Hello

I'm Alex, a technologist from Calgary, Canada. This is my blog.

For information about myself & my philosophy, see the About, Design, and Values pages.

Miniposts are bookmarks, snippets of thought, and syndicated content from elsewhere.

Longform articles are below, sorted by date.

You may also peruse the archive.

Projects


Resolutions 2024


Wow. What a year. There were many challenges and I accomplished little. The irony that it was the year of the rabbit is not lost on me. I’d like to thank all my friends and various associates for being a guiding light this year, as it would have been a lot more harrowing to do this one alone. Anyways, good riddance - here’s an outline of what I intend to accomplish by the end of this year.…
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Digital Minimalism: Kyocera 902KC


In August of this year, I deleted Twitter off of my phone, after what I found to be the final straw after months of garbage policy changes enforced by the rich egg who now owns the site. While I have been using a minimal smartphone for years - that is to say, a smartphone with as few apps as I “felt possible” (more on that later) - what I found after deleting my main digital narcotic was that instead of spending less time on my phone as I expected, I was instead spending just blankly staring at my phone before either reading the news or finding some other way to waste time.…
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Laundry & The Responsibility of Search Engines


I’d like to take you on a journey through the world of scams, laundry, and search engines. In 2016, Foldimate, a California based startup, showed the world a laundry folding robot - it was the size of a washing machine, with a slot in the top for garments that would be mechanically folded and then passed down into a tidy stack at the bottom. I watched Foldimate with great interest, for you see, of all the daily chores of life that one must accomplish, folding laundry is the one I hate the most, put off the longest, and have tried to - mostly failing - hack my way out of for decades.…
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