A project took me to the top of the Holman Grand this morning, and I took the opportunity to take some photos from different vantage points.
By the time I got home, Google Photos had, automatically, and without prompting, stitched then together into a panorama.
Every Saturday morning at the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market, after we have our smoked salmon bagel and coffee (or smoothie), we swing around to Lady Baker’s Tea, where we order up whatever the iced tea of the day is.
Often we’ll take an extra moment and have a chat with personable owner Katherine Burnett or one of her crack team, and that’s exactly what we did last Saturday: I asked Katherine where the best place downtown to get a wide selection of her retail tea was, and she invited me to come to their new location in the basement of the Kirk of St. James.
As you might imagine, given my recent relocation to a protestant church basement myself, hilarity ensued, and plans for each of us to make a pilgrimage to the other’s operation were hatched.
All of which led me to decide that what we really need to do next is to conjure up an mutual aid society for we running businesses from basements, and this begat the launching, via printing press, of the Underground Business Society.
Once the cards are dry, I’ll launch the formal membership drive. Besides me and Lady Baker’s, I can think of Lightning Bolt Comics, and the tartan annex of Northern Watters Knitwear.
Can you suggest other basement-location Charlottetown businesses?
Ton wants to count the number of blog posts he writes per week. I responded with a shell script, but without any documentation.
Here’s the missing manual.
First, the entire script:
curl -s https://www.zylstra.org/blog/feed/ | \
grep pubDate | \
sed -e 's/<pubDate>//g' | \
sed -e 's/<\/pubDate>//g' | \
while read -r line ; do
date -j -f "%a, %d %b %Y %T %z" "$line" "+%V"
done | \
sort -n | \
uniq -c
The basic idea here is “get the RSS feed of Ton’s blog, pull out the publication dates of each post, convert each date to a week number, and then total posts by week number.” As of this writing, the output of the script is:
5 23
6 24
4 25
Which tells me, for example, that this week, which is week 25 of 2018, Ton has written 4 posts so far.
Here’s a line by line breakdown of how the script works.
curl -s https://www.zylstra.org/blog/feed/ | \
Use the curl command, in silent mode (-s) so as to not print a lot of unhelpful progress information, to get Ton’s RSS feed. This returns a chunk of XML, with one
<item>
<title></title>
<link>https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2018/06/4125/</link>
<comments>https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2018/06/4125/#comments</comments>
<pubDate>Wed, 06 Jun 2018 11:23:08 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator><
There is a gathering of people and their doodles this Saturday, June 23, 2018, at the PEI Humane Society’s dog park. It’s both a fundraiser for the Humane Society and a social gathering for people and dogs.
For the uninitiated, doodles are crossbred poodles. Labradoodles. Goldendoodles. And so forth.
As we’ve been asked, of Ethan (not a doodle), “oh, is he a doodle?” roughly a billion times since he came into our lives, we have some familiarity with the dogs and their obsessive passionate humans.
While simply a standard poodle, Ethan has some apricot in his ears, and that prompts doodle-afficianados to flights of fancy. Fortunately, Ethan’s role in Oliver’s life is, in part, to be an entrée to conversation, so this is not a bad thing.
I know about the Romp because I phoned the Humane Society last week to inquire whether their dog park, long closed for renovations, was due to open any time soon. They told me that all that was holding things up was some fencing, and that the fence supplier had been given the Doodle Romp as an immovable deadline.
I received assurances that, should we bring Ethan (not a doodle) to the Doodle Romp, we would not be turned away.
Were Oliver not so averse to committing acts of fraud, I’d try to pull off a “yes he is!”, but we’ll have to play it straight.
This video introduction to LoRaWAN, in addition to being a great introduction to LoRaWAN, is also a great introduction to the ins and outs of sending data by radio. The explanation of the “link budget” was particularly helpful.
While we’re on the topic of (delightful | creepy) computer-assisted lifestyle logistics, I’ve just taken advantage of a feature that I’m pretty sure has been part of the Mac Mail application for a long time, it’s ability to automatically parse out appointments from arbitrary text and allow me to add them to my calendar:
This was almost nothing but helpful.
Google is rolling out a lot of updates to its text messaging suite this month; most recent is the appearance of context-sensitive suggested replies.
In this case it did a good job: its suggested replies were very close to what I actually replied, manually.
The The 24th Annual Fred Eaglesmith Charity Picnic, coming up in August, includes both a pie auction and a pickle contest. As well as music from Fred Eaglesmith and his retinue. The mind boggles.
Fred Eaglesmith fun fact: his song I Shot Your Dog was written about Catherine. Who did.
About This Blog
I am Peter Rukavina and this is my blog. I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.
To learn more about me, read my /now, look at my bio, listen to audio I’ve posted, read presentations and speeches I’ve written, or get in touch (peter@rukavina.net is the quickest way).
I have been writing here since May 1999: you can explore the 25+ years of blog posts in the archive.
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