OpenCellID.org is powerful project with a rich data set that can be used to drive development of location-based services for mobile devices without a GPS (or without the power to run a GPS all the time).

In a nutshell, it’s an open database of georeferenced mobile telephone network cell cites, built from a network of apps that send it data.

Mobile telephones are known as “cell phones” because they connect to a network of “cells” – radio transceivers – distributed around populated areas. As you move about, your phone hops from cell to cell seamlessly. Here’s a map of Charlottetown cell sites derived from the Industry Canada Spectrum Direct database:

Attached to each tower or structure on this map are one or more “cells” and each cell had a unique identifiier made up of four parts:

• MCC: mobile country code; the code for Canada is 302
• MNC: mobile network code; every mobile operator has one: Bell is 610, Rogers is 720, for example.
• LAC: location area code; identifies the geographic region; in PEI our LAC is 48000
• Cell ID: a unique ID for each cell within an LAC.

Right now my phone is connected to Cell ID 250014558 in LAC 48000 in MNC 610 in MCC 302. I know this because I wrote a little Firefox OS application to display this information for me:

The “glue” that’s missing between information about cell transceiver sites (what you see on the map above, and is freely available from Industry Canada) and what I can detect on my mobile device (using the app above) is the Industry Canada data doesn’t include the “Cell ID” in its data, so there’s no way to know, from public data sources, where the cell I’m currently connected to is.

That’s where OpenCellID.org comes in: using the site’s API I can query the database for the location of a given Cell ID, like this (where I substitute my API key, available for free by registering, for “KEY”):

http://www.opencellid.org/cell/get?key=KEY&mnc=610&mcc=302&lac=48000&cellid=250014558

What gets returned is:

<rsp stat="ok">
     <cell lac="48000" 
           mcc="302" 
           lat="46.2334785491667" 
           lon="-63.1262734316667" 
           cellId="250014558" 
           nbSamples="12" 
           mnc="610" 
           range="6000"/>
</rsp>

The location that OpenCellID.org returns is its best guess, from available reports, of my current location. As it turns out, it’s not a bad guess at all:

The pink X is my current location; the red marker is the location OpenCellID.org returned. The site build that guess using 12 reports (reports, as it happens, that I contributed using my device):

<rsp stat="ok">
    <measure lat="46.2341142" lon="-63.12629745"></measure>
    <measure lat="46.23423571" lon="-63.1264044"></measure>
    <measure lat="46.2342632" lon="-63.12641408"></measure>
    <measure lat="46.2342976" lon="-63.12642024"></measure>
    <measure lat="46.23397183" lon="-63.12654337"></measure>
    <measure lat="46.23369234" lon="-63.12707633"></measure>
    <measure lat="46.23305379" lon="-63.12726862"></measure>
    <measure lat="46.23359937" lon="-63.12701882"></measure>
    <measure lat="46.23346142" lon="-63.1267446"></measure>
    <measure lat="46.23268702" lon="-63.12559536"></measure>
    <measure lat="46.23210112" lon="-63.12496772"></measure>
    <measure lat="46.23226499" lon="-63.12453019"></measure>
  </cell>
</rsp>

When you look at the locations of those 12 measures, it’s easy to see why OpenCellID.org returned the location it did:

Obviously with more reports the accuracy of the “guess” will increase. I’m running my app (you can grab it for Firefox OS) when I’m walking around and about downtown Charlottetown, so this should happen on its own, as my app gets GPS location from the device and reports this to OpenCellID.org every 30 seconds.

I’m posting this so that I can refer to it later, as I’m always finding myself looking for these numbers.

Latitude and Longitude of PEI Places

• Coles Building, Charlottetown (see here): 46.23536, -63.12549
• Charlottetown (City Hall): 46.23527, -63.12958
• Charlottetown (Harbour): 46.2179, -63.1342
• Summerside (City Hall): 46.39287, -63.78989
• My House: 46.23587, -63.12412
• My Office: 46.23361, -63.12738
• Center of Prince Edward Island Bounding Box: 46.50105, -63.2014

Bounding Box surrounding Charlottetown

• lonmin,latmin: -63.1977,46.2268
• lonmax,latmax: -63.0811,46.3065
• bbox=-63.1977,46.2268,-63.0811,46.3065

Bounding Box surrounding Prince Edward Island

• lonmin,latmin: -64.4534,45.9353
• lonmax,latmax -61.9494,47.0668
• bbox=-64.4534,45.9353,-61.9494,47.0668
• bounding box for Overpass Turbo: 45.9353,-64.4534,47.0668,-61.9494

Right around the corner from our apartment in Brooklyn was the Brooklyn Art Library, home to The Sketchbook Project. The walls are lined with sketchbooks from all over the world; you can browse through them by signing up for a free library card at the back of the shop and then browsing the catalog by tag, theme or artist to select a sketchbook to “check out.” The book you select is brought to you by a friendly librarian, along with another book, selected at random. It’s a lovely idea, very well executed, and we were captivated by it to the point where we purchased three of the blank sketchbooks to become authors ourselves. If you’re in the area, it’s a great place to spend a few hours.

