Back in June when I visited the Printing Arts Fair in Massachusetts, I bought a book called The Land of Evangline, letterpress-printed by Robert Metzler in Vermont. The book reprints a collection of 19th century engravings by an artist known only by the initials “FHH” of scenes from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. Among these is a very nice rendition of Queen’s Square:

Our house is just out of view, tucked in behind the church on Prince Street.

A couple of weeks ago Oliver and I were in the Malmö record store and café called Folk å Rock, one of my favourite places. I heard a singer on the radio that intrigued my ears: sharp, languid country folk that I didn’t recognize.

I asked the clerk (Ulf, as it turns out) what I was hearing.

“Gillian Welch,” he said, “an American. First album in 7 years. Fantastic, isn’t it.”

Needless to say, I bought the album: stores that hire clerks that know their music need our support.

I’ve been listening to The Harrow & The Harvest ever since, and I’ve only grown fonder of it. My favourite track is from Tennessee, with the following passage:

Why can’t I go and live the life of riley?
Why can’t I go back home to apple pie?
Because your affront to my virtue was a touch too much
But you left a little twinkle in my eye

I don’t know quite why, but I love those last two lines.

Welch, it seems, has been around for a while – you might remember I’ll Fly Away from the soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a duet she sang with Alison Krauss – and has four earlier albums left for me to plumb the depths of.

Once again this year I’ve taken the official Eastern School District School Calendar and created a set of public calendar files to make it easier for parents and others to shunt the information around their digital devices.  Here you go:

• Google Calendar
• iCal format

This process was made slightly more difficult this year because the Department of Education released the calendar as an image rather than as a text PDF, which meant that I had to retype everything rather than simply cutting and pasting. I’ll mention this to the Department with hopes that in future they can be friendlier about this.

Today’s project: providing access in XML to data about provincial electoral districts and polling divisions from Elections PEI via the Elections PEI API. The API saw initial use last year when we exposed municipal election ward and poll information; it’s now been extended to cover provincial election data as well.

Through the API you can get programmatic access to things like:

• a list of electoral districts
• KML files of district and polling division boundaries, like District 12, or District 12, Poll 5
• information about returning officers (name, address, telephone)
• information about regular and advance poll locations for each poll

It’s a simple REST API that associates each of the electoral district’s regular HTML web pages with an equivalent XML page. So the regular old human-readable page of information about District 12, Poll 5 at:

http://www.electionspei.ca/provincial/districts/district12/poll5

Has its XML cousin at:

http://www.electionspei.ca/xml/provincial/districts/district12/poll5

The development of the API with Elections PEI is a long-term effort and will continue; as such, we welcome feedback to api@electionspei.ca about how it meets, or does not meet, your data needs.

A chunk of my summertime work this year was consumed with coding up a mobile version of the foliage-reporting tool we created for Yankee Magazine 7 years ago that’s been running on the web every autumn since.

The free app, called Leaf Peepr, is now available for both iOS (App Store link) and Android (Market link); it lets people report foliage conditions – i.e. what colour the leaves are – while on the go, and to submit photos and descriptions of foliage at the same time. These reports get aggregated together and are used to colour the live fall foliage map that’s on the web and also viewable from within the app.

Although I’ve been making websites targeted at mobile devices for many years now – the mobile City Cinema timetable, for example, and the mobile bus schedule – this was my first time developing a bona fide installable application for mobile devices, and it was a good learning experience.

The app shares a common HTML and JavaScript code base for both iOS and Android, uses jQuery Mobile as its UI framework, and is wrapped inside PhoneGap to allow it to be distributed as an executable through the App Store and the Android Market.

While this isn’t quite “write once, run anywhere,” it’s certainly a more streamlined process than coding native apps in their respective native languages of choice, and the common browser engine parentage of iOS and Android meant that, UI-wise, everything pretty well “just worked” on both platforms. Response time of the UI isn’t quite as fluid as it would be with a native app, but it’s certainly more than acceptable.

The only place I ran into some difficulties during development was with slight variations of returning network status information (“is the device online?”) and geolocation (we need to know where the device is so that we can associate reports with a location); PhoneGap has a standard method for obtaining these, but there are quirks that I needed to work around for various edge cases (i.e. device was online when app launched, then went offline, etc.).

