One of the things you get used to when you’re driving around a 17 year old car on the rough wintertime streets on Charlottetown is that parts of the car fall off from time to time.

Most of the time–thank goodness–these parts aren’t vital: they’re bits of plastic or metal shielding designed to protect some vital part of the car, but that the car can otherwise operate perfect well without.

Last week there was ample evidence, just from listening to the rattle-and-scrape of the car on the driveway at home, that something new was falling off the bottom of the car. I drove around for a week with hopes that it would rattle and scrape free, but it didn’t. And so this morning, after I dropped Oliver off a school, I drove round to Mufflecentre to see if they could help.

While there are other muffler shops in Charlottetown, Mufflercentre is well known as the elite special forces of the exhaust system world. It’s where you go when you need something unusual done. Or something welded. Anything that’s not the typical “insert muffler A into slot B.”

Here’s how things proceeded:

Me: I’ve got a 2000 Jetta out there with things hanging off the bottom. Nothings wrong with the exhaust system, but it’s making a lot of noise.

Mufflercentre: Pull it around to bay number three and we’ll take a look.

I pulled the car around to bay number three, and got waved in to drive over top of the pit. There was a 50% chance, to my mind, that I would drive right into the pit, but I did not.

Me: There’s a bunch of stuff hanging off the bottom; I wonder if you could pull it off or tack it up.

Mechanic: Okay, let’s take a look.

The mechanic walked down the steps into the pit, pulled one bit of aluminum shielding off and bolted another into place. It took him about 3 minutes.

Mechanic: Okay, you’re set. No charge for that. Have a nice day.

And off I went. I’d left the house at 9:15 a.m. I was back at home, Oliver delivered and noise muffled, by 10:00 a.m.

Needless to say, I recommend Mufflecentre for all your muffling needs.

For all the computers and learning pods and post-library-library rhetoric, the most comforting and revolutionary aspect of the new Inspire Learning Centre in Summerside is the generous width of the aisles between the bookshelves. It makes browsing the claustrophobic aisles in Charlottetown feel like being trapped in an antediluvian book prison.

I’ve written a lot about MacAusland’s Woollen Mill in this space over the years. It is one of my favourite places, and their wool blankets are one of my favourite things. If you’re in Greater Bloomfield, do yourself a favour and drop in, take a look around at their fascinating machinery, and then buy yourself a blanket.

We have a large fleet of MacAusland’s blankets at our house: one for every bed, one for the car, a couple for the living room.

Today I extended MacAusland’s reach into the office environment: you’ll recall that yesterday I reported on the introduction of the office chaise. I reasoned that, for the Reinventorium chaise to be an effective office-napping vehicle, I needed an office blanket. And so on the way to work today I stopped in at Northern Watters up the street; they’re an enthusiastic MacAusland’s dealer, and have blankets in stock in many colours and sizes. I picked out a brilliant orange one in the “throw” size (52” x 76”) and it now graces the office.

It’s wonderful.

So if you can’t make it all the way out to Bloomfield, you can always pickup a blanket here and there when you’re on Victoria Row.

Blogging’s exhausting; time for a nap.

Ever since I moved into the Reinventorium five years ago, and especially since Johnny decamped to California two years ago, I’ve been looking to outfit the office with some sort of casual seating upon which I could read, reflect, nap, or otherwise do non-typing things. This is partly because I’ve got non-typing things to do, and partly because if all I do is typing things all day, I’m liable to sit in the same position for 8 hours, with only a few breaks. And that, ergonomics people tell me, is a bad idea.

The stumbling block had always been the casual seating itself.

The Island is not known for its furniture aesthetic, and the local showrooms are more prone to stock Norman Rockwell-inspired punishing couches than they are sleek urban crash-divans. There is Cottage Industry, a laudable exception, but as they’re a tiny space, unless they have something in stock you need to purchase on spec, and I’m not the kind of person who can purchase as something as intimate as an office-creche sight unseen.

Enter IKEA, conveniently located just 5 minutes from my parents house in Burlington, where we were visiting for the holidays two weeks ago. During a quiet moment Oliver and I paid a visit, and in the upstairs showroom I found the Söderhamn line, a mix-and-match erector set of chair and sofa parts that can be stitched together in innumerable combinations. They happened to have a turquoise-upholstered chaise variant set up in the showroom, and it proved to be almost exactly what I’d always been looking for.

