Niti Bhan writes about African governments blocking access to parts of the Internet, Facebook among them:

As civil society groups and others raise their voices in support for peoples disconnected the global digital economy and society today, I believe we need to be cautious about what we’re speaking up for. I would not speak up for Facebook’s rights – there’s ample evidence they’ve trampled on mine even though I’m not a registered user of their platform – nor would I support other private sector tech giants headquartered far away.

The perception that people cannot communicate with each other, nor organize rightful protests, without the use of this one company or that one is a dangerous one in a world where these companies neither care for our rights nor our privacy.

Instead, there’s an opportunity for the emergence of a plethora of independent African “anti-block” social and commercial solutions -whether SMS based or USSD based or whatever the technology specialists deem fit – that can then be supported if shut down, instead of us raising our voices in support of the Facebook Group of Companies.

There is tremendous opportunity here because we already built and have experience using a decentralized Internet and many of those who had a hand in that are still alive. It’s only been relatively recently that we’ve re-CompuServed the Internet, and it’s not too late to rediscover more robust, decentralized networks of networks.

Sneak peak of a two-colour job I just finished printing. I printed the black yesterday, the grey today. And found–as I did the first time I printed grey–that the recipe for grey is “white plus half of an infinitesimal smidge of black.” Drying today. Mailing tomorrow.

Tourist season has begun in earnest and with it comes the bane of all pedestrian Charlottetowners, the four-abreast sidewalk-taker-uppers. Here’s an attempt to illustrate one small slice of this today, as I hurried to catch the bus uptown (do they think we can’t hear them?).

Read from bottom to top (that’s a bug in the design!).

It’s 15ºC and cloudy here in Charlottetown today, which, to my taste, is about as good as it gets weather-wise, especially if you want to do things outside. And, looking at the current temperature map for North America, it appears to be the best weather on the eastern side of the continent right now. Those pink shades of the map in Georgia and Arizona? 100ºF and higher.

Oliver and I have been experimenting with new and interesting ways of getting from Stars for Life back home: today’s experiment involved walking down Beach Grove Road, across North River Road to the Hermitage Creek Trail, and then along the trail to University Avenue where we caught the bus downtown.

Along the trail, just in front of Tremploy, we came across this “Freshwater Marsh & Pond” sign, with both the CADC and West Royalty logos on it:

West Royalty hasn’t existed as a separate community since 1995, meaning this sign must be at least 24 years old. It’s held up surprisingly well.

I wonder when CADC (now also defunct) built its last nature trail.

I was updating 1Password on my Mac this morning and took the occasion to look at the “About 1Password” dialog:

I was intrigued by that long list of places: it seemed to suggest that 1Password is maintained entirely by remote workers. And, sure enough, it turns out to be true; from the 1Password jobs page:

Work remotely, from anywhere, flexibly. You could be in a sweet home office, then a café for part of the day, and even in your camper on a caldera – so long as there’s a reliable Internet connection. We’ve got folks in over 30 cities, from New Zealand to Germany to our office in Toronto.

I pasted that list of places into MapCustomizer.com to generate a map of all of them; here’s what I got:

It turns out that a good number of those workers are in southern Ontario, not surprising as it’s a Toronto-based company:

I see they have workers in Burlington (where my parents live) and Brantford (where my grandparents lived) and Peterborough (where Catherine and I used to live).

I like being about to put a geography to my software creators, especially those that create software that’s as mission-critical to my everyday as 1Password is.

I just made a donation to John Andrew’s Green campaign for the deferred election in District 9.

Everything I’ve learned about John over the past month has shown him to be a thoughtful, intelligent, universally well-regarded person with a deep connection to his home, his watershed and his district.

John is never going to win points for theatricality. I wouldn’t look to him for a disabling political barb levied at his opponents.

But we’re not casting a drama, we’re hiring someone to help solve gnarly problems, and John’s had a career of doing that. He is the right person for this job.

And if that isn’t enough, the view from his back porch is about the greenest possible view you can imagine.

If you’re at Receiver Coffee on Victoria Row this summer, and Joel is behind the bar, order up “The Joel” for a delightful iced summer drink.

