University of PEI

About 8 years ago the word on the street here in Charlottetown was that you could get a great deal on adjustable desks at the Summerside Clearance Centre. I ended up buying two, one for myself and a smaller one for Johnny, and the boys at silverorange bought a number of them as well. They are great desks: solid, durable, and easily adjustable up and down. Here’s what mine looked line on moving-in-day at the old office:

There are two types of plastic parts on the surface of the desk, one type for the “cable pass through” holes and one for the crank that allows the desk to be adjusted up and down. Over the years we’ve had both go missing here in the office, and with nowhere to turn for replacement parts, we just lived with this.

With the availability of 3D printing at the University of Prince Edward Island, however, I realized that I could simply fabricate my own parts, using the originals I still have as models. The return of the browser-based Tinkercad design tool last week coincided with this inspiration, and so I set to work with my Canadian Tire digital calipers to take the measurements of the originals and translate them into Tinkercad models.

Once you grasp the basics of Tinkercad – assembling simple shapes together to make complex shapes – it’s surprisingly easy for a know-nothing like me to make a complex model:

That model is two cylinders in the base, with a box on top, four boxes for the “legs” and four “round roofs” for the little nubbles that hold the part in place inside the desk.

With the model designed and measurements checked, I fired up Tinkercad’s fuction for generating a .STL file:

…and sent the .STL file off to Don Moses at Robertson Library for 3D printing. The next day I got an email back from Don that the part had printed and was ready for pickup. And so here it is:

And here it is snapped into place in the desk:

If you have the same or similar desk, you can go and grab the Tinkercad model for this part, tweak it as needed, and print your own.

This was so much fun that I kept on going and designed up the “crank cover” in Tinkercad too:

It came out of the 3D printer looking like this:

You can grab the Tinkercad model for that part too.

Both parts, I was delighted to find, find into their respective holes like a glove.

To this point I’ve thought of 3D printing as a novelty, an impression only strengthened by the propensity of people with 3D printers to print cats and key chains and parts for more 3D printers. Being able to print parts for my desk, parts there was simply no way to produce until this point, has me thinking there might be something to all this.

I’m going up on Monday for a tour of UPEI’s about-to-be-a-Fablab, which is an exciting development in this regard; I’ll report back on what I learn.

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.

Just in case you missed a point buried in the comments, I’m doing my Hacker in Residence blogging over at http://hack.ruk.ca/ (a server that, despite the domain, is hosted at UPEI and will shortly be blessed with an institutional name).

While I’m usually loathe to fork a blog – part of the appeal, I think, of this space is its wide-ranging coverage of different topics – I decided it better to spare the readership here from the minutiae of discussion of repositories and geopresence archiving and diagrams of my university office.

If, however, you’re into such minutiae, come on over: read the blog, or subscribe to its RSS feed.

One of the unsung aspects of the University of Prince Edward Island is its pioneering involvement in the early Internet: under the leadership of Jim Hancock (Director of Computer Services from 1972 to 1997), UPEI, among other things, participated in the NetNorth, CA*Net and CANARIE initiatives, hosted Prince Edward Island’s first connection to the Internet, and registered the country’s first “.ca” domain, upei.ca, in 1988.

The upei.ca domain name registration’s anniversary is coming up on Sunday: 25 years ago, on January 12, 1988, the domain was registered with John Demco at the University of BC, a name well-known to any of us involved in the early Internet in Canada, as he was the go-to guy for all .ca domain name registrations for many years (back when they were free, but encumbered by many restrictions; that’s how I ended up, for a time, with the domain name digitalisland.kingston.pe.ca).

While the university’s work in this regard had tremendous benefits for the institution itself, it benefited Prince Edward Island as a whole in many other ways. In my case it made for my first contact with PEI when I was applying for a job here – an email from Morley Pinsent using the CA*Net email system hosted by UPEI that was free to any Islander who asked – and, once I relocated here, it was my conduit to the greater world through my email address caprukav@atlas.cs.upei.ca (I still remember the day in 1993 when, as a meek 27 year old, Earlene Gallant handled the paperwork to sign me up for this).

UPEI’s work led to PEINet, which became (via a 14.4 kbps leased line connection) the conduit for the first webserver on PEI, at the PEI Crafts Council, to join the network; later, it was on PEINet’s web host that I created the first versions of www.gov.pe.ca. Through this all, the counsel of Jim’s successor as Director of Computer Services, Dave Cairns, was extremely valuable (the best piece of advice Dave ever gave me: hard drives will always fail, eventually, and maybe tomorrow).

All Islanders owe a great debt to the University of PEI for its vision in this regard; to help mark the occasion, I printed up a ceremonial poster on the letterpress this afternoon, and I’ll stick them up around town and campus over the next few days: