Reflecting Light from KINLEY—our neighbour here in the C1A 4R4 for a time—was released today:

Reflecting Light is a five-song release built on strong pop instincts, lyrics that turn small moments into whole stories, and production that moves easily between dreamy, synth-bright and infectious.

Across the record, KINLEY writes in scenes. A relationship can feel like a natural disaster or a happily ever after. A stranger can become a love interest and a big break before the conversation is even over. Certainty can turn into doubt and back again. The songs live in those in-between moments where attraction, intuition, history and possibility all collide.

At its heart, Reflecting Light is about love, instinct, contradiction and finding your footing, but never in a way that feels too polished or precious.

I’ve had it on repeat today. I love it.

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Kinley  •  Music  •  Charlottetown

From The Jump? by Rob Paterson:

In the summer of 1993, I was on track to end up at the top of the Canadian banking system. This had been my dream since I left school. But instead of being happy, I was utterly depressed. Something was wrong and I did not know what it was. I felt like a donkey on a treadmill going around in circles. Ultimately I realized that I was a prisoner. I was trapped by my income and my debt. For a year, I was just miserable. For how could I have ever escape this trap? Then one summer day, I woke up and realized that I could escape. All I had to do was to walk away from this life. 

This was my jump. The moment when I knew for certain that I had to leave the traditional work life forever.

On the one-year anniversary of the death of my friend Rob comes an unexpected gift: an entire website that Rob created, which I’ve never seen, where he dives deep into the dramatic transformation he took his life through.

Thanks to his daughter Hope for passing this along today.

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The Copernicus Browser can be used to browser through current and historical satellite imagery: think of it like the Google Maps “Satellite” layer, more up to date, but with less resolution.

I zoom in to St. Peters Harbour, on Prince Edward Island’s north short, and grabbed images from every August from 2017 to 2026, and chained them together in a movie:

The movie shows the rather dramatic changes the channel into St. Peters Harbour has gone through over the last decade, more more dramatic than the different between last year and this year.

In recent memory you’ve been able to walk right up to the old wharf/breakwater at the mouth from the adjoining beach; now the navigation channel runs between.

For more on this, read The Disappearing Harbour: Navigating the Environmental History of St. Peters Harbour, Prince Edward Island by Barbara Palmer Rousseau.

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From Presentation of the Gutenberg Prize 2026 by Internationale Gutenberg-Gesellschaft:

Behind this playful gesture, however, lay a serious mission. Through “Hacking Gutenberg,” Spiekermann is seeking support for p98a.berlin, a unique workshop and living museum that combines traditional printing techniques with contemporary digital technologies. Located in the former Girls’ School of Drawing on Potsdamer Straße in Berlin, it houses one of Germany’s most important private collections of historic printing presses and type. As a space for workshops, masterclasses, experimentation and creative exchange, p98a.berlin brings together designers, students, companies and cultural practitioners to explore the material foundations of communication. To secure its future, the project relies on financial support and entrepreneurial partnerships. By bringing “Hacking Gutenberg” to Mainz, the 2026 Gutenberg Prize laureate demonstrated that preserving and reimagining Gutenberg’s legacy remains a shared responsibility in the digital age.

Erik Spiekermann has an experimental letterpress shop in Berlin? This ticks all of my boxes. Every. Single. One.

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Berlin  •  Typography  •  Letterpress  •  Erik Spiekermann  •  Hacking Gutenberg

Our This Box is for Good project has been less active over the last year, but murmering away in the background there are printers around the world creating brand new editions.

This week it was Calgary printmaker Hannah Sanford, who created a stunning box with a wrap-around scene of nuthatches. Read more about it here.

Brown box with a print of a nuthatch on the outside.
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Recent versions the Maps application on iOS and macOS can automate, at your opt-in, the gathering of “Visited Places,” which Apple describes like this:

The Visited Places feature helps you keep track of places you’ve been, so you can easily revisit or share them later. Use it to find past locations—like restaurants from a recent trip—and organize them into guides or share them with others. Visited Places are end-to-end encrypted, can’t be read by Apple, and appear on all your synced devices.

I’ve had an interest, for more than 20 years, in this sort of “personal geolocation archive,” so I’m interested in this feature. 

There’s no built-in way to export the details of these places; a little bit of research reveals, however, that the data is there for the exporting, as it’s simply an SQLite database sitting on my Mac. Here’s how I exported it:

sqlite3 -readonly -header -csv \
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Maps/Data/Maps/MapsSync_0.0.1 \
"
SELECT
 datetime(v.ZSTARTDATE + 978307200, 'unixepoch', 'localtime') AS visited_at,
 l.ZMAPITEMNAME AS place,
 l.ZMAPITEMADDRESS AS address,
 l.ZMAPITEMCITY AS city,
 l.ZLATITUDE AS latitude,
 l.ZLONGITUDE AS longitude,
 v.ZVISITCLASSIFICATION AS classification
FROM ZVISIT v
LEFT JOIN ZVISITEDLOCATION l
 ON v.ZLOCATION = l.Z_PK
ORDER BY v.ZSTARTDATE;
" > ~/Desktop/apple-maps-visits.csv

This exported 349 places, harvested starting October 9, 2025 (Mucho Burrito) and continuing to last night (Sobeys).

I’m not clear on what the threshold for “visited” is, but clearly there’s a relatively high bar, as I’ve certainly visited many more places than those 349.

