Hello, World!
What is EcoHackerWorld? Who is EcoHacker? What's Next? Examples too!
Required default first writing name for a tech blog!
Consider this my "pilot episode" an establishing post, and the purpose is to sample what's to come in case you're interested in more, so let's dive in!
What is EcoHackerWorld?
High Tech, Ecologically Sustainable, Economically Affordable
High Tech, because we live in the future already, most people just don't know it. Technology has advanced so rapidly and in so many areas that it's hard to even know about everything that's going on! It's also easy to get caught up in hype that doesn't pan out...
Ecologically Sustainable, there's no point building a future out of technology that will lead to the collapse of the Earth's biosphere. Pollution is deadly and common and technology that drives the destruction of our natural life-support systems doom us at scale
Economically Affordable, comes from a place of necessity but also convenience and accessibility. High Prices lock people out of solutions all the time. The aim here is to find solutions that are affordable enough to try at home for a minimal price, often free!
This space is intended to share passion projects with a "Sustainability Futurist" bent.
Who is EcoHacker?
Hello, nice to meet you!
I made the name EcoHacker because I do tech hack things but I focus on being Economical for price and energy/fuel use, focusing on Ecological sustainability and projects that can run all day and all night on a small battery and low power.
By education I know Ecology, Evolution, and Aquatic Biology. I have worked in labs and on boats and I've been a Teaching Assistant for college classes before.
By career I worked as a career Data Scientist for 10 years and built servers, data pipelines, and analytics dashboards to monitor entire fleets of electric trucks down to millisecond resolution telemetry streaming live across the world and developing high-throughput applications that could handle massive volumes of data with distributed timeline databases
At home I have a few Raspberry Pi's, and I've run various home servers and Linux machines at work and at home, I've worked in the tech industry and built software and full stack applications professionally, but my passion has always been for researching topics deeply and a lot of my careers have been built from that.
I read many books, watch many documentaries, study a lot of history and science, and comment about politics and the topics I know on social media.
A quick collage of myself to give you an idea, I hike a lot and read a lot and often read on mountain tops while charging my solar generator. I lift weights climbing mountains to train and it works!
For example - Ecology
Do you know what a "Food Forest" is?
A "Food Forest" is what we need to solve world hunger and climate change and stabilize ecosystems all in one fell swoop.
The downside? Nobody makes money off free food...
Here's a video explainer:
For example - Technology
Have you heard of the Raspberry Pi?
The whole point is an affordable computer that's accessible and easy to use and affordable enough for anyone to get into it. It was inspired by computer scientists who aimed to produce an entire computer on a single board, a Single Board Computer (SBC), and the Raspberry Pi 5 is so advanced at this point it's as powerful as a laptop and small enough to fit in a shirt pocket!
Want to see the most powerful and expensive one at $225?
Here's a video review, he builds an AI model right away! He ran AI on it and it's good enough to run desktop stuff at 16 GB of RAM and 2.4 GHz CPU it's fast!
Here's the exact kit he's using:
From the Author
For Example - Sustainable Technology
Did I mention that the Raspberry Pi 5 is powerful, yes...but by the nature of its stripped-down design it uses almost no electricity to run?
In fact, mine takes less electricity to run than my phone charger uses! About 12 Watts vs 20 Watts (I measure my USB wattage, I recommend getting a USB-c voltmeter it helps find dead cables so much easier!)
And then when I run it off my solar generator I'm technically running it for free electricity!
I originally got my solar generator because I wanted to be able to practice electric guitar with only the sun (goal complete, achievement unlocked, solar electric guitar has no downsides!)
Now I expanded into what I'm calling "Sustainable Computing" and for me that's simply a way to acknowledge the need to run things off sustainable power generation, and I think a future post will dive deeper into reviews of various solar panels I've tested, as an example of what you could expect in the future...
I can definitely break down a lot of the technical considerations involved for battery and wattage and voltage considerations.
What's Next?
Here's a list of ideas which I think are likely to be written about in the future here:
- A blog about my "sustainable computing" efforts
- A blog about free, or nearly-free resources, services, and tech
- Informational pieces like How-To guides on tech topics
- Informational pieces like sustainability considerations
- Tech product reviews
- Software reviews
- Engaging projects like setting up devices to play games
- Book reviews and references
- Documentary reviews and references
- Anti-racism writing
- Healthy sustainable food recipes
Join Me
If any of this sounds interesting to you.
Hello, World!
