With a new season of The Amazing Race now underway, Edward Hasbrouck is back with his episode-by-episode commentary. For episode one he focuses on the difficulty that racers, not allowed to use smartphones, have with seemingly simple navigation tasks:

Travellers today aren’t likely to need to fall back on their ability to handle horses. It’s still common, however, to find yourself in a spot where your smartphone is broken, lost, stolen, or has no signal. It’s still worthwhile, I would argue, to learn and to maintain your ability to function without a smartphone, even if you carry one and use it as your primary tool for many tasks. The more you rely on your smartphone, the more you should have a “Plan B”. 

Before you leave home, make a list of all the things for which you use your phone. Think about each of them, and how you would accomplish the same task without your phone, or whether you would be willing and able to do without it. 

What are those functions for which you have come to rely on your phone, especially when you are away from home? Or for which, if you are younger, you have never used any tool other than a cellphone? (What’s a “phone booth”? What’s a “cybercafe”?) What’s your “Plan B” for travel without your phone? 

I once prided myself on my ability to, using only the lay of the land, find a muffler shop in any city I landed in (this was of necessity: my cars of yore were always in need of muffler work when I traveled cross-country). These days, though, as the urban landscape has changed, and my navigation skills have atrophied in the age of Google Maps, I’m not so sure.

Indeed, when we were in Tokyo in 2013, we were cemented to our smartphone and its Google Maps-powering GPS for almost everything. We didn’t have a plan B (other than “a spare battery”), and had the phone failed us we would have had an interesting time getting back to our hotel via celestial navigation.

It amazes me to think back to my time in Seoul, in the late 1990s, when I lost my travellers cheques and got them replaced with benefit of neither mobile phone nor the ability to speak Korean. As I pointed out when I wrote about that episode earlier, the real question to ask yourself not is now “what do I do without my phone,” but rather “what do I do if I lose my debit card?”

The ability to stick a card into an ATM anywhere from Rochester to Riga and withdraw local cash is something we take for granted, at least when traveling in the north. In many situations losing my debit card would sink me far deeper than not being able to use Google Maps (it’s for this reason that we have the “carry an emergency $50 somewhere” rule when traveling).

A couple of months ago I stumbled across this glowing review of the Monoprice Select Mini 3D printer on YouTube. I previously knew Monoprice as a company that sold good quality cables and computer accessories, shipped to Canada at reasonable prices. I didn’t know they dealt in 3D printers, but my good experiences with them on the USB-cable-front prompted me to take a look.

Alas, they were sold out of printers; on a lark I added my email address to the “alert me when this is off backorder” system, and forgot all about it.

Then, three weeks ago, I got the email: we have printers.

For $199.99 US, what did I have to lose? So I immediately ordered one (they were sold out shortly thereafter).

Last Friday afternoon, it arrived in our community mailbox (its box fits exactly in the size of the larger of the two package bins in the mailbox; someone did their package-sizing right!).

I was consumed with other activities until Saturday afternoon when I loaded the box onto a dolly and rolled it along to the office.

On the way I stopped in for coffee at Receiver, and while sitting in the window drinking my macchiato, I had a chat with the personable Sarah Bennetto O’Brien, proprietor of the recently-opened Handpie Company in Borden.

“What’s in the box?”, she asked.

“Oh, it’s my new 3D printer,” I replied, quietly ashamed at the implicit geekiness.

I need not have worried.

“I’ve been looking for someone to 3D print me something!”, Sarah exclaimed.

What followed was an agreement that I would try to print her a tiny Pie Man for her menu letterboard, said “pie man” being the visual identity of the new enterprise:

The 3D printer wasn’t even out of the box yet, and I had my first customer!

A few days later, Sarah emailed along a high resolution JPEG of Pie Man.

