Citizens of Charlottetown woke up with a new mayor and city councillor following from yesterday’s municipal election in the city. Picking up our daily newspaper The Guardian, this morning, however, you’d never know it:

Instead of election coverage, we see a delightful piece about the local brewing industry.

Why?

Because, starting this summer, The Guardian is no longer printed on Prince Edward Island.

As the CBC reported in May, the paper is printed in Halifax now, a move instituted by its new owners:

In an email statement to CBC News, SaltWire Network spokesperson Barbara Cameron said the Guardian and Journal Pioneer’s digital platforms will be the “primary venue for late-breaking news.”

“Printed newspapers are evolving and so is what we include in that medium. More and more we’ll be playing to the strength of print, which facilitates thoroughness, resonance and permanence,” she said.

That’s powerful PR, but little consolation for someone who wants to read about the election by opening a real newspaper.

Here’s how the non-news was explained on the front of the paper today:

By comparison, here’s the front page of The Guardian from February 11, 1904, the morning after that year’s municipal election in the city:

Those were the days.

If you only need one reason to stay at The Charlottetown Hotel, surely this sign qualifies.

Brother Mike is visiting and is sporting a fancy new iPhone with “portrait mode.” Here’s a photo he took of Ethan with me in the background.

After printing the bold headline in yellow on Wednesday, today was the day to print the explanatory body copy on my California Typewriter poster.

I didn’t really want to print this in black, both because I wanted to avoid a honeybee colour scheme, and because I was afraid that the density of the black would detract from the sunshine of the yellow.

“How about grey?”, I asked myself.

I don’t have any grey ink, but I do have both black and white.

So I put a dollop of opaque white on the ink disk:

And then I added a tiny, tiny, tiny amount of black. So tiny you wouldn’t believe how tiny it was. In this regard I had the helpful Making the color gray forum topic from Briar Press to guide me, especially:

Don’t forget adding your colour to white should be done in tiny amounts slowly building towards what you want. If you go to dark there’s no going back, by adding more white!

The result was a very pleasing, dare I say “smokey” grey:

Letting the rollers of the press have at it, a couple of minutes later I had a lovely grey ready for printing:

The type for the body copy is relatively new foundry type, for both faces, and so there was very little need for makeready; here’s what one of the first prints looked like:

It’s hard to get a sense, from that photo, of how not-intense-black the grey is.

Here are the final posters, drying stacked:

You may have noticed, if you’re paying careful attention, that I’ve organized a screening of the documentary California Typewriter for Sunday, December 9 at 1:30 p.m. at City Cinema. Please spread the word. And watch for the posters around town.

I bought this plate from Michael Stanley some years ago. It was a remnant from a set he’d created for a family with small cupboards.

It wasn’t until I set it down with Oliver’s breakfast this morning, in front of his laptop, that I realized that its design is also well-suited for other purposes.

Oliver and I were in Catherine’s studio yesterday morning for an emergency Halloween costume alteration when I heard a commotion in the parking lot below her back window.

I looked out to see the November issue of The Buzz being unloaded.

I’m so used to seeing piles of the paper in coffee shops in quantities of 5 or 10 that being exposed to all of the copies gave me a new appreciation for how much The Buzz has grown since the early years.

I bought this can of grapefruit segments 100% because of the brand name. I wasn’t even in the market for grapefruit segments.

Two years ago I purchased a 5 oz. tube of yellow letterpress ink from NA Graphics. With the exception of a tiny experiment last year, I’d been afraid to use the ink; black and red are easy and substantial, whereas yellow is fickle and mysterious, and I feared that the result would be too light or too dark or just off.

Today, though, I decided to break through this mental logjam.

And to print.

In yellow.

I’m cooking up a skunkworks project for December that I need a poster for (details to follow soon!) and so I pulled out the Akzidenz Grotesk and set to work.

I had nothing to fear: the yellow is throaty and bold and deeply sunshiny. I love it.

If you’ve been following along over the years, you’ll recall that back in 2012, thanks to the imaginative efforts of a coder deep inside the provincial government, a JSON feed of Prince Edward Island’s electricity load and generation became available.

The efforts were imaginative because the coder created a public web page with gauges showing readings by emitting and then consuming JSON; because the JSON was public, it was thus available to anyone who wanted to use it. I’ve been archiving that data since 2012 (you can grab the archive here), and have been it using for everything from a mobile app to an Alexa skill (“Alexa, as PEI power for a summary”). I’ve done all this with an eye to increasing Islander’s “peripheral electricity literacy,” and I’ve frequently referenced this data in my presentations about open data.

