One of my favourite books is Canoe & I or Around the Island in a Canoe (on $10.00) by Bill Reddin, the tale of his quest, starting in 1934, to canoe his way around Prince Edward Island.

His journey, with dog Bozo, begins with a paddle, in his canoe dubbed “Tota,” from Tea Hill to Governor’s Island; upon arriving there he realizes that he’s not brought any fresh water:

Proceeding to prepare our “noon-day dish” I discovered a real blunder — I had forgotten to take any fresh water. Later in the afternoon I set out to explore the Island. Bozo and I walked all over it. We found a number of old farm wells and two or three bored by the Henry L. Docherty oil men in 1926. All were foul.

Meanwhile the wind had risen to a strong gale. I decided to camp in an old shed and wait till the next day before going on to Point Prim.

Our thirst had likewise risen. Strawberry jam helped a little but was too sweet to be much good. I brought up a bucket of salt water from the shore, heated some in a kettle over a Coleman gas stove and held the bucket of cold sea-water over the steam. As the steam condensed on the bottom of the bucket it ran down drop by drop into a saucer and by this primitive still I obtained enough fresh water to let Bozo and me get to sleep.

His journey continues eastward by Point Prim, Belle Creek, Wood Islands (which he insists on calling Wood Island, as he could find only one island), Little Sands, Cape Bear, Murray Harbour, Panmure Island, and finally to Poplar Point, where he puts in for the season and retires to Charlottetown until June of 1935 when he picks up the journey again.

Along the way he provides descriptions of everyday life in Prince Edward Island, and of the people that he meets along the way (people that, more often than not, invite him in for supper and provide him with a place to sleep for the night). An uncommon number of these people are named John Dan, a fact he mentions when he reaches Monticello:

Surf breaking at the shore, I spent most of the day visiting at McCormick’s store, John Dan Maclntyre’s and other houses nearby, sleeping at Mel’s place overnight. (By the way, from Tea Hill to Monticello I met eleven (11) John Dans. How many more I missed, the Lord only knows.)

In 1935 his journey continues around East Point and along the north shore, past St. Peter’s Harbour and Cable Head, Savage Harbour, Stanhope, Rustico, and New London. He passes Cape Tryon and observes the cormorants:

Along the slopes of Cape Tryon about 115 feet high white with bird droppings and, I believe, the highest cliff along our Island shore, the roosting Cormorants (or “Shag” as the fishermen call them) stared down at the little craft passing so close just below their hundred or so nests. This was the only Cormorant Colony I observed on the whole coast.

He continued past Malpeque, Lennox Island, Alberton, Kildare Capes, and Tignish. At almost every stop he seems, somehow, to have a connection. Sometimes this is through his position at Prince of Wales College; for example, in Nail Pond:

Walking back to Nail Pond beach, I met and was warmly greeted by three girls, two being my students at Prince of Wales, Bernetta, and Cecelia, daughters of James Gallant. They had learned earlier from the Summerside Journal-Pioneer that I was coming along the North Shore (though how The Pioneer knew, I do not know). Once they had told my unfriendly French fishermen what I was doing and that I was the girls’ friend, everything changed. So much so that, in my absence, the fishermen had carefully carried Tota well up above the high-tide line to make sure that she would be safe and had pre- pared for me a great big pot of delicious cooked lobsters. I wondered if, perhaps, their initial distrust of an English-speaking stranger could be traced back to the time when their ancestors had been cruelly treated by the English with the Island “Exile of the Acadians.”

He passes Howard’s Cove and West Point and paddles toward Summerside, where he gets stuck on a sandbar and blames The Guardian, which he’d been reading voraciously that morning, having not “seen a newspaper for nearly two months”:

And now my lack of proper preparation and my failure to provide myself with marine charts (I had only a road map of P.E.I.) asserted itself. First thing I knew I was fast aground, or rather amud, in the middle of the Miscouche Shoals, the tide having receded as I paddled blissfully along. I blessed in blue language the dear old Guardian, the cause of my long delay in getting started. I suppose it was really not the Guardian’s fault, but at times like that, one has to have something else to blame for one’s own procrastination.

