Two years ago I wrote about how to save the nightly [[Compass]] video onto your computer using the free VideoLAN application.

Today I added some automation to the process so that, if you have an iPod, you can have your computer automatically grab Compass and dump it into iTunes for syncing.  Here’s what you need:

1. First, make sure you have VideoLAN installed on your Mac. My script assumes you have it installed in your main Applications folder. Note that I’ve only got this working on VLC version 0.8.6 – later versions fail.
2. Next, grab the compass4ipod.sh script, and save it somewhere on your Mac.
3. Open the Terminal application (it’s under Applications/Utilities), and move to the directory where you save the compass4ipod.sh script.  For example, if you save it on your Desktop, then just cd ~/Desktop.
4. Run the script: bash compass4ipod.sh

The script saves Compass in “real time,” so if you’re saving 15 minutes of Compass it will take 15 minutes to run.  When it’s done, you should end up with the latest Compass in the Movies folder of your iTunes, ready for syncing to your iPod.

I welcome any reports of issues you run into trying to make this work.

Update: I’ve prepared a standalone Mac OS X application that, as long as you have VideoLAN installed on your Mac, should allow you to do all of the above in one click.

Update: I’ve added a note about the fact that only VLC version 0.8.6 appears to work with this script; later versions fail.

I’ve created an Internet Archive page for my Applications vs. Capabilities talk from Access 2009. You can now feel free to integrate the video into you homebrew rock videos, etc. as the 500MB of original video is now available in all its glory.

Here’s a great idea from the Prince Edward Island Provincial Library: Book Club in a Bag, described as:

Book Club in a Bag is a service for the use of book clubs wanting the convenience of a pre-packaged bag complete with 10 copies of a book, a discussion guide and suggested questions and a sign-out sheet for the group leader. We have many titles to choose from, including several that are also suitable for teen clubs.

There are currently 124 books available in English under this program.

While I was traveling in September, Starbucks opened up shop in the Tweel building at the corner of Kent and University in downtown Charlottetown. While we’ve had pretend “proudly serving Starbucks” outlets in several locations on the Island, this is the first bona fide Starbucks here and given my late-to-the-party love of a good cappuccino, and the fact that Starbucks is on my way to work each morning, I’m forced to decide whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.

By gut reaction is bad thing, but, to be honest, I’m not sure whether that’s my head talking or years worth of “local = good, multinational = bad” rhetoric coursing through my heart.

Starbucks just feels evil; I’m not actually sure whether it is evil.

I thought about this on Saturday while [[Oliver]] were on the way to Canadian Tire to buy a replacement flap for our ailing upstairs toilet.

Canadian Tire, for those of you in the international audience, is a national Canadian dry-goods merchant that, as its advertising has been saying for years, sells more than just tires.  You can buy everything from television sets to kayaks at Canadian Tire, and belief in essential excellentness of Canadian Tire is tantamount to an article of Canadian citizenship (it is said that “40 percent of Canadians shop at Canadian Tire every week”).

Oliver and I were on our way to Canadian Tire to buy a toilet flap because that’s where they sell toilet flaps.  When I worked at a Canadian Tire store as a teenager I learned that there are entire categories of products for which Canadian Tire simply is the place that Canadians shop.  Where else would you look for Armor All. Or bulbs for your rear taillight. Or rat poison. Or a bicycle pump.

And so, on my way to Canadian Tire, I was wondering why I wasn’t on my way to a small, local, artisanal toilet flap maker instead of a large national toilet flap-selling chain.

And if I’m happy to shop for toilet flaps at Canadian Tire — indeed if it feels only proper and patriotic to do so — shouldn’t I be equally satisfied buying my cappuccino from Starbucks, a chain that, for many, holds the same saintly place in the consumer consciousness.

None of this would amount to anything more than personal taste if it weren’t for the fact that my gut “Starbucks is evil” reaction extends to other people who go to Starbucks. 

I see them all inside there as I walk by every day and secretly think to myself “how could they” with sanctimony I would otherwise reserve for, say, murderers or Hummer drivers or, at least, people who don’t compost.

This doesn’t seem like a very rationale stance to take.  And, who knows, perhaps I’m robbing myself of good coffee with my knee-jerkiness.

I’d welcome the opinion of others in this regard: is it more ethical to get my coffee elsewhere and, if so, why?

Back in the mid-1980s I was a member of a rabble-rousing collective in Peterborough, Ontario called Projects for Change.  We ran a food bank, paid homage to Kropotkin, and, on occasion, even worked on actual pressing issues like capital punishment and welfare reform.

Originally we worked out of a tiny sliver of a storefront at 219½ Hunter Street West and after a few years we expanded into a larger space up the street at 231.

When we took possession of the new space the floor inside was covered in a ratty old blue carpet; underneath we found broad pine-plank flooring in fantastic condition, and so our first project was to rip up the carpet (let it never be said that anarchists don’t have aesthetic sensibilities).

Once the carpet was ripped up we found the floor covered with a thick skin of carpet glue, so project number two was to scrape the glue off; when brute force didn’t work we resorted to boiling up kettles of water, pouring the hot water on the floor and the swooping in to scrape off the now-softened-up glue before it hardened up again.

This wasn’t brutal work, but it took a long time; I remember spending what seemed like weeks coming in every night to boil and scrape, boil and scrape.

There was an old record player in the storefront, and there was, as memory serves, only a single album: Small Change, the 1976 album from Tom Waits. 

The first track on the album is Tom Traubert’s Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen), a 6-minute song that is classic Tom Waits: a rambling gravel-voiced pæan to Waltzing Matilda (you can see a video of a live performance from 1977 here).

