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).

In 2013, on our last night in Tokyo, Oliver and I went out for conveyor-belt-sushi to Pintokona in the Roppongi district.

After supper we wandered up the street to the Aoyama Book Center Roppongi, where we spotted a copy of Tsuyoshi Takashiro’s book Life Packing, a delightful rumination that, among other things, is an unintentional recapitulation of George Carlin’s place for your stuff routine.

I’d seen the book earlier on our trip, neglected to purchase it, and regretted the decision. Finding it again gave me a second chance, and I purchased it immediately, which also gave me a chance to experience the lovely Japanese style for wrapping books in a bookstore in paper upon purchase.

I learned today that the Aoyama Book Center closed earlier this year and that its space is now occupied by the newly-opened 文喫 (Bunkitsu), a bookstore with a cover charge:

Once you’ve checked in, take your free cup of coffee or tea and wander endlessly through books on humanities, nature, art and design, all of which have been thoughtfully curated by the book lovers of Yours Book Store. Every book is for sale, but you can also spend an hour, 5 hours or the whole day and not buy a thing. And if you get hungry, they even have a small café that will sell you lunch or a light snack.

I’m inclined to jump on a plane right now; barring that, here’s a walkthru video from YouTube.

PEI Green Party leader Peter Bevan-Baker on the importance of priorities:

Politics is how we make collective decisions, and it touches on every aspect of our shared lives. Part of the art of politics, I believe, is in choosing what priorities get placed at the front of the line. The word priority quite literally means “prior to” – what things need to be done prior to the rest. In that sense you can’t have a whole bunch of priorities, only a few.

I think regular blogging should be an expected duty of any member of the legislature; it’s a form of communication tailor-made for the profession, and I so appreciate Peter’s regular insights.

PC MLA Brad Trivers is a thoughtful blogger too; I’d like to read 27 MLAs’ blogs, though, not just two, and wish others would join in.

Of all the foods of the world that have come to be regularly available in Charlottetown in the last 25 years, among my favourites is bibimbap, a Korean rice dish available at Mr. Sushi, at Seoul Food and at Ta-Ke Sushi.

Each place has its own way of preparing bibimbap, but what’s common to all is a bed of rice topped with various things–meats, vegetables, often an egg–and then, at your option, slathered in chili sauce. It’s very good.

Here’s mine, from lunch today at Mr. Sushi (and here’s the sound of it cooking itself in the heated bowl, recorded in 2013):

Greta Thunberg is an autistic teenager from Sweden. She is changing the world with her clear-eyed talk about climate change (watch her TEDx talk or her speech at the COP24 last week).