Last day off before 2025 normality returns, and a chance to explore some of the more obscure corners of Manchester city centre. Rylands Library is like a cathedral of books, and an obvious inspiration for the visuals of Hogwarts.

I have been playing with the Mermaid charting capabilities of Copilot Pages. Being able to output text and charts from one prompt like this "please create an article about the elves of middle earth. include a mermaid org chart in the article showing the principle elves of middle earth".

An extremely windy trail run this morning, and my first Imperial Stout of the season.

The word 'magical' gets way over used at this time of the year. But, Northern Lights at Temple Newsam justified the word - even if it was a bit crowded at time.

It's quite some progress for an application that historically couldn't even cope with Unicode to becoming self aware and bent on world dominance.

Clearly, agency is going to be the next trend in AI - we just need to be very carefully considered in what we wish for with it

I was able to plan an evening of cub scout activities through this whilst on a walk. A great use of time, but there are downsides; to passers by you appear to be talking to an imaginary friend, and the limitations of what you can do purely by voice soon become frustratingly apparent.

Last week; a long drive & walk, and mulling over things to be planned or solved. I talked to #chatgpt and #copilot apps for suggestions for creative solutions and to record the results. No visual distractions, and a long asynchronous conversation. Despite annoyances it works well enough to do again