The City of Charlottetown is justly proud of its “Winterfun Weekend”, held over the last three days.

But there’s a glaring hole in the event – and other Sunday and holiday events like it – and it’s that public transit isn’t available on these days.

That means that any city resident without a car, whether for reasons of economy or choice, is left without access to many venues.

So, for example, while “CARI Complex was full for all three days,” it wasn’t full of carless downtown residents with children, for whom the prospect of a 6 km walk to and from CARI from downtown on ice-covered sidewalks with children was simply untenable. Similarly, for a carless Hillsborough Park resident the events held Sunday and Monday downtown might as well have been in Moncton.

It is fantastic that the City of Charlottetown has decided to focus its winter event attention on residents rather than tourists, on family engagement rather than filling hotel rooms. But City events must be events for all, and now that we have a robust public transit system there’s no excuse for its absence on Sundays and holidays, especially on weekends like this.

Next year, let’s do better.

Remembert this? Well, today it became these, invitations for Catherine’s Confederation Centre Art Gallery show, which opens on February 24, 2013:

The Prince Edward Island letterpress cut was a loan from Ian Scott; the headline are in Akzidenz Grotesk 48 point and 60 point, the date and time in Bodini Bold 24 point and the credit line in Bodini 12 point.  Because I only had one “Island,” I had to run each of the 75 copies through the press 3 times, and then another time for the black, so it was a 3-4 hour job. But I’m very happy with the result.

My first job on Prince Edward Island, 20 years ago, was at the PEI Crafts Council. Two years later I began working with the Province of PEI on creating a provincial government website, and in the spring of the following year, in April 1996, Premier Catherine Callbeck rose in the house to speak about this project; I believe this to be the first use of the word “Internet” in the official records of the Legislative Assembly:

Premier: Madam Speaker, last year the Province of Prince Edward Island established a horne page that we call the “Internet Information Centre.” Our intent was to use the Internet to promote Prince Edward Island as a place to do business and as a place to visit. We also plan to use the Internet to provide government information to the Internet community. We’re extremely pleased, Madam Speaker, with the results of the Internet Information Centre to date. Our home page has received several awards, including the top five percent on the Internet and mentioned at the top 100 list from PC magazine. This is quite an accomplishment, considering that there are more than six million sites on the Internet. In addition, our site has been mentioned in several Internet books and computer magazines. The site was also featured in a recent book regarding Canadian Internet sites. According to reviews, we have an excellent Internet home page. Now Madam Speaker, thousands of people from around the world visit our site every month. The best measure of our Internet Information Centre is electronic mail that we receive from those people who use our site.

One American user said and I quote, Madam Speaker:

“I am extremely impressed with all of the work that Prince Edward Island does to attract visitors to their Island. I visit every year and truly believe that PEl is in fact the most beautiful place on earth. I know that I will retire and move to the Island some day. I have never met anyone unkind on Prince Edward Island I’ve never been to any other place in the U.S.” and he’s got in brackets (my home), “where a community is so down to earth. Thank you for being the way you are. Regarding the Internet Information Centre, I am simply amazed. I have not been able to locate any other service on the Internet where the government has done such a great job to promote their products.”

And that’s the end of the quote.

Our site, Madam Speaker, contains a broad variety of information including our electronic visitors guide that permits searching for accommodation. We also have information about doing business on Prince Edward Island. The site is a greeting card centre and information on the PEl Legislature. Last month for the first time we put both the Throne Speech and the Budget Speech on the Internet Access was provided at the same time as they were being delivered in the Legislative Assembly. This means that an Internet user anywhere in the world could read the speeches at the same time as they were being delivered. Given the success of the last year’s efforts, we also provided immediate Internet access to the Throne and Budget Speeches this year. I’m pleased to tell the members of this House that there has been considerable interest in both speeches.

