I voted absentee in the U.S. federal and state elections back in September, casting my vote for Kamala Harris.

A photo of my ballot envelope, addressed to the Monroe County Board of Elections in Rochester, NY. In the top-left is my return address.

Given the quirks of U.S. election regulations, I vote at the address where I lived with my parents, as a newborn, in 1966: 863 Post Avenue, Rochester, NY, I house we left 3 months after I was born.

I’ve been a digital hobbyist for almost 50 years, from my days fooling around with a TRS-80 Model One (on which I coded a video game, in BASIC, called “Galactic Warrior,” and then parlayed my skills into my first coding job) through to my experiments with everything from energy data to ship positions.

Along the way, I’ve accumulated a collection of websites that serve various roles. As I age, as these websites age, and as I recentre my life on analog over digital, their maintenance becomes less a “things I do while procrastinating” and more “annoying obligation.” 

So I’m in the midst of a downsizing project, seeking to strip out what’s not needed, find a new home for things that are best housed elsewhere, and to preserve things that deserve preserving.

Here’s what I’ve achieved so far (I’ll update this list as I make progress).

Migrated

In Progress

  • A collection of energy-related tools and archives — consuming.ca, pei.consuming.ca, energy.reinvented.net — remain in place. They remain valuable tools, and I would, ideally, find new homes for them, where they can be maintained permanently.
  • Sites for a couple of pro bono clients — PEILegion.com, RoyJohnstone.com —  maintained still in Drupal 7, need new homes and/or migrations to Drupal 10.

I expect I’m not alone, being among the first generation of Internet citizens, now in our 50s and 60s, looking at digital things through this lens.

When I migrated my blog to Drupal 10 back in September, one of the things that got left out was migrating the collection of just over 300 sounds that I’d posted over the years. 

I sat out to do this today, and they’re back in place here, everything from me at 6 months old to a remixed Stuart McLean to versions of The Island Hymn to a Bruce Guthro bootleg.

I’ve also brought the podcast feed of sounds back to life.

My ruk.ca podcast playing in a Nissan Rogue, with the episode details showing on the dash screen.

This was a ChatGPT-assisted coding job, with the prompt:

I have a legacy Drupal 7 website. I have migrated it to Drupal 10 using the “migrate” modules. One of the content types, “sound”, migrated the title and body fields, but not an attached Media field, which points to a managed file, and MP3, that is the sound attached to each node.

I want to reattach the MP3 files to the nodes in Drupal 10. The files are already migrated into managed files in Drupal 10, so I don’t need to actually migrate the files, I just need to attach them to the Drupal 10 nodes.

I need some code to do this.

I was returned a PHP script that needed some mild editing only, and that, blamo, did exactly what I asked when I ran it, saving me a lot of thrashing around, and confirming that I got out of the programming profession at the right time.

I was sad to learn of the death of Ralph Hostetter, in 2019, something that escaped my attention at the time.

Ralph was a Maryland newspaper publisher who had a summer place in French River, here on PEI, a piece of bold architecture for the village, an A-frame high on the hill overlooking New London Bay.

I knew Ralph through my work as Executive Director of the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust, of which Ralph was a generous patron. I always found him gracious and straightforward, qualities his obituary expounds upon:

Hostetter was blessed to have loving family members, friends and caregivers around him in person and he enjoyed connecting with others using today’s technology during his final time at his beloved home that he called the Fourth Estate. He freely shared his quick wit, political opinions and talent as a storyteller.

That might be the end of the story, had I not been chatting with Lisa’s mother Karen and Aunt Dianne last week about the houses their father—Lisa’s grandfather—Eddy MacLeod had built over the years. 

One of those houses: Ralph Hostetter’s.

Here’s an artist rendering of the house from family files:

An artist rendering of a modern A-frame house.

And here’s what the house looks like from the road in French River:

Screen shot from Google Street View of 5240 Route 20 in French River, showing a driveway bracketed by brick posts, leading up to an A-frame house high on a hill.

