I’m hosting a Make Your Own PirateBox workshop on August 18, 2013 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. at Confederation Landing Park (where better to host a pirate-themed workshop than on the wharf!). Details and registration are over here.

Oliver and I walked through Queens Square in Charlottetown early one evening last week and stopped to read the Boer War memorial. I noticed that it used the word “fellowcountrymen” as a single word, and was curious: it’s something that, if used at all, would be “fellow countrymen” today.

Was this a typo or common usage of the day?

To find out, I turned to the Google Ngram Viewer, which shows frequency in a corpus (a “big collection of books” in library-speak) of a word or phrase.

From 1800 to 2000 in Google’s English corpus, “fellowcountrymen” is a phrase that peaked in about 1895 (the Boer War memorial was constructed in 1903) and has been on the decline ever since:

Compare this to “fellow countrymen” as two words and you see what it gave way to:

Meanwhile, “countrymen” itself is falling more out of favour every day:

What word or phrase has replaced “countrymen” today? Or perhaps none has? Makes me want to become a linguist to find out.

This video was shown at PirateBox Camp earlier in the month; it describes a “3-Day Masterclass during Dutch Technology Week” held last summer in the Netherlands and it’s a good review of the state of the art.

I’m holding free, informal “Make Your Own PirateBox” workshop on Sunday, August 18 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. at Confederation Landing Park in Charlottetown.

If you’d just like to go ahead and register, see the registration form down below.

I’ll help you take a TP-LINK MR3020 – $38 from Amazon.ca – and turn it into a PirateBox, a small self-contained fileserver that allows you to easily share files (music, books, movies, whatever) with those around you.

Why Would I Want a PirateBox?

Some possible reasons:

1. You want to share files in a classroom or workshop where there’s no access to wireless Internet but people are carrying wireless devices (iPods, iPads, laptops, mobile phones).
2. You want to share files with your family or friends or neighbours, but not using the Internet.
3. You want to create a system for people to anonymously share information with you; perhaps you’re a journalist, for example, and want sources to be able to share with you anonymously.
4. You run a resource library and want a simple way of providing access to digital resources without the complexity of a website, Internet access, etc.
5. You maintain a small remote cabin on a mountaintop and want to be able to provide instructions, maps, and other resources to visitors digitally.
6. You’re interested in the notion of a $38 wireless computer.

There are myriad other uses that a PirateBox can be put to.  Take note, however, that it’s not a device that solves any sort of “I need to connect to the Internet” kind of problem: it’s a standalone, disconnected from the Internet device that is designed to share information with those that are within a 15 metre radius.

What You Need to Bring

1. A TP-LINK MR3020 (not available, as far as I know, locally, but available from Amazon.ca, Staples.ca and TheSource.ca online; if you need to order one, make sure the shipping option you select will get it here in time for August 18th!)
2. A USB stick. These are available almost everywhere; I recommend you get an 8GB one or larger. Shop around because prices vary and these often go on sale.
3. A Windows, Linux or Mac laptop that is wifi-capable and has a (a) USB port (looks like this) and (b) an Ethernet port (looks like this). It doesn’t have to be super-powerful, it just has to work. We may or may not have electricity in the park, so make sure your battery is fully charged before you come!
4. An Ethernet cable (one comes in the box with the TP-LINK MR3020, so you should be set if you’ve just bought one).
5. A willingness to learn and share with others.
6. A chair.

If you’re interested in coming, but are missing any of the above, please drop me a line and I’ll see if I can help connect you with what you need.

What You Need to Know

This is a workshop for everyone, regardless of experience. We’ll go slowly, and I’ll walk you through the process step-by-step.

My hope is that you’ll then be able to show others, so if you’re a good “explainer” you’re especially welcome.

What You Could Read Beforehand

David Dart’s explanation of the past, present and future of PirateBox is a good place to start. Don’t get bogged down in technical details: just read it for the spirit.

There’s also the explanation of how to install PirateBox, but you don’t need to read it in advance if you don’t want to.

When and Where

Sunday, August 18, 2013 at 10:00 a.m. Please be on time as we’ll walk through things together so it’s better we all start together.

At the end of Confederation Landing Park in Charlottetown (PirateBox, on the wharf, get it!). Plenty of parking (you might have to pay for parking; you can enter from Prince Street or Great George Street). Follow the boardwalk to the gazebo at far end of the park by the water. It’s wheelchair accessible – no barriers from the parking lot to the gazebo – and there are washrooms at Peake’s Quay down the boardwalk.

Registration

Please pre-register for this workshop. I’ve limited registration to 20 people, simply because that’s about the maximum number of people I think I can project my voice to.

If you’re registering more than one person at the same time, please select the number of “slots” you’re using (i.e. two people coming = two slots).

Early last Saturday morning I ran into Andy Trivett, the Adama of the nascent Fablab at the University of PEI, at the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market.

“Are you coming to our open house?”, Andy asked.

“What open house?”, I replied.

“We’re having an open house for the Fablab on Tuesday afternoon, you should come!”, he exclaimed.

Reasoning that this was an event that deserved the full-on Hacker in Residence publicity machine behind it, I jumped into action. I created a Facebook Event. I tweeted about it. I even created an event on the UPEI events calendar.

For Wednesday.

And so I showed up on Wednesday for the open house.

