Articles on ZL Labs Ltd

Ubuntu's Popularity Over the Years

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

With the highly anticipated new release of Ubuntu due out later this week (26.04 LTS), it’s a good moment to review the landscape of Linux distributions and ask: “is it the right operating system for me?”

I have been using Linux Ubuntu as my primary operating system (OS) for more than 15 years and it’s fair to say, I’m hooked! My enjoyment of and productivity using Ubuntu goes far deeper than it’s free and it has a great window management, though these are key benefits.

ZL Labs Partners with Laboris Solutions

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I am delighted to announce that ZL Labs will be partnering up with Laboris Solutions, helping them on their mission to build brighter futures and better companies, by recruiting the best talent that Oxford has to offer!

As part of this venture, we will be expanding Laboris’ coverage to new territories: AI and Software Engineering. I will be using my expertise and network in these fields to compliment the years of recruiting excellence that Alex, Laboris CEO, brings to the table.

Pick-A-Partridge: A Festive Game On Reddit

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

On a rainy November weekend, I decided to test drive the Devvit framework, designed for creating apps and games within the Reddit ecosystem. Within a day or two, I had built the first version of Pick-A-Partridge. It’s a festive game of memory, themed around the Twelve Days of Christmas, which will become clear from the backing music when you come to play it.

The game now has its own subreddit, r/pick_a_partridge, which is where you can play. A lot of people are!

AI Agents for Automated Quality Assurance

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Quality Assurance (QA) is an intensive endeavour that feels very repetitive to humans. In this article, we explore the potential of using Agentic AI to automate this process. In particular, we’ll apply this methodology to a real-world example: ensuring that parallellm.com (the “target website”) runs smoothly, round the clock. Any issues that do arise will be flagged very quickly.

The application of Agentic AI to QA has great potential, since traditional website scanning is notoriously difficult. Their HTML layouts are liable to change at any moment. AI Agents, when set up in the right way, can tolerate such changes, whereas traditional heuristic rules are hard-coded and brittle against this effect.

Parallellm in Beta 🚀

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m absolutely thrilled to announce the Beta launch of Parallellm - supercharge your AI conversations in parallel!

With Parallellm, you can cross-compare answers from several LLMs (without switching tabs), spot hallucinations very quickly, and discover which LLM models excel or struggle for your use case.

🫵 Beta testers needed! Please try out the platform for FREE (no card required). I’d be very grateful for any feedback you might have. If you feel you want to upgrade, you can do it later. Payments are secure and powered by Stripe.

ZL Labs Partners with Lanboss AI

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I am delighted to announce that ZL Labs is partnering with Lanboss AI, helping them on their mission to deliver secure and AI-compliant products in commercial and education spaces.

As a part of this venture, I will be helping Lanboss build out the novel Orange Octopus product, an AI proxy service that intelligently enables organizations and schools to harness the power of AI in a safe and controlled manner.

Adopters of the Orange Octopus will benefit from centralised access and visibility of AI interactions, intelligent platform selection and routing, and enterprise-grade security controls. The product will be supported and enhanced by the expertise and years of experience in Machine Learning and AI that I bring.

XKCD Finder

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

XKCD comics have become a cornerstone of internet culture, particularly in technical circles, with their witty takes on science, programming, and mathematics. However, finding the perfect XKCD for a particular topic or reference can be challenging - there are now over 3,000 comics in the archive, and traditional search methods rely heavily on exact keyword matches or remembering specific comic numbers.

This project explores how modern Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques can be used to search XKCD comics semantically, understanding the underlying meaning rather than just matching keywords. By applying vector embeddings and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to comic descriptions, we can now perform a search based on concepts, themes, and abstract ideas.

ZL Labs x Skiller Whale

Fri, 02 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I am delighted to announce that ZL Labs is now providing expert training services to Skiller Whale, supporting their mission to deliver high-impact, interactive micro-workshops to tech teams across Europe.

In this role, I’ll leverage my expertise in AI, Python and SQL to deliver Skiller Whale’s personalised learning plans, providing focused, interactive coaching and hands-on exercises designed to rapidly upskill technical teams.

Stay tuna-ed for further updates! 🐟 🗞️

Parallellm Pump

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Large Language Model (LLM) tools, such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek, have become a key part of people’s workflow, in professional and everyday usage. However, there are dozens of different providers now offering a myriad of options all at different price points; even a single provider has a multitude of models to choose from.

So where do you begin? The Parallellm Pump offers developers a power tool for making response comparisons, asynchronously, to let you be the judge of which provider returns the best result. Still not sure? You can even ask the LLMs themselves to make the decision for you!

DeepSeek in the Cloud

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In this post, I will share my experiences of running one of the DeepSeek open-weights models (DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B) directly on AWS hardware in the cloud - no need for API tokens.