To date more than 450 people have looked at the Budget Speech on the Internet. This represents 1,250 hits. More than 200 have taken a copy from the Internet for use in their computer. Madam Speaker, some of the persons assessing the Budget Speech are off-Island users. Provincial and federal government officials across Canada, as well as financial institutions have utilized the Internet to read or to take a copy of our Budget Speech. Some of those accessing the Budget Speech were also from the United States. More than 400 people have accessed the Throne Speech on the Internet.

This year we have put the Hansard on the Internet, which enables Internet users to read about our Session. Last year former Islanders sent E-mail to tell us that they loved to read about the Session in the Legislature as they kept in touch, because they could keep in touch with what was going on back home. The fact that the speeches are available electronically has reduced the demand for printed copy of the speeches. We have reduced the number of paper copies this year for the Budget Speech.

Also, Madam Speaker, for the Christmas of 1995, we introduced an Internet Christmas greeting card. From the time we began the service in early December to early January, more than 48,000 Christmas cards were sent Anyone with an Internet account could send an electronic Christmas card to another Internet user. The card included the option to select a scenic view of PEl and verses. People from around the world used our greeting card centre - people from Taiwan, from Australia, from England, used the service to send Christmas cards. Based on this success, we introduced a greeting card service which allows Internet users to send birthday cards, as well as any other cards - Valentine, Easter. Since we introduced that, we’ve had more than 10,000 card (Indistinct). We’ve received electronic mail from many users thanking us for the service and telling us what a great means of promoting Prince Edward Island.

Madam Speaker, we can take pride in the fact that we are using leading edge technology to promote Prince Edward Island to provide information to the public. We plan to continue to use the Internet to promote PEl to provide information to Islanders and other Internet users. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

I came across this statement via the newly-lauched PEI Legslative Documents Online project, a rich and well-crafted collaboration of the Legislative Assembly, Hansard office, the government services library and the provincial archives, led by my colleagues at Robertson Library at the University of PEI.

My obituary will relate, I think, that I operated one of the Island’s leading humidity-monitoring-related websites. It’s a badge I will take to my death proudly. With that in mind, here’s the humidity rising in the Reinventorium this morning from 6:00 a.m. to 9:30 a.m.  I have our Venta humidifier plugged into a WeMo Switch and a rule on the WeMo iOS app turns the switch on at 6:00 a.m.; this avoids running the humidifier all night, and ensures a pleasant office when we arrive 3 hours later.

As you can see from the graph (with each horizontal segment representing 30 minutes), things are pretty optimal by 7:30 a.m., so I can probably change the rule so that the humidifier turns on 90 minutes later and still find the office pleasant on arrival.

A note to those playing the home game, I’ve also updated the Python code that polls the Arduino to solve what I took to be an issue with the way I was reading the serial report (readings were, I think, being buffered because I was only polling the serial port every 30 seconds, resulting in herky-jerky data).

Catherine’s show, Changing Environs, has been open at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery since the beginning of the month; it’s really quite wonderful, and one of the highpoints of my day is wandering through the Centre lobby on the way to or from coffee and seeing something I didn’t see before (can there be any greater gift from a love than the opportuntity to see into their soul through their art?). 

The “official opening” (where there’s wine and cheese and talk of “conceptual intentionality”) is coming up on February 24, 2013 at 3:00 p.m. at the Centre, and you are all heartily invited (Catherine’s parents will be here, and they live in Ontario!). I started work – late, admitedly, but better than never – on the invitation for the opening; it will be printed in two colours on my letterpress, and here’s the black set up and almost ready to print:

I hope to have these printed and off into the hands of patrons of the arts Friday or Monday.

So remember that tweet from the Public Library Service here in Prince Edward Island? The one that ended up with me depriving the citizens of PEI of the resources needed to learn Norwegian?

Well, Dan Misener, personable producer of CBC Radio One’s Spark, read the post about my travails and invited me into the studio this morning to talk with host Nora Young about the crazy system we have for library lending of digital things that’s mirrored on the sensible system for library lending physical things.

Listen for it as the “compelling personal anecdote” behind broader Spark discussion of this issue on an upcoming episode.

