change the way in which settings are created in the notebook

This code in the examples notebook is a bad practice. Tampering directly with the locals is not good. Least of all, it prevents code quality tools to find the references to the variables.

I'm not sure if there is any good reason why it was put that way, but I would change those settings variables to be created normally as variable declarations. If more structure is needed, one could think of dataclasses or even pydantic