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


The Death of the Search Engine


In the early days of Google and Yahoo the best hack for getting your website to the top of rankings was Keyword Stuffing. You’d make the font blend in with the background and jam in as many relevant (or in many cases completely irrelevant, depending on your intent) keywords as you possibly could. Your users couldn’t see them, but search engines could, and they’d push you up the rankings, since with so many keywords the website in question must be super relevant to what you’re looking for.

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Fun with Hyperlocal Data


I’ve been drawn to the idea of having many tiny sensors around my home intermittently collecting data points about all sorts of things - the Lumen measurement of our bedroom at night, the noise of the street below us, the AQI of our kitchen.

This was mostly a pipedream until Pimoroni came out with a series of wireless monitors with all sorts of sensors that use a Raspberry Pi PICO to send the data to an endpoint of your choosing.

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Bimonthly? Update - December 15th, 2022


As with most anything I’ve tried to start as a habit, these update posts have become far less then routine. Not to say I haven’t done anything worth writing about - I’m just incredibly lazy.

Anyways, here’s what’s up:

What I’m Working On

I’ve installed a number of Pimoroni Enviro sensors around the home. It’s been great being able to retrieve hyperlocal weather and environment data to do with as I see fit.

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