We listened to Tom Traubert’s Blues over and over and over that summer, and every time I hear that song I immediately have flashbacks to the smell of warm carpet glue and the collegiality that scraping it off involved.

I thought of all of this again this morning when I came across this link to a free download of the first 8 songs of Waits’ new album, Glitter and Doom Live, to be released in late November.

My friend Barbara-Jean sent along a link to the video A Tour of Coach House Press, part of  Historical Perspectives on Canadian Publishing at McMaster University. It’s a very nice introduction to the history of Coach House and after watching it my first instinct was to run out and buy some Coach House-produced books.

The lower end of Pownal Street is turning into a new Charlottetown restaurant nexus. For the past couple of years Tai Chi Gardens has been a singular oasis of calm and dumplings; now, two blocks down, comes Gusto, a European-style pâtisserie at the corner of Pownal and King in the old Haddad’s grocery store.

I’m assuming that in the official “how to start a new business in Charlottetown” handbook, “residential pâtisserie” is not high on the list of prospects, which makes Gusto all the more delightful. Like the German bakery Leonhard’s that opened on Queen Street last year, Gusto is setting out to make a market for itself, not to tap into an existing one. That’s gutsy and laudable. And also very tasty.

For my first visit today I had a pogača – a bun stuffed with ground beef and onions and baked that hails from my own ancestral old country, a potato roll (right out of the oven) and a very, very good strong cup of tea.

Gusto is opening right now – subject to change – from 10:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on weekdays, and from 11:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on Saturdays. They have several savory options for lunch, serve coffee and tea, and have a panoply of sweets from all across Europe, from almond cookies to profiteroles.

The Royal Library in Copenhagen is a stunning example of bibliotecture: overlooking the inner-harbour, the “black diamond,” as it’s called, has a sweeping atrium surrounded by wavy balconies that you reach by taking a gently sloping moving sidewalk from the first floor.  While the space is huge, it’s somehow not overwhelming – it’s the kind of space I could image spending a lot of time in quite comfortably.

My favourite part of the library, however, is not the architecture, it’s the music: every afternoon at 1:00 p.m. for three minutes one of 52 parts of a specially commissioned work titled Katalog plays in the atrium.  The library explains what might seem an odd mixture of reading and music like this:

One may think that sound and reading rooms do not directly harmonize, and that students and scholars can be disturbed in their work. The library is already filled with real life sounds from the rolling travelators, general speech and activities at the A-level around The Queen’s Hall, in the Restaurant søren k, the café Øieblikket and the bookshop.

At 1 p.m. you have the possibility to look up from your books, stretch your legs and - for three minutes, no more no less - enjoy that the huge space is filled with music. Music which is experienced differently according to where you stand or move around.

In my talk last week I used The Royal Library as an example of a library space that typifies the “capabilities” systems design paradigm: the daily musical interlude is very much a part of this.

You can order a CD of 20 of the 52 parts of Katalog from The Royal Library; more information on ordering from this page on the library website.

The video and slides of my Applications vs. Capabilities talk last week at Access 2009 are now online.  The interface is a little wonky, the OCR of my slides didn’t work that well, and I wandered around a lot, but the audio quality is quite good.

Well, where did that week go?

When we last talked I was about to get on a plane in Copenhagen and fly, via Frankfurt and Montreal, back home to Charlottetown. And I did. The flying was uneventful, and even featured a bit of Air Canada friendliness: I was able to get moved, thanks to a helpful gate agent in Frankfurt, from a middle seat to a lovely exit-row seat with endless leg room, making the trip across the Atlantic much, much more pleasant.

Tuesday morning I hit the ground running getting the wireless Internet set up for the Access 2009 conference, conveniently being hosted next door to our house in Murphy’s Community Centre. What was supposed to be an easy morning of Cisco setup turned into a two-day battle that ended up with the donated Cisco gear back in its packing boxes and my home Meraki gear set up to serve the conference – a big jump from serving the CBC Kids needs of Oliver to serving the network needs of 100+ systems librarians. In the end it all worked out – more on this later – and by Thursday I was ready to start assembling my own Access 2009 talk, scheduled to be delivered first thing Friday morning.

As is my habit, this was a “just in time” assemblage after several months of rumination, and what I ended up with was something I called Applications vs. Capabilities (you can find the slides here; the video should be along soon). The general idea was that you can design a system by creating applications, or you can design a system by building capabilities: I argued that we used to do the later, but since industrialism we’re doing more of the former, especially in libraries.

Friday morning arrived and I managed to get the talk out without collapsing from jet lag or lapsing into confused babble. The response fell into two distinct camps: “I’ve felt the same thing for a long time” and “you have no idea about what libraries are about.” It’s always fun to talk to the library audience, as they’re all smart people doing interesting things, and if I managed to influence a few of them in the capabilities direction, I’m happy.

With the presentation out the door, I returned to my role as father, and Oliver and I spent the rest of Friday rambling about, finishing up with a great Toy Story / Toy Story 2 double bill in 3D at Empire Theatres with my mother (we used the new-style online ticketing system, prompted by Billy’s blog post and it worked well).

Saturday morning I took in Mark Leggott’s parade of acronyms at Access (buried beneath the acronyms is some exciting work) and the joined the regular Saturday morning market routine with Oliver and my mother, which culminated in an impulse purchase of a Nintendo Wii, something that’s been entertaining us ever since (and has turned Oliver into a bowling fiend).

Finally today I’m back in the office banging out code after two weeks away.

Regular programming will resume Monday.