One of the best pieces of advice I got, on moving to PEI 31 years ago, was to be careful about burning bridges: the Island, I was told, is enormously interconnected, and if you offend someone, you’re likely offending, by association, vast swaths of people you don’t yet know.

In this case, no offence occurred. But if you’d told me 20 years ago, when I first met Ralph, that I’d eventually be dating the granddaughter of the man who built his summer home, I would have thought you mad.

I had a hankering for a Factory Coffee this afternoon, and seeing that Island Chocolates was open today, I drove out to Victoria. Only to find that Island Chocolates wasn’t open today.

I rerouted to Foxy Fox, in nearby Crapaud, and enjoyed a flat white and a peanut butter cup, over my sketchbook.

A photograph of a page from my sketchbook, showing a pink mug of of coffee in the middle, a sunflower patterned plate to the right, and the text, hand-lettered: October 31,2024 - I drove out to Victoria for a Faetory Coffee - but it wasn't to be, as Island Chocolates was closed I re-routed to Foxy Fox in Crapaud far a flat white and a peanut butter cup. Not the same, but not a total loss.A homemade chocolate peanut butter cup sitting on a sunflower-patterned plate on a glass table, lit by sunshine.

Foxy Fox, by the way, is expanding: they are soon to have locations at Blackbush and in the Charlottetown Mall.

From this week’s 10+1 Things, a link to a beautiful infographic of 77 cocktails.

For example, here’s a Russian Spring Punch:

Zoë Schlanger, reporting for The Atlantic, on how your black plastic spatula might be made of e-waste:

For the past several years, I’ve been telling my friends what I’m going to tell you: Throw out your black plastic spatula. In a world of plastic consumer goods, avoiding the material entirely requires the fervor of a religious conversion. But getting rid of black plastic kitchen utensils is a low-stakes move, and worth it. Cooking with any plastic is a dubious enterprise, because heat encourages potentially harmful plastic compounds to migrate out of the polymers and potentially into the food. But, as Andrew Turner, a biochemist at the University of Plymouth recently told me, black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid.

I’m immune to social media “granola contains outer space debris” fear-mongering, but this is a well-researched article from a reputable source. So I’m going to replace our black plastic spatula with a silicone one.

Speaking of The Atlantic, and toxicity, this interview with editor Jeffrey Goldberg is a good overview of their decision to endorse Kamala Harris, a thoughtful review of the Washington Post’s decision not to, accompanied by a bits of interesting history from the magazine’s past.

Annie Mueller writes about the dumbness of getting AI to do dumb stuff, concluding:

But what if we spent less time figuring out how to do dumb stuff faster and more time pointing out how dumb the stuff is or finding ways to avoid it altogether. Not always possible, sure. But sometimes, it’s possible. Might be possible more often than we think.

It’s PSC Awareness Day, Frank reminds us

From his blog marking today (in translation):

What is PSC?

PSC is a rare disease. There are just over 1,000 cases known in the Netherlands and around 100,000 worldwide. It is a progressive and chronic disease. This means that over time the symptoms become more severe and that there is no medicine for it yet. The treatment of PSC mainly focuses on preventing the symptoms of the disease. Since the beginning of the diagnosis, I have been taking ursodeoxycholic acid (Ursochol) and fortunately it visibly slows down the disease process. My liver functions are improving slowly but surely, as we see in the blood values every few months. But I’m not the old Frank anymore. PSC is a part of my life and will not go away. That’s why every year with Global PSC Awareness Day, an update on how I’m doing now.

PSC Partners has a good overview of the disease.

I am a voracious highlighter of RSS feeds and email newsletters in Readwise Reader, an accumulator of songs in my Spotify “Liked Songs,” and a saver of “Watch Later” videos in YouTube, often with the thought that I should, one day, blog about whatever I’m noting. These piles of interesting things have now risen to the point where I need to disgorge them all at once. Here goes.

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About This Blog

Photo of Peter RukavinaI am . I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.

To learn more about me, read my /nowlook at my bio, listen to audio I’ve posted, read presentations and speeches I’ve written, or get in touch (peter@rukavina.net is the quickest way). 

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