The good news is that it’s easier than you think - modern libraries, such as PyTorch and the Hugging Face (🤗) transformers package, facilitate much of the heavy lifting. I found some extra tips and tricks along the way to speed things up and I will share these with you in this post.

Let it Segment: A Gift from SAM

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

With the release of the Segment Anything Model¹ (SAM) released by Meta AI Research last year, the lie of the land changed quite substantially in Computer Vision, as now images could be segmented easily, with great results even zero-shot. With the release of SAM2² earlier this year, I wanted to get hands on and experiment with these models myself.

This post walks you through how SAM2 could be used in practice, provides a mini analysis of segmentation results and will be released with code so that you can explore further if you want to. This could be expanded to interesting use cases, such as facilitating object grasping in robotic systems, branded product addition or removal in marketing images, or mapping changes in forested areas from satellite imagery over time for environmental monitoring.

Construction Timelapse

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In this project a stunning timelapse video was created from an image stock of over 3,000 photos of a construction site, tracking the progress of a new residential building from breaking ground to completion, a process lasting more than three years. Those images were taken without a tripod, so the variability in camera positions and angles was of course high. To correct for this, Computer Vision techniques were used to predict key points in the images, that could then be used to straighten them and produce the final, steady timelapse.

Website Launch

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’m very excited to launch my new website! Going forward, I will be available for contract work, and will use this space, zl-labs.tech, to showcase my work and connect.

If you have a spare moment, please take a look around and check out my articles. I value your feedback! If you have any improvement suggestions (or proposed projects), please reach out via the contact page or via traditional channels.

Keep an eye for exciting new content coming your way in the coming weeks and months 🚀

Heatmap Analysis

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is an article I wrote for Verv during their Seedrs fundraising campaign in March 2024. Link to article.

This January, we finished the installation of the first Verv Smart Isolator with our partner Nido, a Spanish heat pump provider. A Verv Smart Isolator was attached to an air-to-water heat pump and in less than a week, we provided actionable insights for the customer.

One of the tools that helps us understand the energy usage patterns is the energy-utilization heatmap. The heatmap visualizes the hourly energy consumption over different days (vertical axis) and times of day (horizontal axis). The intensity of colour - marked in the legend - represents the energy expenditure during each hour, with darker colours indicating higher usage.

Parkrun Map

Sun, 27 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Like to parkrun? I certainly do! This project helps you to visualize where you’ve been running, and where you could go next. Simply run the app locally with Python, and enter an athlete ID (e.g. your own one).

I’ve used Plotly Dash to render the parkrun participation on a map for a given athlete. The map initially starts out centred on your home parkrun course - the one you’ve visited most - just zoom out if you’ve gone farther afield.

Using Smart Isolators

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is an article I wrote for Verv in the August / September 2023 edition of the ACR Journal. Link to publication.

Having faced a winter of record-high energy prices and soaring inflation, minimizing energy bills is front of mind for many businesses around the UK. Energy monitoring and management is crucial in the fight against these high energy costs—by understanding how much energy your business uses, you can make informed decisions about how to reduce your energy consumption and save money on your utility bills.

Image Selector

Wed, 26 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Duplicate photos are annoying and unwanted. Wouldn’t you rather make those post-holiday rundowns with the family as impressive (short) as possible? The burden of boiling your photo set down to the most memorable and ones with the best angle is greatly reduced by this app. It works because you can visualize all images together in the order they were taken.

I now use my Dash app routinely after every holiday, as it makes the deduplication process much faster, yielding a cleaner set of photos without maxing out your hard drive!

Atari Pong

Sun, 04 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is a short post to describe my practical introduction to Reinforcement Learning (RL), where I trained a simple agent to play the classic Atari game Pong via a Deep Q-Network.

In English, this means we teach a novice computer to play the classic paddle game by allowing it to observe what happens when it performs various movements at different times and stages of gameplay (against the same, fairly strong opponent). Then, after making a sequence of movement choices, our agent either gets a point (reward of +1) or loses one (reward of -1). After a lot of trial and error, the agent will have observed enough situations to learn what is a good move to make at a given moment in the game.

Find Tune

Sun, 28 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The objective of this project is to create a program that listens to a continuous stream of sound and identifies when a particular song - the target track - is playing. This is similar to how home assistants such as Amazon’s ‘Alexa’ function, except they seek out a different sound (their name). Ultimately, this project will be used to replay the detected positive sound to a speaker, serving as a doorbell amplifier.

Java Jukebox

Mon, 15 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I was curious to see if I could write a music-shuffling program in Java, so that I could listen to tracks stored on an external hard drive. I had digitised an old vinyl collection, most of which can’t be found on YouTube!

The program is simple: it finds all the tracks from a given directory and its subdirectories, and plays them in a random order. If your music is organised into categories or artists, then you can target a particular genre by passing in the appropriate directory as the first argument.