The James Farley Post Office is an imposing behemoth of a building right across 8th Avenue from Madison Square Garden and Pennsylvania Station. To say it’s “abandoned” isn’t completely accurate: it’s still a functioning post office – you can mail letters and buy stamps there – but the building is slated for redevelopment and many of its vast interior spaces, from mail sorting rooms to the headquarters of the Postal Inspector, lie vacant.

It was in those abandoned spaces that Catherine and Oliver and I journeyed on Monday night.

It was raining. We followed the instructions on the tickets to gather at the 31st Street entrance. We found a rag-tag group there, from well-dressed society types to poorly-dressed bohemians, and everything in between, all huddled under umbrellas. As it turned out we’d all gathered by the wrong door, but fortunately someone figured thise out and we went around the corner to the other 31st Street entrance.

At the top of the stairs our tickets were checked on a list and we were assigned to a group. Our group, as it happened, was to be led by Jane Jacobs.

Well, not Jane Jacobs herself, as she’s been dead since 2006.

But a pretty credible facsimile: an actor playing the role of Jane Jacobs in Manna-Hata, a singing, dancing, projecting, acting, shouting, moving, hiding, jumping, drinking and wandering spectacle held in the upper levels of the Farley Post Office.

It was a show that I happened upon by chance while surfing the Village Voice website the week before. It looked just crazy enough to be interesting, and I immediately bought tickets for opening night.

And so, at 7:00 p.m., credible-facsimile-of-Jane-Jacobs emerged to collect our group of about 20 people to lead is inside the bowels of the post office to start the show. There were three other groups, the neighbouring one was led by Walt Whitman; sometimes we were together as one large audience, other times we were separated off into rooms for little shows-within-the-show.

It was, for us, something of an ordeal.

Not because of the show itself, but because we’d spent the day on our feet, navigating through New York in the rain. Out to 111th Street in Queens to the Hall of Science and back and then a quick tour around Rockefeller Centre. We were tired. And our feet were even more tired. So the prospect of spending 3 hours more on our tired feet navigating around the post office following Jane Jacobs had its challenges. But we forged on.

For a lover of all things behind-the-scenes, half the fun was being behind-the-scenes, getting to go through doors like this:

And into washrooms with signs like this posted on the wall:

The spectacle itself was far-ranging: a series of vignettes, each a slice of New York history, with a common focus on issues of land, ownership, control, power, race, planning and community.

Many of these vignettes happened with the audience lining both sides of an office hallway with the action playing out between us. Like the opening scene, an imagined confrontation between Jacobs and Whitman and a gaggle of well-dressed-tycoons who kept popping up as avatars for Big Development. We gradually made our way up to a large room, a mail sorting room I imagine, that looked like this:

There were many scenes set here, from an extended rumination on the role of the Dutch and the English to an impressive explanation of the grid-layout of the Manhattan streets, culimating in the unveiling of a model of the Brooklyn Bridge constructed of rope, ribbon and Christmas lights as we watched.

We were led from the native inhabitation of Manhattan through its various colonial periods, Tammany Hall, the ambitious (crazy) plans of Robert Moses, the social upheaval of the 1970s and finishing with a montage of images from the last 50 years.

Some of this was straight-ahead theatre, but much of it was conveyed through song, dance, puppetry, and projection. Cast members played multiple roles over the evening, and the sets and props were simple and elegant. We started at 7:00 p.m., ended at 10:00 p.m., and there was a quick intermission – pretzels and beers in the postal break room – about three quarters of the way through.

Some of the proceedings were unintelligible to a non-New Yorker, and some were unintelligible to almost anyone because of the echoes in the vast postal halls. But it was almost never boring, and there were several scenes that were crafted with considerable genius. If nothing else, it made traditional theatre seem like a severely limited medium: stages, who needs stages!

Manna-Hatta was presented by Peculiar Works, and aptly-named New York City company. I’m glad we went.

I arrived in Vermont yesterday to a light drizzle. The rental car place dropped me off at the Brattleboro Coop, a brand new colossus of cooperation quadruple the size of the old coop grocery store they tore down next door. If I had any doubt I was in Vermont, the Kung Pao Seitan in the hot food bar was proof enough and after a quick lunch I headed up the hill to Mocha Joe’s for a coffee and then back down the hill to the Amtrak station to catch the train. I managed to get myself a little soaked through all of this, but nothing that an hour to dry out on the train couldn’t solve.

The train journey south to New York Penn Station was quite pleasant: power, wifi, leather seat that reclined almost fully and vegan burgers in the snack bar; what more did I need. I polished off an episode of Man Men and two of Mr. Selfridge and 6 hours later we arrived in New York.

Where it was raining.

Seriously raining. Torrentially post-tropical-storm raining. Taxi drives by you and you get splashed and suddenly your trousers are sticking to your legs raining.

I was determined, nonetheless, to avoid taking a cab to our rental apartment in Brooklyn: it’s so handy to the East River Ferry that it seemed a crime not to go by boat.

I found my way out of the station, found 34th Street, found out how to pay for the 34th Street bus, hopped on a bus and rode it down 34th, fortunately hearing the driver announce “next stop 28th and 2nd” while there was still time to jump off.

