BAC - your friendly lobster from Nvidia

On Weds Oct 14th 2026 Nvidia held their Build a Claw event in London,

There were lots of Nvidia Spark DGX workstations connected to ASUS ProART monitors as well as ASUS Ascent GX10 systems (basically the same reference design with a different box) both with an Nvidia GB10 with 128GB of unified memory.

Nvidia Spark DGX

Though not demonstrated it’s possible to connect 4 together using high speed USB or 2 unified systems over Nvidia’s proprietary interface.

ASUS Ascent GX10

Internally there’s also an SSD which holds the operating system (Linux).

The whole point of the event was to demonstrate what local agents could do running local models, healthcare, controlling video feeds while doing local recognition, controlling local LED strips and robots.

Jensen Huang even made an appearance to give away a DGX Spark and Spark laptop.

Though unified memory is a good idea for speed - there are flaws and if the model consumed all the memory the systems would lock-up and require a hard reboot, which happened quite a lot.

The model that was running locally were quen variants (possibly nvidia/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-FP4-Local) - response was reasonably good and someone asked it to build an HTML game and a few minutes later it did indeed come out with a (semi) working game - it was then asked to make a 3D variant and about 10 minutes later the system locked up.

For local models they are quite impressive though, if you can afford the 5 grand to buy a system.

The main advantage is keeping all your data local and not handed off to “the man”.

Nice if you can afford it, though there are other alternatives coming out.

Other vendors are Acer and Dell.

So long Microsoft and thanks for all the fish

October was a difficult month for various reasons and on the 24th it got worse.

Suddenly Word/Excel/PowerPoint and my Office365 email stopped working. I could still access MicrosoftOnline.com but nothing worked.

Checking licences showed an active PowerAutomate license was active, but that was it.

The checking expired licenses and there was the E3 developer license. Checking with support “oh you were emailed that the E3 developer licenses were going to be expired” - obviously that email went to Junk.

The only way to keep access was to upgrade to a business account. Turns out Business basic gives access to online tools and you keep email but no desktop apps. So you need Business Pro … that’s a big jump but for someone that relies on desktop apps, Microsoft basically holds a gun to your head. No choice if you want to keep using them.

So bang - credit card and 1 year’s subscription.

The E3 subscription was nice (arranged by an old Microsoft account manager when at Demon Internet in the 90’s) and it was active from 2015 so it’s really been a long time coming. 11 years of free service wasn’t bad.

But all good things have to end and eventually Microsoft get their dues.