He continues east from Summerside past Borden (“just as the Carferry S.S. Charlottetown was pulling away from the Pier”), Augustine Cove, Victoria, finally arriving, on the afternoon of September 3, 1935, at Tea Hill.

Canoe & I is written in a breezy, familiar tone and is filled with interesting anecdotes. Even I, not an Islander, and several generations on, have enough familiarity with people and places to recognize more than a few characters (to say nothing of knowing many of Bill’s children, having worked with one of his grandchildren, and having just received word of another great-grandchild on the way).

Why did he make the trip?  In his introduction he says only:

Why did I make the trip? In Maugham’s “The Moon and Sixpence” the hero (villain) is driven by a daemon: “I’ve got to paint, I’ve got to paint!” Perhaps something of the same sort of daemon made me want to “create a picture”.

It is a lovely picture indeed, and an inspiring one: what a crazy idea, to canoe around the Island. And yet what a captivating one, and what adventures he had. It’s a clarion call to seek out audacity.

You can find Canoe & I in the IslandLives.ca collection where you can grab a PDF and read it yourself.

One of the nice things about the TP-Link MR3020 wireless router that powers my PirateBox is that it’s powered, via a mini-USB port, by a 5VDC/1.0A power supply. This makes powering it by means other than a plug in the wall trivial because you can use any power source with a mini-USB. Like a portable battery back, a solar panel or, as I tried yesterday, my 2000 Jetta.

Several of my Nokia phones over the years have had mini-USB power ports, and so I have a few spare mini-USB “cigarette lighter” adapters in my car. So at the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market yesterday I plugged in my PirateBox to the car, tweeted that PEI community histories were available in the parking lot at SSID PirateBox, and let the public do what they might.

One of the limitations (or features) of the PirateBox is that it doesn’t log access, so I’ve no idea whether anyone actually did grab a copy of Attitudes toward the temperance movement among Methodists in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and P.E.I. or Freetown, Past and Present. But they could have.

There’s a helpful page on the LibraryBox website that discusses, in part, battery capacity issues and a page on the PirateBox forum where battery issues are discussed.

I love IslandLives.ca, Robertson Library’s digitization project for Prince Edward Island community histories (disclaimer: I played a small role in the project’s early days, coding some of the project related to automatic named entity recognition). And I’m recently in love with the PirateBox project, which lets you create a standalone wireless file-sharing device based on cheap hardware; you can create your own single-node Internet for distributing content where the Internet itself isn’t available, or where you don’t want it available.

So it seemed like a good idea to marry the two.

I bought a TP-Link MR3020 for $39.99 from The Source, and when it arrived a few days later I set it up with OpenWRT and PirateBox using the refreshingly clear instructions.

I then wrote some code, which you can grab here from Github that harvests data out of IslandLives via OAI, scrapes out PDF files and thumbnail images for every book that has a PDF copy available, creates an index.html file with an index of all the books linked from their thumbnails, and dumps this all into a directory suitable for copying onto a PirateBox USB drive, ready for serving.

Once the data is scraped and copied and on the USB stick in the PirateBox, then for users it’s a simple matter of connecting to the PirateBox SSID, clicking on “Browse and download files here”, selecting the IslandLives directory, and exploring. Here’s what it looks like on an iPad:

And here’s what it looks like on my Firefox OS phone:

In theory it should be possible to adapt the code to harvest data out of other Islandora instances, so creating a PirateBox version of the data inside islandvoices.ca or islandimagined.ca would be an easy next step.

At this end of this month I will make what, by my count, will be my 30th trip this decade to visit my colleagues at Yankee Publishing in Dublin, New Hampshire. Over those ten years (in in the years before) I’ve taken all manner of routes from Charlottetown to Dublin: I’ve driven straight there; I’ve driven the leisurely route with the family along; I’ve flown via Halifax, via Montreal, via Ottawa and via Toronto; I’ve driven to Montreal and driven south through Vermont; I’ve flown to New York City and then back to Boston and driven from there.

One thing I’ve never done, however, is take the train to Dublin. And so this time, at least partially, I decided to try that.

I don’t have the time nor patience to take the train all the way from Charlottetown, so I’m flying to Montreal first and taking the train from there. Sort of.