I used the handy Online SVG Image converter tool to convert this JPEG to a vector SVG file:

I then imported this SVG into Tinkercad, Autocad’s web-based 3D design tool:

I immediately realized that I had a problem: Pie Man is actually two objects, not one. That’s fine for the page, but for a 3D object, if I just printed it as-is it would end up as Pie Man Hair and Pie Man Face.

To bring hair and face together, I used Tinkercad to drop some “struts” into four places; thickening up and sizing Pie Man in the process. I made the struts shallow enough so that, I reasoned, they wouldn’t be noticeable on the final object:

With Pie Man now successfully held together, I exported him from Tinkercad as an STL file. I imported the STL file into Cura, the excellent and free program for converting 3D models into the G-code that 3D printers use as their Turtle-graphics-like instructions:

I tried to find the best settings for the G-code file by reading Monoprice’s thin documentation and by gleaning hints from the Monoprice Select Mini Wiki. I saved the result on the SD card that was included with the printer, pre-heated the hot end and the bed, and set it printing:

Exactly 30 minutes later, Pie Man № 1 was fully conjured. I peeled him away from the “raft” I’d had the printer create underneath him and, voila, here’s what I ended up with:

I’m very happy with the result: the struts are, as I thought, not too obvious and they don’t detract from Pie Man’s identity, especially when viewed from a distance. His eyes need a little work: I might widen them a little in the model to avoid the mismatchedness that resulted (or I might be able to ream them out with a knife after printing, which might be easier).

The next step is to fine-tune the model for Pie Man № 2, which will have “letterboard” legs attached. To my surprise, this seems like fresh terrain: I thought I’d be able to find existing 3D models to use as the basis for the size and shape of the legs, but I haven’t been able to. So Sarah is going to put a sample letter from her letterboard on the next train from Borden to town, and I’ll use that to work from.

If all goes well, you should see Pie Man, in all his 3D splendor, on the wall at The Handpie Company, before the month is out.

Rick Steves has caused me to reevaluate my opinion of Rick Steves:

Back home, one of my pet social causes has long been affordable housing. Twenty years ago, I devised a scheme where I could put my retirement savings not into a bank to get interest, but into cheap apartments to house struggling neighbors. I would retain my capital, my equity would grow as the apartment complex appreciated, and I would suffer none of the headaches that I would have if I had rented out the units as a landlord. Rather than collecting rent, my “income” would be the joy of housing otherwise desperate people.  I found this a creative, compassionate and more enlightened way to “invest” while retaining my long-term security.

Steves just gave a $4 million apartment complex to the YWCA.

(via Fresh Signals, a feed that, for me, has been exactly that for the past couple of weeks that I’ve been subscribed).

From Oliver, on Good Friday:

While on The Beginning Day of Easter. How Do People Like Buddhists Celebrate? How Do Scientists Celebrate? How Do Atheists Celebrate?

Yes, how.

My disappearance down the Ruskin rabbit hole continues.

Today I found the very helpful Post Offices and Postmasters tool from Library and Archives Canada, which led me to the record for the Ruskin, PEI post office, and the following information:

• The post office opened on October 1, 1881 and closed on August 15, 1913
• Over that period there were five postmasters: Joseph Haley, Jos. McInnis, Mrs. Mary Ann Hayley, Charles Grant and Michael Collins.
• When the office closed, the reason given was “Closed R.M.D.”

Also from Library and Archives Canada is the Electoral Atlas of the Dominion of Canada, which has an entry for King’s County and an accompanying map:

Sure enough, at the top of Lot 52 is the Ruskin Post Office, 2¼ miles east of Byrne’s Road:

If it is the role of each generation to take their parents’ gifts and reach ever higher, Oliver is doing proud by me tonight by attending his first high school dance.

A combination of social awkwardness and more social awkwardness meant that, in the 5 years I spent in high school in Ontario, I didn’t go to a single dance there.

At the one school dance I did attend, while on a band exchange trip to Fort McMurray, I was thrown into a wall by an angry drunken young man, and this did nothing to win me over to the idea.

