I missed in January that The Peter and Oliver Podcast passed its 15th anniversary.

I have hundreds and hundreds of photos of Oliver over the last 20 years, but none captures as much of him, and of us, as these audio snapshots of our life.

Remember the Jacobean Cacao Husk Chocolate Tea that I mentioned in November? Well it’s back in stock at Riverview Country Market after a long time out of stock.

“You got more of the Jacobean tea in stock!”, I exclaimed yesterday.

“Yah, we brought it in mostly for you,” my smiling cashier revealed.

So I feel an extra responsibility to encourage you all to pop out and buy some. It’s not cheap, but it is the perfect cold-winter-night drink.

If you’ve got a spare hour this weekend, you could do worse than listening to the first hour of the last Morningside. I remember it like it was yesterday, in part because I listened to it with Catherine and her parents while stuck in an hours-long traffic jam en route to the opening of the Confederation Bridge.

Receiver Brass Shop, understandably given the snapbacks and lockdowns, cancelled Thursday Pizza Pasta tonight, throwing the responsibility for pizza provision back to me. This pizza fought me all the way, but, somehow, it all worked out.

On Zoom this afternoon I talked about my 2019 The Government That Swallowed a Pond presentation with Josh MacFadyen’s geospatial humanities class at the University of PEI.

When Josh introduced me, he referred to me as “Friend to the Humanities,” which I thought a lovely way of describing my relationship to academia. I may have to produce business cards with that title.

Josh and his students were uncommonly engaged, and we had as much discussing as I did presenting; I enjoyed that.

We emerged from “Modified Code Red” into what I keep referring as “snapback,” but is actually called “circuit breaker,” and I used the opportunity to get a haircut. It had been 104 days since the last one.

Every haircut I emerge looking just a little bit more like my mother’s father; as he was among the gentlest people I’ve ever known, I focus on the hope that I inherit his demeanour as well as his widow’s peak.

As part of an orgy of stationery buying from Sumthings of Mine in the late fall, I acquired a Chinese Mini Traditional Calendar:

Palm-size Chinese lunar traditional for the 365 days of the year!

Lunar calendar (农历) is a great creation with its inventions of the intercalary month and the 24 solar terms. It is still used for marking traditional East Asian holidays such as the Chinese New Year, the Duan Wu Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival, Winter Solstice Festival and many more. In astrology, it is used for choosing the most auspicious date for a wedding or the opening of a building.

This calendar is a tear off calendar, which you could tear down each page day-by-day easily. After tearing the pages off, you could store them on your pages, or use them to adorn your outgoings or any collage artworks.

All that in a single calendar!

I’m still sorting out what each part of each day’s markings mean:

• The characters under WEDNESDAY are Wednesday in Chinese.
• Rejab is the seventh month of the Islamic calendar.
• It’s the year 1442 on the Islamic calendar, which appears in the bottom right.
• The 19 in the bottom left is the age of the Moon.

If you know more than that, please let me know.

(In the background: a newly-acquired Ferris Wheel Press fountain pen sitting in a 3D printed phone holder and two halves of a 3D printed Earth).

Romesh Ranganathan’s BBC show, Romesh: Talking to Comedians is the anti-Seinfeld you might be looking for.

If Homeland had been about household plumbing, I think it would still have been interesting.

For reasons only related to his mentioning of battery levels and automation in his 2021 Week Eight update, I was prompted by Paul Capewell to see if there was a way to send the current battery level of my iPhone to a URL where I could archive it.

This turned out to be pretty easy; because there’s no simple way to share Shortcuts, here are some screen shots. I created a new Shortcut called Post Battery Level and added the URL where I wanted to send the value (I’ve redacted that URL in the screen shot):

Next I get the battery level (there’s a built-in scripting component for this — search for ”Get battery”), and use the “Get contents of URL” component to HTTP POST the value as a form, with the battery level sent as the “battery” field:

On the server side, the simplified version of what I do is this, a short PHP script to grab the value and stick it in a MySQL table with a timestamp:

<?php

if ($_POST) {

  $db = new mysqli("localhost", "REDACTED", "REDACTED", "REDACTED");

	$query = sprintf("INSERT into battery (battery_date, battery_level) values ('%s', '%s')",
				strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"),
				mysqli_real_escape_string($db, $_POST['battery']));

	if (mysqli_query($db, $query) === TRUE) {
		header("HTTP/1.1 201 OK");
	}
}

When I run the Shortcut, a new battery level row gets added to the table:

2021-03-01 17:09:14	82
2021-03-01 17:10:20	82
2021-03-01 17:13:28	82
2021-03-01 17:21:28	82

There’s one stumbling block if I want to run this, say, every 15 minutes: to do that requires either using the Automations tab in Shortcuts to create a new schedule for each time I want the Shortcut to run — 00:00, 00:15, 00:30, etc., 96 in all — or to set up a “repeat” loop in the Shortcut itself, with a 15 minute pause inside the loop, which works, but then renders the Shortcuts app unusable otherwise.

Perhaps in a future version of the Automations setup there were be the “run every X minutes” option that I wished there would be.

In any case, thank you to Paul for the diversion.