Amtrak doesn’t make it easy to get to southern New Hampshire from Montreal by train: its “Vermonter” route, which once went all the way into Montreal, now stops at St. Alban’s, Vermont, a town 25 km from the Canadian border. So here’s what I’m doing:

1. On May 30 I’m flying from Charlottetown to Montreal on Air Canada’s direct flight, arriving Trudeau Airport at 1:23 p.m.
2. I’ll hop on the “747” bus from the airport into downtown Montreal’s bus station where I’ll catch the 3:45 p.m. Greyhound bus to Burlington, Vermont.
3. I’ll stay overnight at the lovely La Quinta near Burlington Airport (which is where the Greyhound terminal is), and then on May 31 I’ll catch the 9:25 a.m. “Vermonter” Amtrak train south to Brattleboro, Vermont, arriving at 12:20 p.m.
4. In Brattleboro I’ll get picked up by Enterprise Car Rental at the station with a rental car, and I’ll then drive the 50 km to Dublin, NH.

So, despite my protests about having not enough time nor patience for the train, my journey will take me about 24 hours to complete.

Not content to let this wild adventure end, the following Friday I’ll return the rental car to Brattleboro and continue on the same train south to New York Penn Station where I’ll arrive at 6:24 p.m., rendezvousing with Catherine and Oliver who, being sane and all, will not take any trains at all and will instead fly to LaGuardia via Montreal direct from Charlottetown.

We’ll spend 4 nights in New York City before returning via Air Canada on Tuesday, June 11.

The total cost of my air, train and bus travel will be $546, which is not bad for Charlottetown-Montreal-Burlington-Brattleboro-New York-Montreal-Charlottetown.

One of the great things about having the source code to your phone’s operating system is that you can change your phone’s behaviour in ways you wouldn’t be able to otherwise.

For example, on my Geeksphone Peak the default search provider in the browser is Bing. I’d like to switch this to Google because I like Google’s search results better. Currently this isn’t a user-configurable option in the phone’s settings (although this might change soon), but it’s possible to change nonetheless.

It turns out to be relatively simple to do this, at least once you’ve got a workflow set up to build Gaia, the Firefox OS user interface. In the source tree for you’ve grabbed from github, find and edit the file gaia/apps/browser/js/browser.js and change:

DEFAULT_SEARCH_PROVIDER_URL: 'm.bing.com',
DEFAULT_SEARCH_PROVIDER_TITLE: 'Bing',
DEFAULT_SEARCH_PROVIDER_ICON: 'http://bing.com/favicon.ico',

to:

DEFAULT_SEARCH_PROVIDER_URL: 'www.google.com',
DEFAULT_SEARCH_PROVIDER_TITLE: 'Google',
DEFAULT_SEARCH_PROVIDER_ICON: 'https://www.google.com/favicon.ico',

Then simply build (./build.sh gaia) and flash (./flash.sh gaia) Gaia to the phone. After the flash is complete, you should find the default search is now Google.com:

Gentle Islanders may not be aware that there are librarians in our midst this week, converging on Charlottetown from all across the Atlantic provinces for the annual conference of the Atlantic Provinces Library Association. Yesterday, under the aegis of my Hacker in Residence posting I presented a pre-conference workshop called DIY Mapping for Librarians and then, in the afternoon, I had the pleasure of sitting in on a workshop presented by Don Moses and Krista Godfrey called Playing in the Technology Garden, a session that, to my surprise and delight, focused on the possibilities of building makerspaces and fablabs inside libraries.

Krista and Don started off the workshop with a fun “making” activity, passing out Brush Bot kits to everyone in the hall. Essentially you strap a battery and a mobile phone vibrator into a toothbrush head and then watch it dance around the table. The activity was a good tone-setting, and helped convey that you don’t need soldering irons or 3D printers to do “maker” activities inside a library.

Of course if you do have a 3D printer, well then you don’t necessarily need a toothbrush anymore. A few weeks ago, as part of Open Minecraft Lab, Don printed me up some Minecraft “creepers” on his 3D printer and I decided to hack my Brush Bot and remove the gear from the toothbrush and paste it into a creeper I’d been carrying around in my bag. The result was quite delightful:

Despite only having 3 hours for their session, Don and Krista managed to cover an impressive amount of ground, from Brush Bots to Arduinos to 3D printing to the logistics of makerspaces in library spaces. It was terrific to see the “maker ethic” spreading into the library world, and especially encouraging to see efforts like the one in Nova Scotia to equip every public library with a 3D printer.