“I’m here for the open house!”, I declared to the single person – an engineering student – present in the lab.

“Uh, that was yesterday,” he told me.

Oh.

Somehow I ended up publicizing an event 24 hours later than it was scheduled for.

Fortunately, people showed up!

So, in true Fablab hacker spirit, I soldiered on and had my own exclusive Fablab open house.

And, better yet, every single person who showed up, save Oliver, was a woman, which defeated the “only men use Fablabs” stereotype. What’s more, they were all curious and had lots of questions and obvious use-cases for the Fablab. They were the kind of people that Fablabs exist for.

So while I may have been 24 hours late to the party, the after-party that I held in its wake was, to my mind, a success. Apologies to all those who showed up who had to make do with my “making it up as I go along” approach to teaching about the Fablab; I hope I got most of the broad strikes right, and I hope you come back!

In addition to a non-stop supply of Anne & Gilbert, we are blessed here in the Reinventorium with an art gallery two floors down, in the basement of The Guild. Honestly, I don’t know how those of you without an art gallery in your office manage: every two or three weeks we get a new helping of fresh art on the way to and from work, and it’s a great place to escape for an afternoon moment when things get too hectic.

The show opening today, Arthole, is particular delicious:curated by the inimitable Dave Stewart, the exhibition brings together a motley collection of art by local artists; Dave’s marching orders were “challenge yourself, challenge the viewer, represent yourself as an artist.”

Where many group shows fail to achieve anything more than a science-fair-like discontinuity, somehow this show, despite featuring a broad range of artists working in a broad range of media, hangs together and becomes something. It’s one of the best shows to hang in The Guild in a long while, and I suggest you make a point of seeing it. I snuck down this morning while the building was still empty and stole a couple of snaps to give you a taste (work by Dave Stewart, Don Moses and Donalee Downe, from top to bottom):

Arthole opens tonight, Wednesday, July 31, 2013 from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. and runs until the end of August.

When I woke up this morning I realized that July 31 is coming up on Wednesday, which means there’s only a month of summer left. I panicked and fled to the letterpress shop to compose myself.

These little “ACT QUICKLY SUMMER IS ALMOST OVER” broadsides (can you call them broadsides if they’re not broad?) are printed on Japanese paper I bought in Tokyo in March at Ito Ya. It’s a “sampler pack” of 10cm x 10cm pieces, 100 to a pack, for ¥504 (about $5.25 Canadian).

I think the next level up in my career as a printer will be learning to cut lead type for kerning: the “LY” in “QUICKLY” is quite unappealing as it is here, rectangles being rectangles; cutting a notch in the “L” and the “Y” so that they can hug more naturally would fix that.

From June 28 to July 27 in 2007 this site received 30,906 visitors. They spent an average of 1 minute and 6 seconds here, and visited 1.64 pages on average. Here’s where they came from:

Six years later, from June 28 to July 28 in 2013 this site received 16,666 visitors. They spent an average of 1 minute and 26 seconds here, and visited 1.36 pages on average. Here’s where they came from:

Other that Google, none of the top 10 sources that led visitors here in 2007 are still in the top 10. These days about 50% of all visitors come here through Twitter (t.co in the list above) or Facebook.

Here’s what that 6 years worth of visitors looks like, week by week; 2.2 million of you in all:

[[Oliver]] and I went for a walk last night after supper: I wanted to show off my new PirateBox so we took his laptop and browsed around for a while looking for something interesting.

We settled on Prince Edward Island: The England of Canada, a 1941 pamphlet from the IslandLives.ca collection that lives on the PirateBox. We opened up the PDF and found that there was a photo of Province House as it once was:

As we were just around the corner, we took a little walk and sat down and played a game of “spot the differences”:

A few pages later we came across a photo of Queen Street, taken from the corner of Queen and Richmond, and did the same “then and now” comparison (who knew that Woolworth’s was there before it moved up the street!):

Prince Edward Island: The England of Canada is a great little read; you can grab it from IslandLives.ca or from the downtown PirateBox.

Twitter follower Chris MacDonald asks:

Here’s an easy way to find out:

1. Go to the corner of Queen and Richmond Streets in downtown Charlottetown.
2. Sit on the bench beside Sir John A. Macdonald.
3. Open an wifi-capable portable device: laptop, mobile phone, tablet, etc.
4. Connect to the wifi SSID PirateBox - Share Freely.
5. Open your web browser and visit http://piratebox.lan/ (or, indeed, any web address).
6. That is the PirateBox.

On this particular PirateBox you will find, under the Files link, many interesting things:

• An audiobook of Anne of Green Gables.
• HTML versions of many of L.M. Montgomery’s works, including Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea and Rainbow Valley.
• Several of Cory Doctorow’s books, both as HTML and ePub.
• Complete set of PDF versions of the Statutes of Prince Edward Island and the City of Charlottetown Bylaws.
• Several TED videos and some videos about PirateBox itself.
• Some music.
• Some podcasts.
• A complete set of PEI community histories from IslandLives.ca.

What’s more, you can share your own content using the Upload feature: just click Browse or Choose File under “Upload”, select a file you’d like to share, and your file will, once uploaded, become available to others in the “upload” folder.

All of this is happening disconnected from the Internet, running off a $35 box that you can buy on Amazon.com using software you can download for free.