So when we returned to home soil last week, I overcame my inherited Depression-era “spending money on ones own comfort is wrong” defenses and ordered one on January 4, 2017; the chaise itself was $450.00 and delivery was $149.00; with tax it all came to $688.85:

Six days later, today, January 10, 2017, a big box (with the chaise) and a little box (with the upholstery) arrived here at the Reinventorium. This was something of a surprise, as my original receipt said “Your final delivery date may differ and will be communicated by email/phone once the order has shipped.” and I received no such communication. But that’s not surprising, as IKEA’s web store feels like it was fashioned out of the remnants of the Apollo space program computer platform; it works, but only in a way that surprises you.

The box was well-packed, using vacuum-sealing to keep all the puffy bits compact. Inside I found everything I needed to assemble the Söderhamn, guided by the notoriously hard-to-parse-unless-you’ve-already-done-it pictorial instructions, filled with illustrations like this:

But I made my way. And, of course, it all seemed very ingenious once it was assembled and I understood the underlying theory. I found a corner of the office near the window–Johnny’s former workspace, as it happens–and here’s the result:

I updated the SketchUp model of the office to match:

The IKEA Söderhamn line, I presume, is named after the Swedish community of the same name. This happens to be only about 100 km from the home of the other Golding Jobber № 8 letterpress that I know of.

We received a lot of snow here in Charlottetown over the weekend, and this triggered the usual efficient snow clearing operation from the City of Charlottetown, a stage of which, once the dust has settled, involves pushing the snow from major streets into the middle of the street into a temporary snow mountain and then clearing it all away in a flurry of snowblower and dump trucks.

The IslandCam, conveniently located a few feet from where I type here in The Guild, captured this operation this morning on the lower end of Queen Street between Richmond Street and the water. Here’s a time lapse showing 30 minutes from mountain to “so clean you could eat off the street”:

Here’s how I grabbed the time lapse, using ffmpeg, a wonderful Swiss Army Knife-like video manipulation tool.

ffmpeg -i rtmp://198.167.125.144/islandcam/islandcam.stream -vf fps=1/10 img%03d.jpg

The rtmp://198.167.125.144/islandcam/islandcam.stream is the URL for the IslandCam streaming video; the fps=1/10 says “save one image every 10 seconds” and the img%03d.jpg says “name these files img001.jpg, image002.jpg, etc.”

The result was a folder filled with images snapped once every 10 seconds.

Next, I converted these into a movie with the convert command from the ImageMagick suite:

convert -delay 6 -quality 95 img*.jpg movie.m4v

And, finally, I used VLC to convert this into webm and format to ensure the video can be viewed in as broad a range of browers as possible, inserting it above with

<video controls="" style="width: 653px; height: auto;">
  <source src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.ruk.ca/snowclearing.m4v" type="video/mp4" /> 
  <source src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.ruk.ca/snowclearing.webm" type="video/webm" />
</video>

There’s lots of potential fun and merriment to be had with creating IslandCam time lapses like this: there’s lots going on on Queen Street!

As part of my HTTPS and move-to-Montreal migrations of this blog and its cousins, The Rukapedia got lost in the shuffle. It was still there, and still serving, but for many (most?) people viewing it, HSTS restrictions in the browser would have thrown up a warning and not allowed you to view it (because it was still being served off a server that wasn’t HTTPS yet).

I set out to solve that issue today, and it turned out to be remarkably easy.

The Rukapedia, since I created it in 2005, was running MediaWiki 1.5, a now-very-old version of the same software that undergirds Wikipedia. I reasoned that it was a good time to update MediaWiki too, and, thanks to detailed instructions and a solid update script, that only took a few minutes.

It was a little fiddlier to get the extension that powers the Timeline page updated too, but eventually I sorted that too.

I can’t claim that The Rukapedia is a current source for all-thing-me, but, if nothing else, it’s an interesting pool of random bits of projects, people and ideas I’ve found along the way over the last decade.

At the December meeting of the Learning Partners Advisory Council, I put forward a proposal for a working group I dubbed “Rapid Response to Barriers to Learning.” At its heart I viewed this as a sort of trouble-ticketing system for practical issues that are barriers to learning: a way of identifying and quickly responding to issues that, whether because they affect smaller numbers of people, cross traditional bureaucratic silos, or aren’t visible from inside systems, had heretofore escaped attention.

