Wikibase, from Entity to EntityDocument
The term document has already come up a few times while discussing what a Wikibase entity is, and if that should change (be that in name only, code or structures), including in my first post of this series. Looking at the very first definition of entity in the duck duck go search that I performed…
Wikibase: What is an entity?
I left the Wikidata and Wikibase teams roughly a year ago, and at the time there were some long and deep discussions going on inside the team trying to define what an entity was, and what should and should not be an entity. At the recent Hackathon in Tallinn, this topic resurfaced to me, as…
2023 Year Review
What a year, I spent most of my time on a sail boat, cruising around the Caribbean etc, and working part-time for Wikimedia on Wikibase. WBStack became Wikibase.Cloud and the team now working behind it has continued to iterate on the platform, which finally made its way out of its early alpha state. That also…
Smart Home: A fleet of Temperature and Humidity Sensors
One of the easiest ways to get myself into the Zigbee life without needing to worry too much about exactly what I was doing, buying or what my goals were was to buy a set of Temperature and Humidity Sensors for every room of the house. After a tiny amount of research and some discussion…
Scanning for iBeacon advertisements in Go
I spent some time this evening faffing around trying to make a Raspberry Pi turn into a device that could detect nearby iBeacons, filtered by signal strength to find the closest, to basically create a kind of iBeacon scanner that spat out the UUID, minor and major values. Eventually, I gave up on the Raspberry…
Review & Removal of Wikidata query service Blazegraph JNL on Cloudflare R2
Back in August, I uploaded a new Wikidata query service Blazegraph JNL file to both Cloudflare and the Internet Archive. 4 months on, it is time for me to remove the R2 version of this file, which is costing me around 18 USD per month to store, and fall back to the Internet Archive version…
Smart home: Starting with OPNSense Router, Eero Wi-Fi and a pile of cables
I recently moved into a home, that whether I like it or note, is rather “smart”. There is a Ring video doorbell, Ring camera out the back and Wi-Fi radiators throughout, not to mention the Wi-Fi fridge, dishwasher, washing machine, hot water tank and Amazon Echo Dot that I was recently gifted. In total, I…
COVID-19 Wikipedia pageview spikes, 2019-2022
Back in 2019 at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, Wikipedia saw large spikes in page views on COVID-19 related topics while people here hunting for information. I briefly looked at some of the spikes in March 2020 using the easy-to-use pageview tool for Wikimedia sites. But the problem with viewing the spikes through this…
See all Windows 11 network data usage
Windows 11 (and possibly previous versions of windows) have a data usage view built into the advanced network settings view. This feature allows users to monitor and manage their data usage on both Wi-Fi and wired connections, and I assume also data connections if your device can be connected via a SIM. The Data usage…
If you have a sandwich and cut it in half, do you have one or two sandwiches
A few years ago, I asked a similarly silly question about lasagne to a group of people I know and summarized their responses. This time I’m bored on a coach, so asked 30–40 people the question “If you have a sandwich and cut it in half, do you have one or two sandwiches”. In this…