Those of you who have been reading here for a long time may recall that, many years ago during simpler times, I developed a macOS app called PresenceRouter.

PresenceRouter allowed you to echo your geopresence information in Plazes to a variety of other sites (we didn’t call them “social media” back then, just “sites”); by the time of the final release in November 2008 it supported 21 sites in all.

Here’s what it look like to add a new site to the configuration:

In reviewing the apps on my Mac that are 32-bit ( > About This Mac > System Report > Applications), and thus won’t run when macOS Catalina is released later this fall, I noticed PresenceRouter in the list.

In other words, if you upgrade to Catalina, you won’t be able to run PresenceRouter.

Given that Plazes, upon which PresenceRouter depends, shut down 7 years ago itself, this shouldn’t prevent a practical impediment to anyone. But it is the end of an era, and the practical end of a project that taught me a lot about developing Mac apps, about  authentication, and about the open web.

More serious for me at this point is that AccountEdge, the bookkeeping app that I rely on to run my business, is still 32-bit-only, and won’t be updated in time for the Catalina release. So I’ll be stuck in the Mojave until it gets updated.

Why Are Books Published on Tuesdays?

(TL;DR nobody knows)

Via Notes from a Small Press.

Has there ever been as enthusiastic a guest on the Cool Tools podcast as Susie Bright?

To say nothing of the breadth of her tool recommendation choices: Gingher Craft Scissors, Palomino Blackwing 602 Pencils, the Original Magic Wand and the Heavy Duty Commercial Potato Ricer.

Truly an episode where the deadpan curiosity of co-hosts Kevin Kelly and Mark Frauenfelder provides an excellent canvas on which Bright can paint.

When Hurricane Juan struck Prince Edward Island in 2003, our neighbourhood, while not devastated, was certainly affected: huge trees came down, power was out for several days, and there was a lot of cleaning up to do. Including, the morning after, helping to run a provincial general election, and, the day after that, holding Oliver’s 3rd birthday party.

Hurricane Dorian passed over the Island on Saturday, and, if you are following the news at all, you will see that there were significant impacts: power (still) out to a large swath of the population, barns and boats destroyed, campgrounds flooded, huge trees down.

At 100 Prince Street, though, it was almost like nothing happened: we lost power for 2 hours on Saturday afternoon, which was enough time for a good nap. The power came back on in time to let me make supper, and has been back on ever since. There was a single small branch down in the back yard, and an uptick in the number of leaves down. But that was it.

We’ve had a lot on our plate this September, so I thank the fates for sparing us the additional challenges of storm recovery. And thoughts go out to Islanders, and others in Dorian’s wake, not so-spared.

I’d like to think that the members of the Bldg. Fresh Air Intake Unit had very smart uniforms and exceptional collegiality.

Looking back over the year so far, by far and away the most profound experience I’ve had came at the closing supper of Crafting {:} a Life, where my friend Elmine read a story, fresh that day from her intensely creative mind, titled The Oodlanders.

I am not one to break down in tears. And I am certainly not one to break down in tears in public.

But I did that night as Elmine read.

I’m still gutted where I listen to it now, on this web page where she’s posted an updated reading, along with the downloadable text.

In the afterword, Elmine wrote:

Though real life events may have been the inspiration for writing this story, it is of course a work of fiction. Any resemblance of its characters to people known to me is purely accidental. Or not.

Or not.

Indeed.

The Irving-owned tanker Acadian was coming into the Port of Charlottetown yesterday while Oliver and I were walking around the boardwalk on the waterfront.

“I wonder if my phone can shoot time lapses,” I muttered.

“Yes it can!”, exclaimed Oliver.

And so I quickly took out my phone, opened the camera, selected “Timelapse” under “Video modes,” stuck the camera on a nearby deck for stability, and let it run. This is what resulted (it’s sped up 4x from normal):

Other than the slight tilt, which makes it look like the ship is sailing uphill, and was due the angle of the camera, it’s a satisfying result, and I’m happy to learn that my phone has this superpower.

I have been typing professionally for a living for almost 40 years, and along the way I’ve learned a thing or two about ergonomics (enough to realize I have a lot more to learn).

