As I related in October, my friend Nene turned me on to the world of Pen Chalet fountain pen ink samples, and starting from her lovely gift of a sample of Morning Star ink, I’ve acquired a small fleet of 4 ml vials of my own.

The only downside of the tiny sample vials from Pen Chalet is that it’s hard to keep them upright: they’re top heavy, and so whether on a table or in a drawer, I find they’re forever falling over on me.

Not such a bad thing, really.

Unless I have the top off to refill a pen (fortunately this hasn’t happened yet).

I set out this afternoon to solve this problem: I used my calipers to find that the diameter of the vials is 16mm and then designed a 3D model of an “ink vial holder” in Tinkercad:

I printed the model on my Monoprice Select Mini 3D printer this afternoon and the result does exactly what I set out to have it do, holding four Pen Chalet sample vials upright:

An unintended side-effect of the design is that it also works really well for moving the vials around; it reminds me of those boards used to transport sampler flights of beer:

Keen-eyed readers will note that my ring finger in the photo above bears witness to accidentally touching the “hot end” of the 3D printer a few weeks ago when making an adjustment. As burns go, this one went very well and served mostly as a lesson to me to never touch the hot end of a 3D printer.

William Denton is selling copies of a limited edition of a book version of Listening to Art.

I like his pricing:

While I have supplies, copies are available at a special price: $20 Canadian for Canadians, $20 US for Americans, and €20 for people anywhere else in the world.

At today’s exchange rate, this translates to:

• $20 Canadian = $20 Canadian
• $20 US = $26.53 Canadian
• €20 = $30.47 Canadian

The result is nice even-numbered shipping that seems reasonable to Canadian, Americans and Europeans all, but that builds in an allowance for the increased shipping costs attached to each.

(For example, the Canada Post lettermail rate for a large envelope for weighing 400 g is $5.78 to Canada, $10.90 to the USA, and $21.80 to Sweden).

Euan Semple writes, in Fear, and loss of control, in part:

Life keeps on happening, without our control. We are out of control. We don’t even control our own thoughts never mind the world around us. Deep down we know this and numb ourselves to the fear it induces with mindless media, sugary food, or alcohol.

But something magical happens when we stop worrying about our lack of control. We can still take actions, we can still think thoughts, we can still affect the world around us, we just stop worrying about whether things turn out as we expect. We stop piling stress on top of the lack of knowledge of how things will end up.

Rather than inhibiting us, the acknowledgement of our total lack of control makes it easier for us to take action. We stop worrying and do stuff. We enjoy going along for the ride and worry less about where we are going. In doing so we might just get somewhere magical - again and again.

Having a partner with an incurable illness has taught me this empirically: I am someone who likes order, and predictability; snow days weird me out; I get discombobulated when my shaver gets moved to a different shelf or when I can’t find my phone charger where I left it.

Needless to say, introducing cancer into the mix rendered that way of thinking unworkable.

While I can’t make any great claims about calming down about snow days and shavers and phone chargers, I do believe I’ve gained some small amount of “grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed,” and to, as Semple writes, “stop piling stress on top of the lack of knowledge of how things will end up.”

Back in the day when television was still television and we all gathered around the hearth to watch CBC (the only channel we picked up on the rabbit ears), CBC’s Land and Sea was a perennial favourite (longtime readers will recall this episode about the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market that captured wee Oliver and me).

For some reason–perhaps its website, not updated since 2014–I’d assumed that the program had long ceased production. And so I was surprised to hear a piece on Mainstreet this afternoon promoting an upcoming episode about Prince Edward Island.

It turns out that Land and Sea is still very much alive, and is in its 18th season. The website is, a friendly and helpful person at CBC Communications in Halifax tells me, a vestigial one that needs re-pointing: CBC Gem is the place to find Land and Sea now, I was told. And, indeed, there are 10 seasons of back-episodes ready there for the watching.

Welcome back, Land and Sea!

It’s only once you enter the hand-cut, hand-printed, hand-folded, hand-perforated, hand-bound notebook manufacturing game that you realize why there aren’t more such notebooks in the marketplace: all that cutting, printing, folding, perforating and binding takes time. Especially when you’re doing it 23 times over.

