Gentle Islanders may not be aware that there are librarians in our midst this week, converging on Charlottetown from all across the Atlantic provinces for the annual conference of the Atlantic Provinces Library Association. Yesterday, under the aegis of my Hacker in Residence posting I presented a pre-conference workshop called DIY Mapping for Librarians and then, in the afternoon, I had the pleasure of sitting in on a workshop presented by Don Moses and Krista Godfrey called Playing in the Technology Garden, a session that, to my surprise and delight, focused on the possibilities of building makerspaces and fablabs inside libraries.

Krista and Don started off the workshop with a fun “making” activity, passing out Brush Bot kits to everyone in the hall. Essentially you strap a battery and a mobile phone vibrator into a toothbrush head and then watch it dance around the table. The activity was a good tone-setting, and helped convey that you don’t need soldering irons or 3D printers to do “maker” activities inside a library.

Of course if you do have a 3D printer, well then you don’t necessarily need a toothbrush anymore. A few weeks ago, as part of Open Minecraft Lab, Don printed me up some Minecraft “creepers” on his 3D printer and I decided to hack my Brush Bot and remove the gear from the toothbrush and paste it into a creeper I’d been carrying around in my bag. The result was quite delightful:

Despite only having 3 hours for their session, Don and Krista managed to cover an impressive amount of ground, from Brush Bots to Arduinos to 3D printing to the logistics of makerspaces in library spaces. It was terrific to see the “maker ethic” spreading into the library world, and especially encouraging to see efforts like the one in Nova Scotia to equip every public library with a 3D printer.

An especially encouraging side-effect of the workshop was learning that Andy Trivett, chair of the Engineering Department at UPEI (wait, UPEI has an Engineering Department!?), has secured funding and space for a Fablab at the university, and that this will be a community facility that we’ll all be able to use. This is a great an unexpected development and I look forward to seeing what develops.

On Thursday afternoon a small box arrived by UPS at Reinvented HQ: my Firefox OS-driven Peak mobile phone fresh from Geeksphone in Spain:

I ordered the phone because I like the idea of developing for (and using) a mobile device where I have much more intimate control than I do on  increasingly-more-intermediated phones running Android, iOS and Windows Phone. I went in realizing that this would mean, at least right now when Firefox OS is relatively new an immature, using a device that only partially worked, and that lacked the polish of devices I’m used to. With that in mind, here’s a quick “state of the union” rundown of what works and what doesn’t. I’m using the phone with the latest code from Mozilla.

What Works

• Making and receiving telephone calls.
• Sending and receiving SMS text messages.
• Importing contacts from Google (although not syncing them, yet).
• Syncing calendar with Google Calendar (in both directions).
• Installing new apps from the Firefox Marketplace (although it renders weirdly on the Peak).
• Mounting the phone as a device on my MacBook (allowing me to drag and drop photos and audio to and from the Peak).
• FM radio (the radio works well and the FM radio app is solid).
• Playing music
• Wifi and mobile data. No issues at all.
• Tethering. Worked out of the box without issues.
• Notifications.

What Sort of Works

• Using the web browser: it mostly works, but there’s an issue with it not being detected as a mobile browser by sites offering a mobile version, and there’s an issue with mobile sites rendering much too small to be usable. Otherwise, it appears solid and well-designed. Which makes sense, because it’s from Mozilla.
• Taking pictures with the front and back cameras (see some examples here): the quality of the photos isn’t great, the camera UI needs some work, and the “gallery” app has bugs.
• Bluetooth. I can send files from my MacBook to the Peak, but I cannot send files from the Peak to the MacBook. And while I can pair it with my Bluetooth speakers, I can’t send audio to it.
• Twitter app. It appears to function properly, but the UI is too tiny to be usable.

What Doesn’t Work

• GPS (doesn’t appear to work at all).
• EXIF date-stamping of photos (they all show up in iPhoto as having been taken in 2002).
• Sharing photos (there are hooks in place to share via Twitter, Flickr or imgur, but I haven’t been able to get any of them working).
• Email. I haven’t been able to get the Email app to talk to my IMAP server. This is likely because either I have a self-signed SSL certificate or because I’m using STARTTLS which the Email seems not to support.
• Manual brightness setting (I can switch off automatic brightness, but then can’t adjust brightness above “barely visible).

That’s by no means a comprehensive list: it just reflects what I’ve tried to do in the last 3 days.