An especially encouraging side-effect of the workshop was learning that Andy Trivett, chair of the Engineering Department at UPEI (wait, UPEI has an Engineering Department!?), has secured funding and space for a Fablab at the university, and that this will be a community facility that we’ll all be able to use. This is a great an unexpected development and I look forward to seeing what develops.

On Thursday afternoon a small box arrived by UPS at Reinvented HQ: my Firefox OS-driven Peak mobile phone fresh from Geeksphone in Spain:

I ordered the phone because I like the idea of developing for (and using) a mobile device where I have much more intimate control than I do on  increasingly-more-intermediated phones running Android, iOS and Windows Phone. I went in realizing that this would mean, at least right now when Firefox OS is relatively new an immature, using a device that only partially worked, and that lacked the polish of devices I’m used to. With that in mind, here’s a quick “state of the union” rundown of what works and what doesn’t. I’m using the phone with the latest code from Mozilla.

What Works

• Making and receiving telephone calls.
• Sending and receiving SMS text messages.
• Importing contacts from Google (although not syncing them, yet).
• Syncing calendar with Google Calendar (in both directions).
• Installing new apps from the Firefox Marketplace (although it renders weirdly on the Peak).
• Mounting the phone as a device on my MacBook (allowing me to drag and drop photos and audio to and from the Peak).
• FM radio (the radio works well and the FM radio app is solid).
• Playing music
• Wifi and mobile data. No issues at all.
• Tethering. Worked out of the box without issues.
• Notifications.

What Sort of Works

• Using the web browser: it mostly works, but there’s an issue with it not being detected as a mobile browser by sites offering a mobile version, and there’s an issue with mobile sites rendering much too small to be usable. Otherwise, it appears solid and well-designed. Which makes sense, because it’s from Mozilla.
• Taking pictures with the front and back cameras (see some examples here): the quality of the photos isn’t great, the camera UI needs some work, and the “gallery” app has bugs.
• Bluetooth. I can send files from my MacBook to the Peak, but I cannot send files from the Peak to the MacBook. And while I can pair it with my Bluetooth speakers, I can’t send audio to it.
• Twitter app. It appears to function properly, but the UI is too tiny to be usable.

What Doesn’t Work

• GPS (doesn’t appear to work at all).
• EXIF date-stamping of photos (they all show up in iPhoto as having been taken in 2002).
• Sharing photos (there are hooks in place to share via Twitter, Flickr or imgur, but I haven’t been able to get any of them working).
• Email. I haven’t been able to get the Email app to talk to my IMAP server. This is likely because either I have a self-signed SSL certificate or because I’m using STARTTLS which the Email seems not to support.
• Manual brightness setting (I can switch off automatic brightness, but then can’t adjust brightness above “barely visible).

That’s by no means a comprehensive list: it just reflects what I’ve tried to do in the last 3 days.

In general the phone UI feels a little rough around the edges (when compared to iOS, Android and Windows Phone devices that I am used to), but not shockingly so: it’s responsive, scrolling is smooth and not “laggy,” and although the phone has the habit of rebooting itself more than I’d like, it’s so quick to reboot that this isn’t as much of a problem as it would be otherwise (and is to be expected from a developer-focused phone).

Ten years ago, on June 16, 2003, we held a session at the University of Prince Edward Island about blogging called “Weblog Night in Charlottetown.” To promote the session, Catherine Hennessey and I visited Mitch Cormier at CBC Mainstreet to talk about blogging:

I love Catherine’s answer to the question “What was it that attracted you to blogging?” (“I wasn’t attracted at all…”).

Here are our three panelists, Steven Garrity, Catherine and Rob Paterson (all of whom are blogging to one extend or another, some more actively than others). Photo by Nick Burka.

And here’s Steven and Stephen Desroches and Rob chatting after we finished up:

Interestingly, the blogger blog that we created as a demonstration of how easy it was to set up a blog is still sitting there, unloved.