For example, you think “each notebook will have 10 signatures, to make 20 perforated pages.” That seems simple enough. But then you realize that 23 notebooks need 230 signatures, each of which needs to be cut, folded, perforated and bound.

Fortunately, the work is relaxing, and I don’t have a supervisor on my case about making my quota for the day.

Sometime last year the CBC Prince Edward Island News website got updated, and in the process, it became effectively useless on my mobile phone.

While nominally “mobile friendly,” whatever framework the CBC decided to use for its updated website renders very slowly and confusingly (with images loading and the resizing after a delay), and responds erratically to navigation (often retrieving the wrong story because it misinterprets my taps). It’s very frustrating to use.

As the CBC is an important news source on Prince Edward Island, I set out to try to solve the issue, using Node-RED, the handy visual programming system that I’ve used before with my sensor experiments.

Here’s the Node-RED flow that I came up with:

In a nutshell, here’s what this flow does:

1. Retrieves the CBC Prince Edward Island RSS feed.
2. Parses the RSS feed to extract each headline, and uses these to assemble a simple HTML page; each story is linked to the faster-loading AMP version of itself, rather than to the full-blown web version.
3. Returns the HTML.

The simple page it returns looks like this on my mobile phone:

More important than the simplicity of the page, however, is how quickly the page is returned, and how easy it is to navigate. Even with all the “grab the RSS feed and parse it and return HTML” machinations–run on a pokey old Raspberry Pi, no less–this all happens quickly.

Here’s a side-by-side screen capture of my stripped-down Node-RED powered page on the left, compared to the CBC’s mobile website on the right, both sessions with a goal of loading the headlines and then navigating to the 3 arrested in Kensington while police chasing snowmobiles story that ran this morning:

It took me 7 seconds to use the Node-RED-powered version to get to the story; using the CBC website it took 30 seconds to get to the same story: not only did everything load more slowly, but I had to wait for everything to load, including the ads, before I could reliably tap on the story from the front page.

If you want to try this yourself, and are set up with Node-RED, you can download my flow and import it.

This month marks the 30th anniversary of the first issue of IslandSide, the venerable magazine founded by Jim Brown in 1989.

Here’s the Editor’s Note from that issue:

This is the first issue of IslandSide Magazine and I hope that, no matter where your interests lie; in politics, sports, the arts, history, fashion; you’ll find something here worth reading.

This month’s cover story is an interview I had with Joe Ghiz in December. I wanted to interview the premier to get his response to the post-election conventional wisdom that’s been swirling around the Island that, a) he is largely responsible for the Liberal sweep of seats, and b) he is gearing up for a provincial election so that, with another victory under his belt, he can turn his sights on Ottawa.

Not unexpectedly, the premier wasn’t giving anything away during our talk, but I think you’ll find his answers interesting and, although Mr. Ghiz didn’t come out and say so, I’d say a spring provincial election looks like a pretty good bet. I say that for two reasons, his vagueness when asked about calling a by-election to replace Prowse Chappell, and his apparent decision to retain the agriculture portfolio.

Barbara MacAndrew‘s story on land speculation was written before Community and Cultural Affairs Minister Gilbert Clements announced his freeze on land development pending the findings of the Royal Commission on Land Use. While his announcement addresses, at least temporarily, some of the concerns raised by Ms MacAndrew, her story provides a detailed illustration of the facts that led to the minister’s unprecedented move.

This first issue introduces readers to IslandSide’s three regular columnists. Two of them, Deirdre Kessler and Jack McAndrew, are well known to most Islanders. The third, Campbell Morrison, will be writing every month on the actions of our Island MP‘s and senators from his vantage point in the press gallery on Parliament Hill. Mr Morrison operates a news service for Maritime daily and weekly newspapers called NewsEast.

One regular feature of IslandSide that doesn’t appear in this issue. because it is the first, is the letters to the editor section. We welcome all letters and look forward to some lively debate.