Fortunately, Oliver has no such awkwardness, and so is fully prepared to go places his terrified father never could.

This being a more enlightened era, he has the aid of his excellent new support worker, Drake from Summerside, and, should he need it, the support of me, hunkered down here in the Learning Centre as a failsafe. Of course social awkwardness having a half-life of about a billion years, it’s me who’s the nervous one still, cowering in the corner, hoping that nobody notices me.

All of this was made evermore feasible by a helpful meeting on Monday with Oliver’s resource teacher and the school principal where we worked to shave off the rough edges (practical things like “buy tickets from your block D teacher,” something that Oliver doesn’t have, and matters of the spirit like “will Oliver be overwhelmed and what’s our plan if so?”). They were nothing but helpful and supportive in this regard, and are to be commended for their true commitment to inclusion.

I’ve got a big stack of books and three hours to kill. The indecipherable back beat of 2017 pop music leaks through from the cafeteria. Worst case scenario, I can always hide under a desk if it gets too bad.

Postscript the next morning: the dance was great; Oliver had a wonderful time and danced up a storm; Drake was great; I had a relaxing three hours in the Learning Centre, most of which I spent talking my brother Mike on the phone.

The word is all over town that the Hopyard crew are opening a new place in the old Sirenella space on Water Street. And so, in anticipation of the coming freshening, I thought it wise to snap a photo before it’s too late.

Many great meals were had in there.

I was in my friend Catherine Hennessey’s house yesterday, helping her find out why her Facebook had mysteriously started communicating to her in Brazilian Portuguese, when I spotted a copy of John Croteau’s book Cradled in the waves: the story of a people’s co-operative achievement in economic betterment on Prince Edward Island, Canada sitting on her dining room table. Curious–I’d heard Catherine and her posse referring to Croteau in venerable terms for years–I picked up the book and paged through it.

Spanning the endpapers I found a beautifully-illustrated map of Prince Edward Island:

My eye was immediately drawn to northern King’s County where I spotted, just under Bangor, a place named Ruskin, which I’d never heard of before:

This is one of my favourite areas of Prince Edward Island. My first visit there was many years ago when I needed to go and visit a young cobbler who’d set up home and shop in a house off the Bangor Road. On the journey there–drive to Morell, turn right, drive forever–I was struck by how unpopulated the region was. In a province where you are not often out of sight of the signs of human habitation, you can drive for miles on the Bangor Road and see only forest, fields and scrub before emerging, far down the road, into what, by comparison, seems like decidedly urban Cardigan.

The notion that The Lost City of Ruskin lurked somewhere along that route was intriguing.

So, what of this Ruskin?

The 1973 book Geographical names of Prince Edward Island has an entry on page 107 for the place:

Ruskin: PO 1891-1913 in the N part of Riverton, Lots 39, 40 and 52. Named for John Ruskin (1819-1900) the art critic.

Comparing this 1973 book to the 1925 Place-names of Prince Edward Island with meanings, we find disagreement on the where, but confirmation of the place being named after John Ruskin:

Ruskin; settlement, lot 51. A post office about 1891 to August 15, 1913. After John Ruskin (1819-1900).

While he’s not mentioned by profession here, John Ruskin the art critic was indeed born in 1819 and did indeed die in 1900.

The book Canadian Literary Landmarks, by John Robert Colombo, also references John Ruskin the English essayist:

Ruskin was the name of a post office in Riverton from 1891 to 1913. Riverton is south of Morell. Ruskin was named after the English essayist John Ruskin (1819-1900).