For each place I get:

  • Date and time: 2026-08-15 16:02:00
  • Place name: Sobeys
  • Street Address: 400 University Ave, Charlottetown PE C1A 4N6, Canada
  • City: Charlottetown
  • Latitude: 46.246187
  • Longitude: -63.133117
  • Classification: 7

I haven’t figure out what the “classifications” map to — my values are limited to 1, 4, 5, and 7, and there’s no rhyme nor reason as to what they represent.

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Apple Maps  •  Places  •  Geolocation

Back in March, Lisa and I were in Annapolis Royal and stopped in at the Elephant Grass Printmakers Society, where we met Lorna Mulligan.

Through Lorna we were virtually introduced to printmaker and textile artist Julie Rosvall and printer Katie Prescott, both living and working in the Annapolis Valley.

This summer we visited Katie’s print shop, and Julie drove up to join us. We had much fun talking printing, printmaking, printers, printmakers, ink, paper, and more. 

A month later we got to give Julie a tour of our print shop when she was in Charlottetown on vacation.

Yesterday, on our way out of Wolfville, we stopped in at Harvest Gallery downtown to see Otherwise, a group show of work by Julie, Bonnie Baker, Sydney Lancaster, and Sheri Hancock.

The exhibition is a must-see if you are in the Valley this summer—it runs until September 13, 2025. 

My favourite piece is Julie’s Remnants, a textile relief print:

Remnants, by Julie Rosvall, hanging at Harvest Gallery

Julie’s current practice centres on making relief prints from textiles: she creates the textiles, then inks them and runs them through a press as a matrix. It’s quite affecting.

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Harvest Gallery  •  Wolfville  •  Julie Rosvall  •  Katie Prescott  •  Printmaking

We stayed at the Old Orchard Inn in Wolfville on Friday night, and on Saturday morning we took a walk around the area, which took us in a loop around Horton High School, where I spotted this in the window.

The Little Library

We were booked into cabin 413, which was directly across the lane from cabin 412, where Olivia and I stayed in 2018 when we were in town for a recording of Pondercast.

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My other task at last night’s Celebration of Life for Catherine Hennessey was to assemble photos of her into a slideshow for projection on the in the Carriage House at Beaconsfield.

I used this sketch of her house at 222 Sydney Street to get things configured.

Beacons

Kudos to staff at the PEI Museum and Heritage Foundation, by the way, for very clear instructions for how to project video from a laptop. Much appreciated.

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Lisa wondered the other day if the people who read my blog can intuit my mood from how much or little I write, her thesis being that if I post a lot, I must be in need of diversion, which must signal something. Whether or not this can be intuited by the readership beyond Lisa, she’s not altogether wrong: writing here serves many roles. It’s a place to stick my head when I need a break from the tizzy of everyday life, it’s a place to go when I simply need space to be alone with my thoughts, it’s a way to exercise control when other things seem beyond my control.

I clearly needed some distracting this week, as evidenced by the maintenance work I’ve done here on the blog over the last couple of days. Which variant of disappearance into the cave this was, I’m not completely sure: part of it was being left to my own devices for a few days, here by the shore, and being unable to settle into complete summertime idyll; part of me needed some respite from writing weighty words; and there’s a longer-standing part of me that takes comfort from, well, optimization.

It’s optimization that I was focused on this week, and I made a few small repairs in that regard, under the hood, which I’m listing here as much to remind myself as anything else:

  • I replaced the Drupal theme, which was a sub-theme of Claro, with a much more minimal custom theme, one that recreated the aesthetics but stripped out everything that wasn’t needed (Claro is a Drupal admin-focused theme, and so it had a lot of superfluous cruft that wasn’t required here).
  • I added responsive image delivery, so that those on mobile get smaller mobile-optimized images, and added lazy-loading of images. These were a big win for making the site nimble.
  • I started serving the site with HTTP/2. This was an easy win—one configuration change in my Apache setup—that also provided a big speed payoff.
  • I turned on both CSS and JavaScript aggregation in Drupal.
  • I turned on Brotli compression for Apache.

The result of all these changes was that I increased my Core Web Vitals score from 57 to 92, and reduced my Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) from 7.5 seconds to 2.9 seconds.

All of these things are standard issue Drupal and Apache optimizations, the kind of thing that I spent more than a quarter century steeped in when I was maintaining Drupal for Almanac.com.

Which prompts me to consider another reason that I escape into this sort of work from time to time: I miss it. I derived a good part of my identity from being a professional optimizer: that was the work that lay at the heart of my career. Giving that up, at the end of 2023, has left me to reinvent myself. Like a pilot who hangs up their wings, sometimes I just need to remember what it’s like to fly.

(Credit to Shawn Colvin for the post title. Her A Few Small Repairs is a masterwork.)

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Shawn Colvin  •  Drupal  •  Blogging

About This Blog

Photo of Peter RukavinaI am . I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.

To learn more about me, read my /now, look at my bio, listen to audio I’ve posted, read presentations and speeches I’ve written, see things I’ve favourited elsewhere, or get in touch (peter@rukavina.net is the quickest way).

I have been writing here since May 1999: you can explore the 25+ years of blog posts in the archive.

You can subscribe to an RSS feed of posts, an RSS feed of comments, an RSS feed of favourites elsewhere, or a podcast RSS feed that just contains audio posts. You can also receive a daily digests of posts by email. I also publish an OPML blogroll.

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