Alex Schreyer's Blog, Projects, Books, and More
Together with a colleague of mine (Sasha Stepanov from Campus Planning), I just presented the “My Favorite Places” website (and the UMass “Likes/Dislikes” site) at the 2012 Spring Conference of NEARC, an ArcGIS user group here in the Northeast. All in all, this was a great event (held at beautiful Smith College) that allowed me […] Read more..
A little while ago, my hoster (1and1.com) whom I actually like quite a bit, decided that I was using too much of my fair share of the common server and decided to warn me that I was “abusing” the system. They told me that if I didn’t reduce my server load, I would have to […] Read more..
A university of 27,000 students and several thousand more faculty and employees is a very complex environment whose spaces and places are experienced differently by different audiences.
This project sought to request feedback from students, faculty, employees and visitors to UMass about their favorite places on campus. This was done by providing a website that allowed to crowdsource feedback by letting users place a pin at their favorite locations and submit a comment.
The best way nowadays to set up information displays like these is to have them simply consist of an LCD screen and a Raspberry Pi, with the mini-computer connected to the internet and set to only display a single webpage. This project shows some of my implementations.
I recently had a need for a PHP script that queries a MySQL database for location-based point data (a LatLong coordinate and some descriptive information) and then creates a KML-file from that data on the fly. A file like this can then easily be loaded into Google Maps, Google Earth and other geospatial applications. In […] Read more..
Okay, enough with the daily single-tweet posts already! I just switched the posting frequency of my twitter-plugin to once per week. That way, if you like to follow my tweets (without being on Twitter yourself), you can find them all in one place and not get annoyed by too many posts. Apologies if that was […] Read more..
As you may have noticed, I have been experimenting with QR codes lately. There’s just so much fun you can have with these little black-and-white icons. For your Friday enjoyment, here is a list of where I have used them so far: 3D QR code The example video above is simply a vectorized QR […] Read more..