This notion of Ruskin being named after John Ruskin the writer runs contrary to what was reported in Over on the Island, the 1939 book by Helen Jean Champion. As Champion takes the reader on a ramble through King’s County, we come to Ruskin at the end of chapter 7, “A Plague of Mice” (emphasis mine):

Farther on lies Ruskin. I wonder what that great apostle of art would say if he could see his family name representing a district on Prince Edward Island. The place, however, is not named after the famous writer; it is named after John Ruskin, an early settler. Even so, if the great critic ever spied his name on this map, I am sure he would put one thumb in his waistcoat, and assuming the attitude typical of a lecturer, he would begin an address to his dear unknown friends:

Wherever art is practised for its own sake, and the delight of the workmen is in what he does and produces, instead of in what he interprets or exhibits—there art has an influence of the most fatal kind on brain and heart, and it issues, if long so pursued, in the destruction both of intellectual power and moral principle; whereas art devoted humbly and self-forgetfully to the clear statement and record of the facts of the universe, is always helpful and beneficent to mankind, full of comfort, strength, and salvation.

John Ruskin, the critic, retires, and John Ruskin, the farmer, takes his place at the plough and forgets, if, indeed, he ever knew, the principles which this great teacher has laid down. And Ruskin, the district, goes on with its daily work, unconscious of the great and illustrious name it bears.

There is a paucity of Ruskin, PEI scholarship otherwise, likely because what was once a place that people were from is now just a stretch of road.

The Guardian is filled with Ruskin references, but most all of them are references to John Ruskin the Essayist, not our Ruskin, and where they are references to our Ruskin, they are mentioning the school district or the polling place.

So the question remains: was Ruskin, Prince Edward Island named after an English essayist, or an Island farmer?

Anthony Bourdain on friendship, from a recent profile in The New Yorker:

Bourdain is exceptionally close to his crew members, in part because they are steady companions in a life that is otherwise transient. “I change location every two weeks,” he told me. “I’m not a cook, nor am I a journalist. The kind of care and feeding required of friends, I’m frankly incapable of. I’m not there. I’m not going to remember your birthday. I’m not going to be there for the important moments in your life. We are not going to reliably hang out, no matter how I feel about you. For fifteen years, more or less, I’ve been travelling two hundred days a year. I make very good friends a week at a time.”

I haven’t reliably hung out with anyone in more than 25 years.

When I began my term as Hacker in Residence at Robertson Library at the University of Prince Edward Island in 2013, one of the first things I did was to set up a dedicated weblog to record my activities while wearing that hat.

Things started badly when I was forced, by university policy, to attached the blog to http://hacker.vre.upei.ca/, an address nobody could love (to this day I don’t know what a “VRE” really is, nor why it had to appear in my URL).

But I soldiered on, making 60 posts, on all manner of topics, between January 8, 2013 and July 17, 2015.

At that point the Hacker in Residence blog started to wither on the vine; it wasn’t that I wasn’t hacking-in-residence any longer, it’s just that, as I gradually fine-tuned the writing-and-rendering environment here on the mothership blog, writing over there felt like wearing slightly ill-fitting clothes. So I started to write here what I would have once written there.

This was the second time something like this happened: back in July of 2003 I started a separate Reinvented Labs blog to write about more technical topics. That too fell into disrepair, a year later in 2004, and I corrected the error of my ways by returning to a single stream of writing when I evolved what was once the “Reinvented.net” blog into the “ruk.ca” blog as you now know it.

What I should have learned from that exercise, and what I’ve finally realized definitively, is that I should never split my feed.

Which is to say: it’s difficult enough having one clean, well-lit place to write, let alone introducing the technical and spiritual complexities of creating separate neighbourhoods for separate types of writing. Drupal installations don’t get updated. Backups don’t get made. Attention doesn’t get paid. It looks like the interest stopped, when really it just flowed elsewhere.

So today I imported all 60 of the Hacker in Residence posts over here, and this week I’ll get a redirect put in place to 301 Redirect all http://hacker.vre.upei.ca/ URLs over to https://ruk.ca/ ones.

Please warn me if I set out to do this again.

From a technical perspective, I used the Views Data Export module on the Hacker in Residence Drupal to export the posts into a CSV file. On this end I used the Feeds module, supplemented by Feeds Tamper to massage the data a little, to import the posts into this Drupal. Where they will remain for all eternity.