Because the development is in HTML and JavaScript, the designer at Yankee, who coded up the UI elements, was working in a familiar environment, and the learning curve for me was primarily getting the development and compilation environments set up in XCode and Eclipse respectively (along with the frustration of the slightly-different key bindings for each).

Our initial submission to the App Store was rejected on a technicality: the Google Maps log was scrolling out of view on the map view, which violates the requirement that it be always visible. We re-submitted the app and it was approved; total time from initial submission to being available to the public was 10 days. For the Android Market, because it lacks this review process, the turnaround was about 30 minutes.

If you’re in New England this fall and want to help in the foliage reporting effort, please install the app on your device and let me know how it goes.

I first visited Malmö back in 2005 when I took the train over for supper after my first reboot. One of the things I lamented on that trip was the difficulty in taking photos of the Turning Torso, the stunning Santiago Calatrava-designed skyscaper in the city’s western harbour.

This summer I resolved to get up close to the building and to finally take some photos, and so a couple of weeks ago Oliver and I walked over from the central train station on a windy, chilly summer day to see what we could see.

Up close it’s an even more intriguing building, one that seems to defy what I expect humans are capable of constructing. If you ever find yourself in Malmö it’s worth the 30 minute walk (or 5 minute bus ride) from downtown to take a look for yourself.

My friend Morgan tweeted this morning “I think that @ruk’s letter press results are what’s keeping the postal industry afloat.” Which reminded me that I planned to provide an accounting of the costs associated with my Mail Me Something experiment. So here goes.

By the end of the process I had 40 people on the weekly mailing list, which means that the total “per subscriber” cost was roughly $10.63, or about $2.12 per subscriber per week.

After they signed up I invited “subscribers” to donate $5.00 via PayPal at their option, and I also provided a more flexible donation link, where they could donate larger amounts;  13 of the 40 (one third) donated a total of $85.00, leaving me with $340.44 to pick up myself.

I didn’t launch this experiment as a money-making endeavour, and so I don’t consider that a “deficit” but rather a very cheap learning experience: about $8 per hour of studio time.

I thorough enjoyed the experience of spending five days of my “working vacation” at Druckwerkstatt, away from the digital hubbub (my mobile phone didn’t even work in the basement, so it was a full-in 19th century experience); having an “audience” imposed the same sort of rigor on the process that having an audience of readers for this blog provides.

And receiving photos and descriptions of the final products in their new homes around the world has provided me with tremendous joy.

Thank you to all who participated. Who know: now that I have 40 of you on a mailing list, I might just have to keep sending things…

Last Thursday, as our final touristic activity of the summer in Europe, Oliver and I took the train north from Malmö to Helsingborg to visit the Grafiska Museet – the “graphics museum” – located on the grounds of the Fredriksdal Museums and Gardens.

Grafiska Museet turned out to be a compact by well-resourced museum of letterpress printing, complete with a nice collection of presses, a solid collection of metal and wood type, and, on the second floor, an uncommonly well-designed set of exhibits offering an introduction to printing.

There was, alas, no actual printing happening on the day of our visit – a guide explained that the printers are all pensioners of indefinite schedule – but this was more than made up for by an enthusiastic and thorough demonstration of the Intertype type-casting machine by one of the nicest museum guides I’ve come across.

He cast Oliver his first name in both regular and bold, trimmed the result and wrapped it in masking tape (so as to reduce the lead-poisoning potential), all the while opening hatches and flipping switches to show us how the machine magically turns molten lead into cast type.

While we came for the museum specifically, we were pleasantly surprised to find that Fredriksdal Museums and Gardens itself made for an interesting additional visit: I’m not a “formal gardens” person, but even I was wowed by the breadth and complexity of what they’ve created on this site, from spice gardens to maple orchard, flower gardens to fruit trees, we spent an additional couple of hours wandering the grounds.

If you happen to find yourself in a group mixed between print-o-philes and regular everyday people, a visit to Fredriksal is an excellent choice, as you’ll both be catered to. Take the train from Malmö (or the train and then ferry from Copenhagen) and then catch a city or regional bus from the train station to the site (search schedules for route to “Gisela Trapps v. 1”): it’s about 10 minutes from downtown. There’s a serviceable café surrounded by a lovely outdoor eating area where you can grab a snack or lunch, and you could easily spend an entire day wandering around.