Today I got a message from an ailing friend looking for advice for purchasing a better working chair, and this is how I replied:

• It’s as much about the software as the hardware. In my experience, $500 on a chair + $500 on an ergonomics expert to advise (and show you how to use the chair) is a better long-term investment than $1000 on a chair.
• There is no better antidote than not working so much. No chair has been invented that will make working a 12 hour day with no breaks possible.
• It might not be the chair: the keyboard, the monitor, your mousing device, and their relative positions, can all contribute to unexpected pain in unexpected places.
• You need to spend the $500 on the ergonomics expert every year because you will forget everything they tell you.

I’ve be using my current desk chair since 2010; it comes from Chairs Limited in Dartmouth, a firm that has the advantage of being able to customize extensively.

The Cotswolds-based cycle.travel site has an excellent description of itself:

Cycling is awesome. Amazingly, beautifully so. This humble machine, invented some 150 years ago, gets us to work, into town, and to see friends… faster, cheaper and plain more fun than the alternatives. It gets us to Britain’s best scenery entirely under our own steam. It gets us away from the daily grind.

Cycling gets us places. That’s why this site is called cycle.travel.

Not everyone wants to be Bradley Wiggins. There’s a lot of cycle.sport and cycle.performance on the web. We aim to be something different. For us, it’s not about the bike; it’s about the ride, and making better, more liveable cities and countryside with the bicycle as our chosen weapon.

The site also happens to have the best cycle-routing systems I’ve yet to come across, one that truly leverages the cycle-related data in OpenStreetMap to good end.

Compare, for example:

Here’s the routing via the ORSM routing algorithm from my house to the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market, one of two cycle-routing options on OpenStreetMap:

This route suffers for taking one out onto University Avenue, a very cycle-hostile street at the best of times, and particularly so north of Allen Street to Belvedere.

GraphHopper, the other OpenStreetMap cycle-routing option, is a little bit better:

GraphHopper’s route avoids University Avenue and routes to the Confederation Trail, but that stretch of Allen Street from Walthen Drive to the trail is fraught with cycling pitfalls.

By contrast, here is the cycle.travel route, which happens to be the exact route that Oliver and I take to the market every Saturday:

Any routing algorithm involves a struggle to weight competing factors: should the route be the fastest? the one with the gentlest hills? the safest? the most scenic?

As such finding a routing algorithm that suits your particular tastes is much like finding a coffee you like drinking. I’m glad I found mine.

In yesterday’s edition of Monica Langwe’s bookbinding-focused email newsletter she mentioned the book The Art of the Fold:

I am glad to hold “The Art of The Fold” in my hands. The book, made together with her daughter Ulla Warhol, is tastefully created and a “must have” for all working with bookbinding in a creative way.

Thank you Hedi for sharing your knowledge. I always talk about  you in my courses and I am truly happy for having had the opportunity to work with you!

Per my new habit for finding good books, I checked the website for The Bookmark and found, to my surprise and delight, that they had a copy in stock. And that they closed in 20 minutes.

So I hoofed over to the store and bought it (sorry–it was the last one; more are on order).

There is a Techniques section early in the book, and the section “Dividing into an odd number of sections” caught my eye:

This is something I’ve struggled with a lot in my bookbinding experiments, as when stitching a binding it’s very common to need an odd number of sections along the spine of the book.

But I found the explanation, especially the visual, in The Art of the Fold confusing because it shows a piece of paper that happens to neatly fit along the hypotenuse of a 5x5 triangle, and that’s often not the case.

What I realized is that it’s best to ignore the illustration, and follow the theory; here’s my experiment:

The key to figuring this out for me was that the X axis can be ignored completely; it’s only the Y axis that matters.

So the bottom-left corner goes at 0,0, and the top-right corner is set to wherever it lands on the Y axis at the number of sections you want (in this case 5). Then the Y axis markings–1, 2, 3, 4– are used to mark the sheet into that number of sections.

My confusion or not, it’s a great hack, and worth the price of the book already.

I’m very excited about being able to dive deeper into The Art of the Fold.