Speaking of Receiver: they’re about to open a third location, out on the North River Causeway, and roasting and baking operations will be relocated out there. They’re still casting about for a name; I’m advocating for Receiver Underwater, as a tip of the hat to climate change, but it’s not garnering much support.

Caledonia House Coffee at the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market has a perpetual summer problem, as the newly-arriving hordes of irregulars clog up the coffee line. Bret is working to mitigate this issue by opening up a second coffee stand, outside in the trailer formerly occupied by 4S. The coffee’s just as good, and the line–at least for now–a lot shorter.

Speaking of the market: don’t forget that it’s now open on Wednesday–in addition to the regular Saturday–for the summer. It’s a lot less busy, but there’s still a good complement of vendors, and it’s a great place to stop for lunch.

The best thing ever to happen to the downtown Sunday flea market in Charlottetown has been to close Queen Street below Grafton: the result is that the vendors are now facing in to the street rather than out to the sidewalk, rendering the sidewalks clear and the street a pleasant place for a car-free stroll. I had a very nice rajmah chawal from The Great Indian Curry for lunch today.

If you’re a fan of the A&W Beyond Meat burger, you can now get a similar vegetarian concoction at Tim Horton Donuts, the Beyond Sausage. It appears to be popular–or at least more popular than anticipated–as I’ve encountered a couple of situations where a outlet doesn’t have any stock. And don’t let them tell you that you need to order it with egg: the Beyond Sausage Lettuce Tomato is just that; this hasn’t been internalized by all staff yet.

A reminder that, as reported earlier, Riverview Country Market now has a Downeast Soap refilling station. I’ve started to regularly buy our hand and laundry soap there and not only is it great to not be buying new plastic bottles every time, but the price is significantly less than buying a brand new bottle at Sobeys.

And, finally, my annual recommendation for The Best Thing Ever, the Factory Coffee at Island Chocolates in Victoria. It’s the one regular concession I make to avoiding sugar and it is fantastic.

Thanks to a helpful post by William Denton, I remembered the Android utility Tasker, and realized that I could use it to automate the gluing together of my Android phone and my Mac.

Here’s what I did.

First, I installed Tasker on my phone from Google Play and then the Termux:Task add-on from F-Droid.

Next, on my phone I launched Termux, created a directory ~/.termux/tasker, and created two scripts there.

The first, start-ssh, to start the SSH server on the phone (after killing it first, in case it was running already):

#!/bin/bash

pkill sshd
sshd

The second, mount-phone-on-mac, to mount the phone on the Mac (by SSHing to the Mac and doing the mount from there, unmounting it first in case it was already mounted):

#!/bin/bash

ssh peter@192.168.2.2 "umount ~/motog7"
ssh peter@192.168.2.2 "/usr/local/bin/sshfs phone:/storage/emulated/0 ~/motog7 -o volname=motog7 -p 8022"

To allow this second script to work properly, I had to do a couple of things.

First, in System Preferences on the Mac, I had to check the “Remote Login” box on the Sharing sheet.

Second, on the phone, in Termux, I had to create an SSH keypair:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 2048 -f id_rsa

This left me with a public key file ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub that I then added to the end of ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on my Mac.

I made these two scripts executable with:

chmod +x ~/.termux/tasker/*

I then tested them out to make sure they worked.

Next, I set up Tasker.

I created a new Profile called Reinventorium with the trigger of State > Wifi Connected and the SSID of my office’s wireless network:

I added a new Task called Mac to this Profile, and added two Actions to that Task, one for each of the two scripts I created above, selecting Plugin > Termux:Task from the Action category and entering the name of the script:

With all of this in place, every time I come into the office with my phone and it connects to the office wireless network, it automatically launches its SSH server, and tells my Mac to mount its storage.

Following a link on Frank’s blog, I learned about an innovative mortgage product from the Dutch Triodos Bank, the sustainable mortgage:

With the Triodos Mortgage you get a discount on the interest when your house becomes more sustainable. We offer the Triodos Energy Saving Loan for the renovation. With this loan you can finance up to 25,000 euros in sustainable adjustments to your home. The great thing is that the interest on this loan is only 50% of the interest on your mortgage.

This is an excellent idea.