Mandy Patinkin on Charlie Rose.

The autofocus on my Geeksphone Peak creates an interesting effect when confronted with the cycling of my Golding Jobber № 8 letterpress.

The building at the north-west corner of University and Kent in downtown Charlottetown has been empty for as long as I can remember. When we first moved here, 20 years ago, it was home to both CFCY and Sam the Record Man, and as such a sort of musical nexus; since they both moved out it’s been getting evermore eyesore every year. Reports are that the inside is even worse.

But this week, all of a sudden, the modern exterior – plaster and aluminum siding – is being peeled off and the old brick facing revealed. It’s in sorry shape – missing bricks, missing windows, painted white – but perhaps it will rise again as a grand old building?

Started from here, then switched the direction of the type and used a different face for the “142.” I like it – I’m especially proud of the letterspacing in the “142” – but I think I’m going to revert to the original design and try it two-colour. In the meantime if you’re quick you get pick up a pound of coffee at ROW142 in these bags while they last.

What was Youngfolk & The Kettle Black on Richmond Street is now ROW142 on Richmond Street. I’ve been doing some experimenting with a new coffee bag design: this is just a one-colour experimental prototype for something that might eventually become a more complex two-colour job. I like the simplicity of this, though.

In a departure from earlier coffee bag printing, I’m bridging the “fold” region, and there be dragons: it’s twice-as-thick, and the position of the fold is quite variable, so this positioning might not be tenable over hundreds of bags.

It was good to get back into the print shop.

Oliver’s French class at Birchwood is studying language for travel – cars, planes, buses and so on – and that includes the language for the directions: north, south, east and west. Why do we travel but for to gather photos for later use as teaching aids: in 2009 we walked to the top of the Eiffel Tower and I took pictures of Oliver standing at each of the four corners!

This CBC television documentary hosted by Linden MacIntyre, shot in 1978 on Prince Edward Island, focuses on the “Development Plan” and especially the “Joint Advisory Board,” a 10-member federal-provincial committee that managed it and that, MacIntyre suggested, “works in secrecy” and was an affront to democracy. Regardless of how you view the issue, this is a fascinating at Prince Edward Island 35 years ago.

Note that the audio and video are out of sync for the first few minutes – until the introductory sequence – and then improve.

You know how Radiolab has Radiolab Live and This American Life has The American Life Live?

Well, I don’t have David Sedaris nor Neil deGrasse Tyson in my Rolodex, but all the same it occurs to me that it would be interesting to marshall the forces that keep this here ruk.ca in the air to produce a ruk.ca live. There would be 3D printing and artisanal coffee and letterpress demonstrations and Finnish anarchists and live-action role playing. And no face painting.  It’s not like I don’t have a theatre at the ready mere steps from the centre of my digital life.

Hmmmm.

Nørd Camp (“Geek Camp” in Danish) is a project of the Roskilde Festival in Denmark. In poorly-translated-from-Danish it describes itself as a summer camp where:

Every day is a new day filled with new challenges, tasks and not the least knowledge of the real Big Nerd spirit. Participants are involved in building projects, shaping them and test whether they work in the end. This will bring participants through many different things - everything from chemical reactions to build soapbox cars and final competition.

In short, it looks like the greatest camp on earth.

I updated my Firefox Nightly and, blamo, this ye olde UI:

became this sexy new UI:

It’s called Australis and you can read more here and watch a video introduction here.