I had a nice chat with my friend Stephen and his mother Carol last night on the telephone. Carol was talking about her 6 children, and how 4 of them have “permanent partners,” which was her way of saying they were married.

Catherine and I have long sought a way of describing our unmarried union (we’ll have been dating for 28 years in 2019) and I think permanent partnership is the best term I’ve yet heard.

Sometimes Google Photos comes up with the most interesting things, all on its own. Here’s an animated GIF it made for me yesterday: Catherine is looking through the jars of the “studio snack station” I gave her for Christmas (12 mason jars, each with a different snack), and Oliver’s looking at the book  Fika: The Art of The Swedish Coffee Break, with Recipes for Pastries, Breads, and Other Treats that I gave him both to remember a stop in Toronto this spring and to remember a delightful fika in Sweden itself this summer. Meanwhile, Ethan’s just plain excited by everything.

In this post about SimCity for the NES:

The original version of SimCity was written by Will Wright for the Commodore 64 as a follow-up to his first game, 1984’s Raid on Bungeling Bay, a helicopter flight simulator that was published by Brøderbund.

As Wright often tells it, the germ of an idea for SimCity actually evolved out of Bungeling Bay’s map editing tool.

“I found out that I had a lot more fun building the islands than I did flying around in the helicopter,” Wright told GameSpot in a 1999 interview.

Being open to the embrace of unintended fun is a skill we should all cultivate.

In the same vein, I became an unlikely fan of waterslides when visiting public pools in Iceland: I went for the “lolling about in hot water” and found that “careening into hot water” was way, way more interesting.

From yesterday’s Citizens’ Alliance News, a helpful guide to sorting waste streams at Christmas.

By volume our Christmas morning wrapping was about 65% compostable, 30% waste and 5% reusable. We can do better next year.

You can subscribe to Citizens’ Alliance News yourself: every morning you’ll get a mix of coming events, practical advice and progressive opinion in your inbox, well-curated by Chris Ortenburger.

I spent Sunday working out the details of this epic Node-RED flow, designed to turn my dumb (but effective) Venta Airwasher humidifier into a smart (and even more effective) humidifier.

The basics of this involve getting the office humidity reading from a DHT22 connected to a Raspberry Pi, figuring out if it’s an office day or not, and then deciding whether or not to turn the humidifier on or off (via a Wemo Mini WiFi Smart Plug).

You’ll note that I also grab Charlottetown weather information as part of the flow (freely available from Environment Canada as XML); because I log both the inside and outside temperature and humidity to a database, in addition to controlling the humidifier, the flow also gives me what I need to drive a PiTFT mounted on the same Raspberry Pi to display status information for both the inside and the outside (building upon the work helpfully documented here).

It was nice to have the prior art of previous year tinkering to build upon for this.

Ton kindly sent me some photos from our visit to their house in Amersfoort this summer, and this one is my favourite. If memory serves, we were listening to Frank talk about the IndieWeb (Oliver was watching the screen, I was watching Frank).

By far and away my favourite YouTube find of the year was All the Stations, a project of the entertainingly nerdy and passionate couple Vicki Pipe and Geoff Marshall wherein they undertake to visit every single railway station in Britain.

Perhaps the best introduction to the ethos of the project comes deep into Scotland in the video Chose Corrour, which serves as a sort of manifesto of acceptance of being interesting in interesting things. It’s okay to be a nerd.

While Geoff and Vicki completed their quest in 2017, they continue to release railway-related videos on their YouTube channel, including this week’s lovely The Shortest Train, a sequel to this summer’s The Longest Train.

Rather than traveling down the spine of Britain as they did for the summer solstice, for this winter solstice they took the 2 minute journey from Wrexham General to Wrexham Central, and did it with humour and panache.

If you fall into the All the Stations wormhole, you may not emerge for several weeks, as visiting 2,563 stations takes time. But I promise you will be delighted.

Some years ago Catherine and Oliver and I visited the Spring Geequinox while on a trip to Halifax. The event was a sort of “Comicon for people too weird for Comicon” and I was initially very, very uncomfortable with the heady mixture of Renaissance reenactors, ham radio operators, board game aficionados and furries.

But then I had a revelation: the freedom of each of those in the hall to be geeky in their own way opened up space in the universe for me to be geeky in my own way.

Printing presses and typewriters and fountain pens and bookbinding are my jam, not Dungeons & Dragons or inhabiting the soul of Shrek, but all are things that run contrary to the conventional, and the prominence and celebration of one only seeks to enliven all the others. My revelation put me immediately at ease, and that ease has taken me to places I wouldn’t have been able to get otherwise.

Visiting every railway station in Britain is, by almost any measure of reasonable, an inane thing to do. Which is why it’s such an interesting thing to do, especially when it’s done full-throated and without apology as Vicki and Geoff did it.

Bravo.

Today was the day for the installation of the new finial, crafted by Kelly Caseley, above the door to St. Paul’s Anglican Church. The new finial is a bang-on reproduction of the original; Kelly did great work.

This is the 2019 levee schedule for New Years Day, January 1, 2019 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.

If you’re a new friend of the blog you may have missed this fascinating tool of cats and mice, related to Matthew Rainnie on CBC Mainstreet on September 22, 2000 (9 days before Oliver was born!).

I have always loved making radio with Matthew, and I think this piece was a high point for us.

(The issue of mice on Marion Island is ongoing, 18 years later).