Here’s what the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market looks like when you’re here early (which we almost never are).

Ironically, this earliness followed on from an early morning email exchange with my friend Dave about early rising (which we almost never do).

Fast coffee line! No claustrophobia! Abundant tempeh! What’s not to love?

I found today that it’s possible to turn a Raspberry Pi 3 into a beacon that can be discovered, via Bluetooth LE, by mobile devices nearby.

I took the Pi I use as an OSMC media server here in the office, SSHed to the command line, and then:

sudo connmanctl enable bluetooth
sudo hciconfig hci0 up
sudo hciconfig hci0 leadv 3
sudo hcitool -i hci0 cmd 0x08 0x0008 1f 02 01 06 03 03 aa fe 17 16 aa fe 10 00 02 72 65 69 6e 76 65 6e 74 6f 72 69 75 6d 07 3f 62 6e

The final line is an encoded representation of “show the URL for the Reinventorium” that I calculated with this handy tool.

With this in place, the Google Nearby tool automatically discovers the new beacon, and provides me with a link to the URL:

The only snag I ran into is that the Reinventorium page that I created for the link originally had bad metadata, which I needed to update on the site. There didn’t appear to be a way other than by making slight adjustments to the target URL in the beacon, to cause the Google Nearby app to refresh this metadata.

Thank you to my friend Jonas for originally turning me on to this emerging technology.

The CBC is holding a public summit on the “changing nature of news” on March 24 at the Confederation Centre of the Arts, hosted by Peter Mansbridge and including some of the country’s preëminent journalists.

It was announced yesterday that free tickets would be available starting at noon today at the Confederation Centre box office, and online starting on Monday.

I dropped by to pick some up this afternoon at 12:30 and found a bunch of disappointed people waiting in line; they’d just learned that the event was sold out after only 30 minutes. As one particularly disturbed fellow said on his way out, “this riles me up to no end.”

While I’m sad we won’t be able to attend, I do take some comfort from the notion that an event on the “changing nature of news” sold out as fast as the Leonard Cohen concert a few years go.

In case they’ve escaped your attention, Port Cities is a new Nova Scotia supergroup that deserves your attention. They are releasing a new album here in Charlottetown on March 24, 2017. Unfortunately, this date conflicts with a performance across the street at the same time by Peter Mansbridge’s supergroup. An embarrassment of riches in the neighbourhood on that night.

Now that my phone has received the Google Assistant update, I’ve got both it and our Amazon Echo hooked up to the Wemo switches for our living room light and television.

So here’s a little video showing them both at work on the same task:

Continuing my drive to spread the City Cinema film schedule as far and wide as possible into cyberspace, I’ve got a “Google Action” all ready to go. It’s working, in private “preview” mode, on both my Google Home device here in the office, and in Google Assistant on my Android phone.

I’ve reached a stumbling block with getting it approved for public release by Google, though: when I try to use “City Cinema” as the “invocation name” I get an error about a “reserved brand name”:

I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do to under “Connected Properties,” and I’ve been back and forth several times, fruitlessly, with the Google Actions support. I’ve submitted another request today, and hope I’m more successful.

In the meantime, here’s what it looks like:

Generating a good portion—or more—of our electricity load here on Prince Edward Island from the wind happens frequently enough these days that it’s unremarkable. But it’s seldom that load and wind generation are so perfectly in balance as they are tonight.

A friend of mine made reference, in an email a few weeks ago, to her vain attempts to “release attachment to the outcome.”

That struck a chord with me: doing exactly that has removed one of the great sources of stress in our family’s daily life: getting to school on time.

According to the letter of the law, the school day at Colonel Gray Senior High School starts at 9:00 a.m.

And so our goal, starting out the year in September, was to try to arrive at school at 8:45 a.m. to give Oliver a chance to get settled before things ramped up.

This turned out to be untenable, for a variety of reasons.

First, if you work backward from 8:45 a.m., and factor in that we were walking to school in the fall, we had to leave the house by about 8:15 a.m. Which meant breakfast had to be underway by 7:30 a.m. Which meant getting Oliver out of bed by 7:00 a.m. Which meant getting myself out of bed by 6:30 a.m.

It wasn’t so much that this order of operations was untenable–6:30 a.m. is a perfectly reasonable time to wake up–it’s just that the military precision required to getting all operations completed on time to allow for an on-time arrival at school was eating away at our souls, especially Oliver’s, as there’s nothing he likes less than being rushed.

So, with the generous cooperation of school officials, we decided to release our attachment to the outcome: we’d try to get to school by 9:30 a.m., but if we didn’t, well, that would be okay too.

The positive effect on our family life was immediate and dramatic: with no time-pressure, our mornings could be leisurely and free of “Oliver, you have to hurry up and eat so that we can leave on time” stress coursing through the house.

Slow morning getting started? Who cares!

Oliver needs a little more time to finish watching a Robert Reich video or to memorialize somebody’s birthday by posting 89 YouTube videos to their wall? Take your time!

The great irony of this is most days we arrive at school, without consciously trying, at about 9:22 a.m.

I know this because the first thing Oliver does every morning on arrival is to go for a walk with Dave, his educational assistant. And so my first action on arrival is to send a text message to Dave, and to Shelly, the leader of the Learning Centre at the school, letting them know we’ve arrived.

And scrolling back through my text messages last week I found that there’s freaky regularity in our arrival time:

This is supported by my Google Location History, which tracks my location and automatically records my arrival time at the school each morning:

Discovery of our regularity came as a big surprise to me, for I’d been under the impression, what given our release from attachment to the outcome, that we’d been arriving on a random schedule, untethered to real-world concerns like clocks and schedules.

But, no, it’s almost always 9:22 a.m.

9:22 a.m., it seems, is the time that Oliver is meant to be at school when we follow the natural rhythm of our family.

9:22 a.m. works for us.

9:22 a.m. doesn’t make us rush. It doesn’t make Oliver time-claustrophobic.

9:22 a.m. has made the difference between a hectic, stressful morning and a calm, enjoyable one.

I’m so happy we released our attachment, and that we were supported in doing so.

The Google app on my phone invited me to “Explore Interests” this morning. Under the “politicians” category it listed Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Justin Trudeau, Melania Trump, Vladimir Putin, Bernie Sanders, Queen Elizabeth and Fidel Castro.

Quick on the heels of the City Cinema Twitter Bot, here’s the City Cinema Telegram Bot.

If you use Telegram as a messaging app, you can query this bot just like you can the Twitter one: “what’s playing on Sunday?” and so on. It’s powered by the same API.ai back-end as the Twitter bot is, and there were no coding changes required to support this integration.

Here’s what it looks like:

You gotta hand it to Telegram for eating its own dog food: the entire process of setting up a new “bot” is handled conversationally with the BotFather.