With the river in sight, I walked the rest of the way down 34th and got really, really wet in the process. Shoulder-bag-filled-with-water-passport-soaked wet.

I arrived at the ferry terminal just as the 7:19 boat was about to leave, but they held the gate for me and I stumbled on. Twelve minutes and $4 later I was at the North Williamsburg wharf getting wet again as I tried to find Kent Avenue and then, once found, tried to figure out where on Kent Avenue our apartment was.

After some wrong turns I righted myself and 5 minutes later I walked in on Catherine and Oliver negotiating with the landlord about the leak in the carriage house (nothing a pot and a towel wouldn’t solve).

I peeled myself out of my clothes, set my money and passports on the mantle to dry, and by 9:00 we were eating Sicilian Rice Balls down the street at Monk’s Pizza.

When we travel, it rains. It rained on us for 3 days in Bilbao when Oliver was young enough to be in a stroller (Oliver’s first words were “no bags on feet!). It rained on is in Porto. It rained on my father and I in Plitvice. It rained on my parents and Oliver and me at Fortress Louisbourg to the point where most of our weekend was spent drying out in the laundromat. It rained on us in Venice two years ago to the point where the platforms came out in St. Mark’s Square. We have acquired tens of umbrellas in as many cities. 

So we know how to do this and are undeterred.

Now, coffee. Fortunately we are in Williamsburg, where every second storefront is an artisanal coffee roaster.

Oh, and the rain has stopped.

I took the “desk hole filler” (naming things is obviously not my forté) and tinkered with it a little to create a hole for a USB extension cable. You can grab the upgraded design on Tinkercad. Here’s what it looks like in my desk (I’ve since corrected the type-the-wrong-way; you’d think if anyone could get that right it would be me, but I have a limited brain for 3D transformations):

This pierce by Laura Chapin broadcast last week on CBC Prince Edward Island’s Island Morning is a touching portrait of Eileen Higginbotham’s Prince Street Puppy Project. It’s a sad story – you will get tears in your eyes listening to it – but it also drives home why this project is a valuable and important one.  KaBoom was the resident dog in Oliver’s class this year, and several of the students you hear are his classmates.

About 8 years ago the word on the street here in Charlottetown was that you could get a great deal on adjustable desks at the Summerside Clearance Centre. I ended up buying two, one for myself and a smaller one for Johnny, and the boys at silverorange bought a number of them as well. They are great desks: solid, durable, and easily adjustable up and down. Here’s what mine looked line on moving-in-day at the old office:

There are two types of plastic parts on the surface of the desk, one type for the “cable pass through” holes and one for the crank that allows the desk to be adjusted up and down. Over the years we’ve had both go missing here in the office, and with nowhere to turn for replacement parts, we just lived with this.

With the availability of 3D printing at the University of Prince Edward Island, however, I realized that I could simply fabricate my own parts, using the originals I still have as models. The return of the browser-based Tinkercad design tool last week coincided with this inspiration, and so I set to work with my Canadian Tire digital calipers to take the measurements of the originals and translate them into Tinkercad models.

Once you grasp the basics of Tinkercad – assembling simple shapes together to make complex shapes – it’s surprisingly easy for a know-nothing like me to make a complex model:

That model is two cylinders in the base, with a box on top, four boxes for the “legs” and four “round roofs” for the little nubbles that hold the part in place inside the desk.

With the model designed and measurements checked, I fired up Tinkercad’s fuction for generating a .STL file:

…and sent the .STL file off to Don Moses at Robertson Library for 3D printing. The next day I got an email back from Don that the part had printed and was ready for pickup. And so here it is:

And here it is snapped into place in the desk:

If you have the same or similar desk, you can go and grab the Tinkercad model for this part, tweak it as needed, and print your own.

This was so much fun that I kept on going and designed up the “crank cover” in Tinkercad too:

It came out of the 3D printer looking like this:

You can grab the Tinkercad model for that part too.

Both parts, I was delighted to find, find into their respective holes like a glove.

To this point I’ve thought of 3D printing as a novelty, an impression only strengthened by the propensity of people with 3D printers to print cats and key chains and parts for more 3D printers. Being able to print parts for my desk, parts there was simply no way to produce until this point, has me thinking there might be something to all this.

I’m going up on Monday for a tour of UPEI’s about-to-be-a-Fablab, which is an exciting development in this regard; I’ll report back on what I learn.

While I reserve the right to have darts in my eyes with regards to past wrongs, it must be said that Tim Banks and his APM have done an absolutely stellar job restoring the Kays Building in downtown Charlottetown. The wrapping came off the building this week, and it’s obvious that the restoration involves good measure of both whimsy and careful attention.

Add that to the modernist palace of pleasure Mr. Banks is building from the ashes of the old Seaman’s warehouse on King Street (a development that, with every pass-along of gossip, gets more rotating Porsche elevators and helipads and tomato juice fountains), and suddenly APM emerges as an exceptional beacon of architectural courage in a city given to Homburg-style “preservations” and Atlantic Superstore disposa-buildings.

I don’t expect Tim and I will be going for coffee any time soon, but, kind sir, I tip my hat to you. Well done.