In general the phone UI feels a little rough around the edges (when compared to iOS, Android and Windows Phone devices that I am used to), but not shockingly so: it’s responsive, scrolling is smooth and not “laggy,” and although the phone has the habit of rebooting itself more than I’d like, it’s so quick to reboot that this isn’t as much of a problem as it would be otherwise (and is to be expected from a developer-focused phone).

Ten years ago, on June 16, 2003, we held a session at the University of Prince Edward Island about blogging called “Weblog Night in Charlottetown.” To promote the session, Catherine Hennessey and I visited Mitch Cormier at CBC Mainstreet to talk about blogging:

I love Catherine’s answer to the question “What was it that attracted you to blogging?” (“I wasn’t attracted at all…”).

Here are our three panelists, Steven Garrity, Catherine and Rob Paterson (all of whom are blogging to one extend or another, some more actively than others). Photo by Nick Burka.

And here’s Steven and Stephen Desroches and Rob chatting after we finished up:

Interestingly, the blogger blog that we created as a demonstration of how easy it was to set up a blog is still sitting there, unloved.

The fleet of Charlottetown Transit is a patchwork quilt of ye olde trolley buses, castoffs from other transit companies (complete with signage in Spanish!) and, inexplicably, a thoroughly modern, comfortable bus kitted out with all the latest conveniences, including a “cowcatcher” bicycle holder on the front:

I spotted this bus earlier in the week and I phoned Charlottetown Transit to inquire whether it was a bus I could ride from downtown Charlottetown up to the University of PEI and was told that, alas, it was assigned to the “Cornwall run.” Later the same day – without my bicycle in tow – I caught the 11:30 a.m. University Avenue Express north and was surprised, in light of what I’d been told on the phone, to find that I was riding on the selfsame cowcatcher bus.

I called Charlottetown Transit back and received clarification: the cowcatcher is sometimes on the University Avenue Express line, but not on every run (they also confirmed it’s the only bus that you can carry a bicycle on; no bikes allowed on the ye olde buses).

Fast forward to this morning. With an email just arrived from my friend Don the Librarian up at the university – “will you be on campus today?” – I was riding my bike south from Prince Street School when I spotted the 8:30 a.m. cowcatcher idling in front of the Confederation Centre of the Arts. I pounced.

I wheeled my bicycle in front of the bus and signalled to the driver, who came out and showed me how the cowcatcher works: it’s a simple pull of the handle and swing down of the “catcher” and then there’s room to set two bicycles in place with a spring-loaded arm that raises to secure the bicycle in place around the front tire. The entire procedure took about 30 seconds and now that I know how I can easily do it without the driver’s assistance.

We sped north on University Avenue and 10 minutes and $2.00 later, again with the driver’s help, I removed the bike at the University of PEI stop and was off to see Don.

En route I heard my driver – an incredibly nice and helpful fellow – on the radio telling base that this was his first use of the cowcatcher, which made me proud (and gave me an excuse to snap the photo above) but also dismayed that more people aren’t taking advantage of this.

In Montreal they call this the Cocktail Transport and it’s something that fits my use-case perfectly: I don’t want to fight the (admitedly gentle) slope up University Avenue at 8:30 in the morning before I’ve had my coffee, so I throw my bike on the cowcatcher, fly up to the University, grab a coffee, check a book out of the library, say hello to my colleagues, and the roll down the Confederation Trail – downhill all the way – and am back downtown 45 minutes later.

You should really try this out: to make sure the cowcatcher is ready for you, call Charlottetown Transit before you head out – 566-9962 – and ask them to confirm with the driver on the University Avenue run (they can do this quickly by radio). Then, once you’ve confirmed, prepare to be amazing by the ease and elegance of the cowcatcher of hope!

Bonus hint: if you’re coming down the Confederation Trail from the north, headed downtown, after you pass Kent Building Supplies on your right take a right-hand turn into the John Street soccer fields, ride around the first field and then take a left out of the middle of the second field and find your way to Orlebar Street. Take Orlebar to Hillcrest and turn right, then take an immediate right onto Hillsborough, which is newly-paved and downhill all the way to Grafton. Here’s a map to illustrate the route.

Remember those coffee bags I printed up for Youngfolk & The Kettle Black? Well they’re in use now, filled with coffee and available for sale in the roastery at 142 Richmond Street (Victoria Row) in downtown Charlottetown.

At some point in the future this whole Internet thing might come crashing down on me and I might be forced into printing wedding invitations for a living; in the meantime making coffee bags seems like a much more noble use of the letterpress.

Next step: modify the design for the smaller bags, while have a valve sticking out of them, which will make for even more design constraints.