I propose to strike a working group of the Learning Partners Advisory Council, the Rapid Response to Barriers to Learning Working Group, that will be specifically tasked with identifying issues such as this – small by the numbers, profound in impact – with an eye to making specific, realistic, actionable practical and policy recommendations that will remove barriers to learning. These issues may be economic, they may involve disability, they may touch on geography, or simply on learning interests that fall outside the margins; what they will share is that they present uncommon barriers to learning that can be reasonably removed or mitigated.

While my proposal was not met with an enormous outpouring of warm enthusiasm, it did serve as a stimulant for some of the most positive and vigorous discussions that the Council has mustered in its four meetings to date, and I’m happy to have played a small role in catalyzing that. I believe that many of the threads started there are still alive inside the Council, and that we’ll return to these themes in our future meetings.

My proposal is now public thanks to the launch of the new Learning Partners Advisory Council website. Mindful that PDFs are where data goes to die, I’ve posted the working group proposal here as well, as and aid to the future and to allow for comment.

For as long as I can remember I’ve been naming my Linux hosts after my grandparents: nettie is a wireless router, dan was its redundant backup router, ross was my main Linux server for the longest time, and, when I migrated to Amazon Web Services, my server there I named ada (I have the benefit of having 5 grandparents, so I still have louise in my pocket for expansion!).

During the migration process from AWS Virginia region to the AWS Canada region, I needed a temporary new hostname for ada, and so I used canada.

It was only today that I realized the canada contains ada within it. So I think I’ll leave it as that.

A few days before Christmas I spent 30 minutes in spirited discussion with Steve McQuaid on the telephone. Steve had just spoken to one of the Island’s Rotary clubs about challenges in the non-profit sector, and he’d used the School Lunch Program initiative of PEI Home and School Federation as an example of an initiative that could use Rotary’s help. In his capacity as President of the Community Foundation of PEI, Steve had taken an active interest in school nutrition, provincially and nationally, and since home and school became engaged with the issue two years ago we had many conversations about the way forward. We concluded our call with a plan to speak again early this new year.

I first met Steve five years ago when, again through his role with the Community Foundation, we chatted about an idea I’d come up with for developing a sort of centralized IT help desk for non-profit organizations. He generously agreed to spend time with me talking about whether it was a good idea or not, and whether, even if it was, it was something achievable. As with the myriad conversations we shared in the years since about all manner of things, Steve was enthusiastic, helpfully critical, imaginative and freely giving of his time and energies.

Steve died earlier this week at the age of 69. With his death I’ve lost a trusted source of advice and counsel, the Island has lost a great and tireless champion of the power of non-profit organizations to change the world, and the McQuaid family has lost a caring and generous man.

Three years ago I migrated this blog from my owned-and-operated server here in Charlottetown to an Amazon Web Service’s Virginia-based “cloud” server, and it’s been served from there until yesterday.

Last month Amazon announced the opening of a Canadian region and I decided it was time to repatriate my hosting. Amazon remains a large multinational corporation, of course, so this is repatriation of bits, not dollars; it’s not like I’m migrating to a artisinal server farmer in rural Quebec.

While AWS is notoriously easy to use, especially when it’s an environment you live and breath inside professionally, I managed to cock up the migration.

The first thing I did was to purchase a reserved instance for the Virginia region the week before the Canadian announcement. I had no way of knowing the Canadian announcement was coming, so this was a simple cost-saving move (Amazon gives you a substantial discount if you pre-pay for a year), rather than a cock-up.

Once the Canadian announcement came, I thought I’d simply be able to sell the reserved US instance on the AWS Marketplace; alas this wasn’t possible because the Marketplace is one of the few aspects of AWS that requires a U.S. bank account.

I contacted AWS support about this quandary and, to my surprise and delight, they offered, as a one-time-only-don’t-get-used-to-this move, to refund my US reservation if I purchased an equivalent Canadian one.

I eagerly took them up on the offer.

And managed to cock that up as well: I misunderstood the AWS UI poorly enough that I managed to purchase a second US reservation by mistake.

AWS support again extended a hand of help, and agreed to refund that mis-reservation too.

So now I’m set. I migrated ruk.ca, consuming.ca, pei.consuming.ca, casamiacafe.ca, my Nextcloud, and the backing infrastructure for the Social Consumption Project  yesterday; with a few glitches here and there, it all went without issue. The U.S. instance is still running to allow me to clean up a few stragglers; by the end of the week I should be serving pure 100% Canadian bits, though.

Please alert me to any weirdness you note that might be a result of this migration.