The province has admirably continued to maintain the JSON feed all these years, and this week, as part of their migration to a new web platform, they’ve moved the mechanism by which the data is available, and, in the process, have formalized something which had heretofore been informal.

Here’s a one-liner that that illustrates the new system:

curl --header "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST --data '{"featureName": "WindEnergy"}' https://wdf.princeedwardisland.ca/prod/workflow

This will return a JSON object with the five values previously available, albeit wrapped in a slightly more complex data structure:

{
   "components":[
      {
         "type":7,
         "data":{
            "actualValue":186,
            "footer":"",
            "maxValue":300,
            "header":"Total On-Island Load: 186.59 MW",
            "color":"#008570"
         }
      },
      {
         "type":7,
         "data":{
            "actualValue":49,
            "footer":"",
            "maxValue":200,
            "header":"Wind Power Used On Island: 49.21 MW",
            "color":"#008570"
         }
      },
      {
         "type":7,
         "data":{
            "actualValue":55,
            "footer":"",
            "maxValue":300,
            "header":"Total On-Island Wind Generation: 55.22 MW",
            "color":"#008570"
         }
      },
      {
         "type":7,
         "data":{
            "actualValue":6,
            "footer":"",
            "maxValue":200,
            "header":"Wind Power Exported Off Island: 6.01 MW",
            "color":"#008570"
         }
      },
      {
         "type":7,
         "data":{
            "actualValue":0,
            "footer":"",
            "maxValue":200,
            "header":"Total On-Island Fossil Fuel Generation: 0.00 MW",
            "color":"#008570"
         }
      },
      {
         "type":5,
         "data":{
            "text":"Last updated October 31, 2018 10:44 AM"
         }
      }
   ]
}

I’ve modified my systems to use this new feed. If you want a simpler mechanism for grabbing the same data, pulled in real time from the source, you can:

curl "https://energy.reinvented.net/pei-energy/govpeca/get-govpeca-json.php?format=json"

which will return:

{
   "on-island-load":"186.59",
   "on-island-wind":"55.22",
   "on-island-fossil":"0.00",
   "wind-local":"49.21",
   "wind-export":"6.01",
   "percentage-wind":"29.59",
   "updatetime":1540993440,
   "updatetime_human":"2018-10-31 10:44:00"
}

Or, if you prefer XML:

curl "https://energy.reinvented.net/pei-energy/govpeca/get-govpeca-json.php?format=xml"

which returns:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<govpeca>
    <on-island-load>186.59</on-island-load>
    <on-island-wind>55.22</on-island-wind>
    <on-island-fossil>0.00</on-island-fossil>
    <wind-local>49.21</wind-local>
    <wind-export>6.01</wind-export>
    <percentage-wind>29.59</percentage-wind>
    <updatetime>1540993440</updatetime>
    <updatetime_human>2018-10-31 10:44:00</updatetime_human>
</govpeca>

If you’d prefer a richer set of data, you can also use the endpoint I created to drive the pei.consuming.ca mobile app:

curl "https://energy.reinvented.net/pei-energy/govpeca/deliver-govpeca-data.php?format=json"

which returns:

{
   "current":{
      "updatetime":"2018-10-31 10:44:00",
      "uptimetimehuman":"Wednesday at 10:44 AM",
      "on-island-load":"186.59",
      "on-island-wind":"55.22",
      "on-island-fossil":"0.00",
      "wind-local":"49.21",
      "wind-export":"6.01",
      "percentage-wind":"29.59"
   },
   "previous":{
      "updatetime":"2018-10-31 10:29:00",
      "uptimetimehuman":"Wednesday at 10:29 AM",
      "on-island-load":"188.27",
      "on-island-wind":"63.76",
      "on-island-fossil":"0.00",
      "wind-local":"53.69",
      "wind-export":"10.07",
      "percentage-wind":"33.87"
   },
   "peak":{
      "peak":"188",
      "hightime":"10:29 AM"
   },
   "peakwind":{
      "peak":"91",
      "hightime":"3:14 AM"
   }
}

The data here is the same, but I include the previous sample, and the daily peaks for load and wind.

I’m self-hosting these endpoints, so please don’t hit them too hard (the data is only updated once every 15 minutes by Maritime Electric via the province, so there’s no need to poll more regularly than that).

The province’s own page of gauges visualizing this same information has also changed its location: you can now find it at PEI Wind Energy.