I’d like to close this first Editor’s note by thanking all of the writers, photographers, artists and advertisers who took a chance, sight unseen, on IslandSide Magazine. I’d. also like to thank Jim MacNeill of the Eastern Graphic for his guidance and assistance.

IslandSide ceased publication about 6 months before I landed on Prince Edward Island and thus has long served as a helpful introduction to the cast of characters that have populated my quarter century here (I will never forget the time that—by that time Lieutenant Governor—Hon. Gilbert Clements called me looking for technical support for his Internet connection; what strange planet had I landed on).

The highlight of Issue 1 for me was Jack MacAndrew’s back page column on George Proud’s defeat of Tom McMillan, Bouquets for Ordinary George, which ended like this:

Ordinary George won one for the ordinary people. The little man you’d never notice in a crowd, stepped out of the pack and let his ordinariness win it for him. He was simply himself, without pretence, and that turned his ordinariness from a putdown to a positive. That’s the fact of the matter, whatever they may think in the drawing rooms of Brighton.

Something else. Ordinary George will do just tine at those cocktail parties on embassy row. Decency, straightforwardness, and personal humility are attractive attributes in any language. I can hear him now, telling the regulars at Tim Horton’s all about those splendid affairs.

How I wish we had someone with Jack’s insight and skill with words to interpret the times we’re living through now.

Jim Brown, of course, went on to become a national broadcasting treasure, most recently at The 180; a tip of the hat to him on this anniversary.

Thanks to my friend G. for leaving a copy of Volume 1, Number 1 on my doorstep this afternoon.

As an experiment I decided to see if I could print a fountain pen on my 3D printer

I found this Open 3D Fountain pen model on Thingiverse, and I’ve been printing it this week (each of the three sections take a couple of hours or more to print).

One of the things I realized when I went to print is that when I switched from using a MacBook Air to using a Mac Mini as my computer I lost the use of an SD card reader. I could have powered up the MacBook Air, but I opted instead to use the opportunity to experiment with OctoPrint, the self-styled “snappy web interface for your 3D printer.”

OctoPrint makes the process of using my Monoprice Select Mini 3D printer so much easier: rather than having to schlep an SD card around from computer to printer, I just connect the printer to the Raspberry Pi I set up (via OctoPi) with OctoPrint and then can control and monitor the entire print process from there.

OctoPrint has some very nice features.

The Temperature tab shows me the temperature of the print head and of the heated bed (and let’s me adjust, if needed):

The GCode Viewer tab shows me the print head in real time:

And the Control tab shows me a live view of the print job via a webcam that I’ve connected to the Raspberry Pi:

OctoPrint can create a timelapse of the print job, using parameters I set; here’s what it created when I set it to take a timelapse shot every 10 seconds and printed the pen’s barrel:

And here’s a timelapse of the printing of the cap, taken from a different angle:

I’ve printed the three parts of the pen and, despite that I have a low-end printer, to my surprise, aided by a little bit of beeswax, the threaded parts screwed together without issue.

Here’s the barrel screwed to the top:

It doesn’t look like a million bucks, but with some sanding and perhaps some painting, it might amount to something more than a striated hulk.

I’ve ordered a JoWo #6 nib to complete the pen, and once it arrives I’ll assemble everything and see how it feels as a pen.

In a December blog posts where he discussed the 2019 quarter-millennial of St. Paul’s Anglican Church, Archdeacon John Clarke wrote about the parish’s tagline for the year, A Caring Community for All:

With it we haven’t given up anything and other ways that we might describe ourselves are not lost. This tag-line will serve us for the year to remind ourselves and tell the world what we are trying to be.

But here’s fair warning, “All” mean all. Make no mistake about it—everyone, no matter their circumstances or history will fine a caring community at St. Paul’s. People ridiculed, ignored, beaten, or lost in this world are welcomed here and will be cared for to the best of our abilities. Or we change “all” to “some” and that just doesn’t seem true to the Gospel.

While I rarely take the religious route into Archdeacon Clarke’s words, I almost always connect with them on other levels, and for this sentiment that is particularly true. I am proud to be a secular affiliate of an institution that shines light so universally.