Following on from yesterday’s experiments with an Arduino, a DHT22 temperature and humidity sensor, some Python and Cosm, a few developments.

First, I generalized and cleaned up the Python code and companion Arduino sketch, and you can now find these both, with some documentation, in a Github repository. This code improves error detection, and filters out the occasional out-of-range reading (like a 2300ºC temperature). It also sends the data to both Cosm and to Thingspeak.

Second, I brought my Belkin WeMo Switch into the office with hopes of wiring it up to this system: the Venta humidifier in the office doesn’t have a humidistat in it, only three fan speeds; I’m thinking that I should be able to set thresholds for turning it on, like “if the humidity is below 25% and it’s after 7:00 a.m., then turn on the humidifer.” Stay tuned for that.

Third, in Safari on my Mac I opened the Cosm feed for the temperature and humidity and the selected File | Open in Dashboard… from the menu.

I then selected the orange temperature “badge” from the page, and clicked Add and then did the same thing for the humidity badge:

The result is that on my Mac OS X Dashboard I now have the temperature and humidity in the office displayed:

Regular readers will know of my interest in (obsession with?) the temperature and humidity here in the office. Today I took this to a whole new level with this:

That’s an Arduino wired up to a DHT22 temperature and humidity sensor ($9.95 from The Robot Shop).

Using the wiring diagram helpfully provided by Adafruit I connected the DHT22 to the Arduino, with data flowing in on pin #7.

Next I installed this DHT library for Arduino and then used this slightly adapted Arduino sketch to actually grab the data:

#include <dht.h>

dht DHT;

#define DHT11_PIN 4
#define DHT22_PIN 7

void setup()
{
  Serial.begin(115200);
}

void loop()
{
  int chk = DHT.read22(DHT22_PIN);
  Serial.print(DHT.humidity, 1);
  Serial.print("\t");
  Serial.println(DHT.temperature, 1);

  delay(2000);
}

It took a little bit of fiddling to get things to work – it turns out that I’d used the wrong resistor to bridge the data pin with the 5V pin – but once it was working, monitoring the virtual serial port on my Macbook displayed the current humidity and temperature every 2 seconds:

34.2     22.7
34.1     22.7

and so on.

Finally, to pipe this through to Cosm and the world, I set up this Python script to run in the background on my Mac (adapted from here; I needed to install python-eeml and pySerial first):

import eeml
import eeml.datastream
import eeml.unit
import serial
import time

# parameters
API_KEY = 'MY API KEY'
API_URL = '/v2/feeds/104026.xml'

arduino = serial.Serial('/dev/tty.usbserial-A6008jtr', 115200)

while 1:
    readings = arduino.readline().strip().split('\t')
    pac = eeml.datastream.Cosm(API_URL, API_KEY)
    pac.update([eeml.Data(0, readings[1], unit=eeml.unit.Celsius()), 
        eeml.Data(1, readings[0], unit=eeml.unit.RH())])
    pac.put()
    time.sleep(60)

The result is this Cosm feed, showing temperature and humidity for the office:

The old analog gauge in the office agrees with the DHT22 measurement almost exactly; the humidty on the analog gauge reads about 6% higher:

I’d like this setup to be less dependent on the intermediate MacBook (it makes the MacBook far less portable, for one thing), so my next step will be to adapt the setup to either use the Raspberry Pi to gather and forward the data, or to get an Ethernet shield for the Arduino so that it can hand this by itself.

I decided that it was only right, given the work I’ve been doing with OpenStreetMap on the UPEI campus, that I should revisit the neighbourhoods closer to home too. Given that my life is lived, in large part, around Queens Square in downtown Charlottetown – office on one end, home on the other – that seemed like a good place to start. So, over the last few days, I’ve been fleshing out details, to the point where things look like this now:

I added all the foot paths through the square, made some adjustments to the setup of the Confederation Centre of the Arts so that its footprint is clearer, and added monuments and fountains. You can take a look for yourself (and join in the effort – just click Edit) at OpenStreetMap.org.