The fleet of Charlottetown Transit is a patchwork quilt of ye olde trolley buses, castoffs from other transit companies (complete with signage in Spanish!) and, inexplicably, a thoroughly modern, comfortable bus kitted out with all the latest conveniences, including a “cowcatcher” bicycle holder on the front:

I spotted this bus earlier in the week and I phoned Charlottetown Transit to inquire whether it was a bus I could ride from downtown Charlottetown up to the University of PEI and was told that, alas, it was assigned to the “Cornwall run.” Later the same day – without my bicycle in tow – I caught the 11:30 a.m. University Avenue Express north and was surprised, in light of what I’d been told on the phone, to find that I was riding on the selfsame cowcatcher bus.

I called Charlottetown Transit back and received clarification: the cowcatcher is sometimes on the University Avenue Express line, but not on every run (they also confirmed it’s the only bus that you can carry a bicycle on; no bikes allowed on the ye olde buses).

Fast forward to this morning. With an email just arrived from my friend Don the Librarian up at the university – “will you be on campus today?” – I was riding my bike south from Prince Street School when I spotted the 8:30 a.m. cowcatcher idling in front of the Confederation Centre of the Arts. I pounced.

I wheeled my bicycle in front of the bus and signalled to the driver, who came out and showed me how the cowcatcher works: it’s a simple pull of the handle and swing down of the “catcher” and then there’s room to set two bicycles in place with a spring-loaded arm that raises to secure the bicycle in place around the front tire. The entire procedure took about 30 seconds and now that I know how I can easily do it without the driver’s assistance.

We sped north on University Avenue and 10 minutes and $2.00 later, again with the driver’s help, I removed the bike at the University of PEI stop and was off to see Don.

En route I heard my driver – an incredibly nice and helpful fellow – on the radio telling base that this was his first use of the cowcatcher, which made me proud (and gave me an excuse to snap the photo above) but also dismayed that more people aren’t taking advantage of this.

In Montreal they call this the Cocktail Transport and it’s something that fits my use-case perfectly: I don’t want to fight the (admitedly gentle) slope up University Avenue at 8:30 in the morning before I’ve had my coffee, so I throw my bike on the cowcatcher, fly up to the University, grab a coffee, check a book out of the library, say hello to my colleagues, and the roll down the Confederation Trail – downhill all the way – and am back downtown 45 minutes later.

You should really try this out: to make sure the cowcatcher is ready for you, call Charlottetown Transit before you head out – 566-9962 – and ask them to confirm with the driver on the University Avenue run (they can do this quickly by radio). Then, once you’ve confirmed, prepare to be amazing by the ease and elegance of the cowcatcher of hope!

Bonus hint: if you’re coming down the Confederation Trail from the north, headed downtown, after you pass Kent Building Supplies on your right take a right-hand turn into the John Street soccer fields, ride around the first field and then take a left out of the middle of the second field and find your way to Orlebar Street. Take Orlebar to Hillcrest and turn right, then take an immediate right onto Hillsborough, which is newly-paved and downhill all the way to Grafton. Here’s a map to illustrate the route.

Two of the participants in Open Minecraft Lab were Hon. Doug Currie, Prince Edward Island Minister of Health and Wellness, and his daughter. The following week, when I took a school PD morning to attend a sitting of the Legislative Assembly with my son, Minister Currie recognized us in the gallery, and this was captured in the day’s Hansard:

Also, I would like to acknowledge that we have Peter Rukavina in the gallery today, and I believe his son Oliver is with him. Last week I had an opportunity – last Saturday – my daughter and I went to his open lab, Minecraft, which is an activity and a game that the children play in communities, and a very popular game, but was quite impressed with the volume of students that were participating, and Peter’s vision for the game in respect to using it as educational opportunities in math and strategy and architecture. I want to point that out and (Indistinct).

I’m not sure what the Minister finished with that was “indistinct” – perhaps it was “and ensure Peter that he has this government’s support in anything he ever wishes to do,” but that might be simply wishful thinking. Thanks to Minister Currie – who you can follow on Twitter at @DougCurrie – for coming out with his daughter, and for taking the time to make what might have been the first mention of Minecraft is a legislature.