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.

Remember those coffee bags I printed up for Youngfolk & The Kettle Black? Well they’re in use now, filled with coffee and available for sale in the roastery at 142 Richmond Street (Victoria Row) in downtown Charlottetown.

At some point in the future this whole Internet thing might come crashing down on me and I might be forced into printing wedding invitations for a living; in the meantime making coffee bags seems like a much more noble use of the letterpress.

Next step: modify the design for the smaller bags, while have a valve sticking out of them, which will make for even more design constraints.

After our three Open Minecraft Lab sessions I sent out a brief survey, via SurveyMonkey, to all of the particpants. There were 120 participants in Open Minecraft Lab, represented by 92 email addresses (because some families brought more that one person). Of those 92 email addresses, 12 responded to the survey, for a response rate of 13%. Here’s how the responded.

Update: I had the “yes” and “no” reversed for the “would you be interested in coming to Open Minecraft Lab again?” question. Corrected.

Was this your first time visiting the library at the University of PEI?

• Yes: 8 (66.67%)
• No: 4 (33.33%)

Did you have fun at Open Minecraft Lab?

• No: 0%
• Sort of: 0%
• It was okay: 1 (8.33%)
• Lots of fun: 9 (75%)
• Maximum fun: 2 (16.67%)

Did you play in Creative mode or Survival mode?

Minecraft can be played in both “Creative” and “Survival” modes, the former offering more flexibility and less “game play” and the latter more challenging and game-like.

• Creative: 3 (25%)
• Survival: 2 (16.67%)
• Both Creative and Survival: 7 (58.33%)

Did you learn anything new about Minecraft at Open Minecraft Lab?

• Yes: 6 (54.55%)
• No: 5 (45.45%)

If yes, respondents were asked to describe what they learned:

• Many of the things in Minecraft are about real life, so it can tell you a bit about those.
• Design, math, problem-solving, cooperation, creativity.
• how to build things
• It teaches people about thinking before you do because you have to know what you want to build before you build it.
• To build things!

Would you be interested in coming to Open Minecraft Lab again?

• No: 1 (8.33%)
• Yes: 11 (91.67%)

If so, what would be the best time(s) for you?

• Monday night: 2 (18.18%)
• Tuesday night: 1 (9.09%)
• Wednesday night: 0 (0%)
• Thursday night: 3 (27.27%)
• Friday night: 3 (27.27%)
• Sunday morning: 5 (45.45%)
• Sunday afternoon: 7 (63.64%)
• Sunday night: 2 (18.18%)
• On holidays or school PD days: 9 (81.82%)

What could we do to make Open Minecraft Lab better?

• Not allow the guys who blew up my house with TNT to come back! Maybe have some people with lots of Minecraft knowledge share some of their idea, or seeds.
• We weren’t able to stay long the day we attended, but enjoyed the environment. Thanks for creating this space for cooperative learning, Peter. It’s clear there’s an interest in Minecraft. Todd Gallant
• maybe some more one on one times-or see if kids have questions. sometimes hard to ask. I had lots of fun.
• Have the headsets attached to a Skype call type thing so we can talk about what we want to build not talk in chat
• Great way to spend two hours with my kids!
• Collaborative build. It would be interesting to see social dynamics extend to a specific design and build project within the edu server (creative mode of course)
• Make the EDU (?) version more different than the regular version. Get better mice!
• Update to a newer version. Also, the mice were terrible.
• It was perfect! The guy who helped was really cool and nice.
• Downloading safe new mods and texture packs
• my sons loved it
• Be neat to be able to learn more things.

I have a longtime interest in the presentation of Prince Edward Island statutes and regulations online: I worked with the Government of PEI on its website for 8 years, and getting this material online was a significant project that ended up taking many more years than it should have, mostly because of technology challenges – the word processor that was used to maintain the material – that had nothing to do with the Internet. And we had to wait for the PDF file format to emerge as a de facto standard way of distributing complex documents on the web for it to really be feasible.

But there’s a limit to PDFs, especially when it comes to programmatic parsing of documents, and so I have an interest in “beyond the PDF” for distributing statutes and regulations. And, handily enough, I have a test case to use: because of my involvement with the PEI Home and School Federation I have more than just a passing interest in the School Act and its regulations, and I’m interested in ways of presenting it and annotating it that would enliven the document and spread it to a wider audience.

To begin this process I requested a Microsoft Word-formatted copy of the School Act from Legislative Counsel’s office, which they were quick to provide. When I opened this file in OpenOffice.org, however, it was presented to me as a “Read Only” document, meaning that I couldn’t edit it, and I couldn’t see any of its formatting, so I couldn’t understand the way that styles were used in Word to structure it. Fortunately this was quickly resolved by saving it as a native OpenOffice.org document (File | Save As… | ODF Text Document). Once I did this, then the names of the styles in the document were revealed.

So, for example, the definitions are all assigned the “Definitions” style:

Looking in the “Format | Styles and Formatting” tool of OpenOffice.org with the School Act open, the styles listed under “Applied Styles” are as follows:

• Act Title
• AmendingSubsection
• CenteredText
• Chapter
• Clause
• ClauseCont
• Default
• Definition
• DefSidenote
• Footer
• Header
• Part
• SecSubCont
• SecSubSidenote
• Section
• Subclause
• Subsection
• Topic1
• Topic2

Rearranging that list so that it reflects the hierarchy of the School Act transforms it to:

The only inconsistency in the document appears to be the use of the “Topic1” style for “PART I” at the beginning of the Act, which should, I think, be assigned style “Part.” But otherwise the styling appears consistent enough to allow for automatic parsing of the document. Which will be my next step.

Charlottetown’s Deputy Mayor Stu MacFadyen quoted in a City of Charlottetown press release in August 2012 on cruise ship visitors in Charlottetown:

“Beyond that, these passengers contribute to the atmosphere and buzz of activity in our downtown. We wish to thank those who have included Charlottetown in their vacation, but also extend our appreciation to the Harbour Authority for the work they put into hosting these large ships in the City’s port.”

Charlottetown’s Deputy Mayor Stu MacFadyen quoted in a City of Charlottetown press release today on cruise ship visitors in Charlottetown:

“Beyond that, these passengers contribute to the atmosphere and buzz of activity in our downtown. We wish to thank those who have included Charlottetown in their vacation, but also extend our appreciation to the Harbour Authority for the work they put into hosting these large ships in the City’s port.”

At least he’s consistent in his thinking.

(See also “…the atmosphere and buzz of activity in our downtown…”).