My autistic son made me see the season anew – a Christmas tree is not a fish!:

I remember on the way home from nursery one December day, my son pointed at a small plastic fish in a charity-shop window. In the next window, I showed him a Christmas tree, and, in a phase when he was obsessed with defining things negatively, according to his own idiosyncratic system of what they were not, he replied: “It’s not a fish!” For at least two more years, every time we saw a Christmas tree one of us would say: “It’s not a fish!” and fall about laughing. I know, the levels of you-had-to-be-there are off the scale, but this is the way with autism. It’s hard to explain, and highly specific. The point is, even with all the challenges – and there are many – if you just open the door of your mind to autism, the world is reborn. And it’s incredible.

Exactly.

I have a 3/8 inch hole punch; it looks like this:

I want to use the punch to make holes in business cards; there are two problems with this setup as-is:

1. There’s no way to ensure that the holes I punch are centred horizontally on the cards.
2. There’s no way to control the vertical distance from the top of the cards that the hole gets punched, other than pushing the card all the way into the punch.

I want my holes to be centred and about 1/8 inch from the top of the cards, but because of these limitations, the best I can do is eyeball the horizontal centre and get holes about 1/2 inch from the top, like this:

Clearly what I need is a “jig,” a device to wrap around the hole punch to solve both problems.

To the 3D printer!

I designed a jig in Tinkercad with a slot for the hole punch and guides for a business card:

The design took just over 2 hours to print on my Monoprice Select Mini 3D printer:

With the hole punch inserted, and a business card ready to punch, it looks like this:

And it works!

Here’s a perfectly-punched hole:

Now I’m off to punch lots of perfect holes in lots of cards for a New Years card project I’m working on.

At the November meeting of the PEI Electric Vehicle Association there was considerable discussion about matters related to electricity and our provincial utility, Maritime Electric.

While it’s always good to hear people talking about the source and use of energy, I was dismayed that much of the discussion was based on assumptions and half-truths, and I resolved, at the end of the meeting, to see what I could do about getting electric vehicle owners and Maritime Electric in the same room.

This effort came to fruition last night as an overflow crowd packed into the company’s boardroom for a wide-ranging discussion of the province’s electricity future, and where Maritime Electric and electric vehicles fit into it. Maritime Electric’s formal presentation was scheduled to last 15 minutes; it stretched over 2 hours as we all chimed in with questions and suggestions.

While I learned a lot last night, by far and away the most interesting and useful information I learned was:

• Electricity purchased from the mainland–about 60% of PEI’s needs–has an estimated CO₂ content of 0.3 kg/kWh.
• When the 25% of electricity generated by on-Island wind is factored in (about 25% of the total), the overall content of the electricity supply is 0.2 kg/kWh of CO₂.

These numbers are interesting and useful because they allow me to much more easily calculate the average carbon impact of my electricity consumption:

• For example, today at 100 Prince Street we’ve used 2.48 kWh of electricity so far; at 0.2 kg of CO₂ per kWh, that’s 0.496 of CO₂ emitted today to toast our bread, start up the furnace, charge our devices, power the TV, run the lights.
• Over the last 5 years, we’ve averaged 14.56 kWh per day of electricity usage in our house, or a total of 5,314 kWh per year; that consumption translates to just over 1 tonne of CO₂, or 333 kg per year for each member of our family. This in the context of the annual climate budget for each person on Earth being 2.3 tonnes per year.
• This week our Kia Soul EV has been averaging 18 kWh/100 km; that translates to 3.6 kg of CO₂ per 100 km driven.

Beyond what I learned about emissions and transmissions and generation last night, the most heartening aspect of the meeting was that in one room, on a cold winter’s night on PEI, we had our electric utility, the province’s manager of energy policy and programs, two MLAs from the Official Opposition, and, depending on how you count, about 1/3 of the electric vehicle owners on the Island. I’d hazard a guess that getting a group together like this is only possible on Prince Edward Island, and it was wonderful to be a part of that.

From Matt Haughey, a guide to creating a QR code for your wifi network that visitors with mobile phones can scan to get immediate access without needing to enter your fiddly password.

He points to qifi.org as an easy tool for doing this, and I can confirm that it does what it says on the tin.

If you preemptively generate a QR code for your home network, imagine the confusion and intra-family strife you can avoid from trying to find the chit with the password, and then the resulting “no, that’s an L, not an I” and “not a bracket, a paren!”

To the anonymous person who, perhaps knowing what a trying week this has been for our family, left a bag of potato chips with french onion dip in our front vestibule today: you are the greatest—the greatest.

My friend Chantal, a fellow fountain pen aficionado who I met through Pen Night, is a talented artist and illustrator; after seeing my letterpress in action in July, she set out to see if she could take her pen and ink artwork and have it turned into a custom die, suitable for use in letterpress printing.

Today was the day to take her experiment out for a ride on the press; while I will leave it to her to reveal the result of the main event, she surprised me with the lovely gift of an additional die that she designed and had made, an image that, I think you’ll agree, lovingly captures the spirit of me and my printery:

Of course I had no choice but to print a whole big bunch of them, on Artists’s Tile Set acid-free cards from Peter Pauper Press in New York:

The unexpected gift, from the hand and the heart, is the best gift of all. Thank you, Chantal.

You watch one Alexa Chung video on YouTube and then YouTube is, like, “how about another Alexa Chung video!” And suddenly all you’re watching is Alexa Chung videos. Like The Making of the Met Gala 2019 Dress.

I’ve learned more about fashion in the last 48 hours than I thought there was to learn. Chung is a good teacher: a potent mix of humility, moxie, design sense and iconoclasm.

Beware “vanilla scented” draft-stopping caulking compound. Unless you like your vanilla scent to smell like an amalgam of nuclear waste and turpentine.

This is the 2020 levee schedule for New Year’s Day, January 1, 2020 for Charlottetown and Prince Edward Island.

Show levees that are ages 19+ Show only Charlottetown-area levees

The levee schedule is covered under a Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike License.