The final event of Oliver’s Birthday Season, a trip to Wolfville to bear witness to a live taping of Laurie Brown’s Pondercast podcast.

So, of course, we recorded a podcast while waiting for the show to start.

I can’t figure out whether this bus stop bench was mis-installed, got hit by something, is buckling under pressure, or was just artfully designed.

At the end of my “stakeholders tour” of Province House back in June, I mentioned the work that my friend Perry Williams has been doing with photographing and editing “3D tours” of places on the Island, and suggested that it would be great if he could expose the under-renovation building to this treatment.

Parks Canada subsequently connected with Perry, and the result is this fantastic look inside the deconstructed home of our Legislative Assembly.

This is as good a use of virtual reality as I’ve ever seen, and provides so much more context than simple photographs would.

Almost twenty years ago, with the assistance of Brian Simpson, the Provincial Photographer, and using a complicated QuickTime VR authoring tool, we did some early experimenting with virtual reality at Green Gables; the quality of what Perry is doing these days, and the usability of his tours, far outstrips what we were capable of back then.

XYZ CARGO designs and manufactures bicycles in Hamburg and Copenhagen using a novel and humane business model:

Fair pricing: We ask ourselves how to give access to XYZ CARGOs to as many people as possible and how to do this in a fair and symbiotic way. We wouldn’t try to get the biggest profit, but balance a fee for our work with the costs and the time we have invested. All persons should be able to access XYZ CARGOs in a way, that fits both: their means and their needs.

We offer a range of ways to get hold of a XYZ CARGO: we sell readymade, assembled cycles and we arrange workshops for those who want to build their XYZ CARGO themselves. Finally people can also build their XYZ CARGOs from scratch on their own, according to the Creative Commons license above. However we do not give away blueprints for the commercial models.

Being “fair and symbiotic” are excellent business goals.

(via Low-tech)

From Olle, a tip about making events that include everyone, especially newcomers:

There were at least two new faces at the meetup, and I had been given a hint by Morgan about the article Breaking Cliques at Events. In it, a method for reminding people that the longer they’ve been in a group, the more responsibility they have to welcome newcomers to it: “Take the number of years you’ve been in the group. That number is how many new people you say hello to at a meetup.”

Most groups I’ve been a member of give little thought to this, adopting a “it was hard for me to become a part of the group, so don’t expect a free pass, newbie” attitude. That’s not a good way to run a railroad.

From How to Build a Low-tech Website:

In contrast, this website runs on an off-the-grid solar power system with its own energy storage, and will go off-line during longer periods of cloudy weather. Less than 100% reliability is essential for the sustainability of an off-the-grid solar system, because above a certain threshold the fossil fuel energy used for producing and replacing the batteries is higher than the fossil fuel energy saved by the solar panels.

The “less than 100% reliable” design pattern is a powerful one.

I get pinged on my mobile phone, for example, if this website goes down. But only between 7:00 a.m. and 11:00 p.m.

I could hire a antipodean doppelganger to keep the watch in small hours, but the risk-reward of that wouldn’t be worth it. If MySQL crashes at 3:00 a.m., y’all are on your own until I wake up.

If you search for help downloading all of your Flickr photos, along with the metadata, you will, no doubt, get trapped in a jungle of old advice about how you must do this page by page from your “camera roll.” Or use arcane scripts that probably use an out of date Flickr API.

The modern answer, it turns out, is much simpler: on your Flickr account page, in the lower right, you’ll find a tool called “Your Flickr Data” that allows you to submit a “data takeout” request. It took about 18 hours to process mine, and when it was done I got an email directing me back to this page, where the section was now populated with links to ZIP files of the photos and metadata:

Very helpful.

In the shadow of last week’s Farm Day in the City, I had this idea that we should organize City Day on the Farm. Avocado toast and Boosted Boards go to Central Queens.

I set out to try to illustrate the idea last night, but only got as far as sketching a barn.

My favourite blog-find of late is that of Austin Kleon, author of Steal Like an Artist.

Not only do I appreciate Austin’s sensibilities, but I appreciate that he takes what others might toss off as pithy asides and instead develops full-throated blog posts in the classic tradition.

Kleon is delivering the keynote at Sketchkon in Pasadena in November.