Apparently Deputy Mayor Stu MacFadyen mentioned The Talking Bus at last night’s meeting of Charlottetown City Council.

CBC Radio reporter Brendan Elliott was there, and tweeted about this and then mentioned the mention to CBC Television reporter Brian Higgins who called me first thing this morning and asked if could come down and do an interview.

And so I cleaned up my office. Quickly.

And 15 minutes later Brian Higgins hauled his video gear into the office – he’s a “VJ” and shoots his own video – and after a brief pre-interview he shot about 5 minutes with me about how The Talking Bus came to be.

He followed up with some “perp walk-style” shots of me clicking on various icons on the interactive bus map, an awkward attempt to tape the actual computerized voice with the wireless TV microphone sticky-taped to my phone, and some shots of the computer up in the server room that actually answers the phone (hint: it’s a beige box with flashing lights on it).

Once Brian is done with other interviews related to the story he’ll head back to CBC HQ where, I learned, he’ll edit the whole story together himself using a desktop video editing system.

And, as long as a hurricane doesn’t topple the Confederation Bridge in the interim, you’ll be able to see the story on Compass tonight (not sure whether it’s on Compass Lite at 5 or Compass Serious at 6).

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Jumping off from my earlier Concerts on Demand hacking, I’ve created an (unofficial) CBC Radio 2 Concerts on Demand RSS Feed.

CBC Radio 2 has an excellent Concerts on Demand feature on its website. Unfortunately it’s rendered as a set of web pages that makes easy browsing of the entire canon cumbersome, and because the links to tracks are trapped inside ASX files it’s harder for non-Windows users to get at the music itself (every time I tried to listen to a concert in Firefox on my Mac about 25 empty tabs would inexplicably spring open).

To help expose this resource to a wider audience, I’ve hacked together one big page that lists every concert and every track, in reverse chronological order.

This isn’t intended to be a pretty page, but rather a dead simple one. It’s intended to make using players like MPlayer and VideoLAN to listen to the concerts easier. It doesn’t actually do anything other than index the files on the CBC media server differently.

For the technically-minded among you, the key to the whole process is http://www.cbc.ca/radio2/cod/ajax.php, a handy URL that returns JSON about the concerts. It’s not optimized for use as an external API, so there’s some post-processing of the chunks of HTML table code that it returns, but the data is structured enough so that this isn’t arduous.

• a tweet about a job a 23
• the job ad at 23
• the sentence “currently helping individuals and organizations, in more than 210 countries”
• Google search for “list of countries”
• Wikipedia page on sovereign states
• the criteria for inclusion section of that page
• the sentence “[t]wo states not recognized by any other state: Somaliland and Nagorno-Karabakh”
• Wikipedia page on Nagorno-Karabakh
• Google search for “Nagorno-Karabakh tourism”
• The Office of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic in USA
• the Landmine Clearance page of that site
• The HALO Trust website
• the Nagorno Karabakh Challenge Grant page of that site
• the Julia Burke Foundation

The (regrettable) era of “peter rukavina blogs” is over: behold the era of the square ruk. Right is left, left is right, fonts are smaller: it’s a whole new flavour of ruk. No doubt you will want to celebrate with an expensive branded water bottle.

For those of you who like to know such things, the face in the square is Aerohop from Haiku Monkey. Proving the adage: when in doubt, use typefaces made in Vermont.

And although this isn’t new, I will point it out: you can now become an member of ruk.ca. This lets you post comments in a “non-anonymous” way (i.e. it won’t say “(not verified)” beside your name) and is sure to eventually come with all manner of fun benefits.

The broadminded team at the Office of Research Development at the University of PEI are spearheading an effort this winter to get researchers out of the lab and into the public sphere.

As I’ve long lamented the “never venture south of Belvedere Avenue” nature of the institution, that they decided to hold this event at Mavor’s, deep in the heart of civilian Charlottetown, is an excellent development. And so even though the subject matter of the first session – “new atheism” – isn’t exactly my cup of tea, I decided to take one for the team and show my support.

As it turned out, “new atheism” turned out to be rather interesting (I wasn’t won over to the dark side, but Dr. Joe Velaidum is nonetheless a pretty good spokesmodel for faith). And that there was a healthy, diverse crowd of more than 50 people was quite heartening to see.

Of course you might argue (and I did) that moving from the Faculty Lounge down to Mavor’s is simply trading one effete enclave for another. But you gotta start somewhere, I suppose. Things will really start to get exciting, though, when the talks move out into the small halls and the regular everyday folks start showing up.

In the meantime, there were more than just the usual seminar-going-suspects in attendance last night, and I got to meet some interesting people and hear some interesting ideas batted around.

Things fire up again in the new year:

• Monday, January 11 at 7:00 p.m. - “Package Deals: Exploring the History of Tourism on PEI” with Dr. Ed MacDonald. (I heard someone refer to this as “talking about them after they’ve left,” which I think would make a much better title).
• Tuesday, February 9 at 7:00 p.m. - “Relationships, Trust and Revenge” with Dr. Stacey L. MacKinnon.

Both will also be at Mavor’s, and events are scheduled for March and April too, with speakers to be announced.

Back in June when we were living in Malmö, Sweden for two weeks, Catherine and I had the pleasure of being shown around Forskningsavdelningen – Swedish for “Research Department” – an urban “hacker space” that our friend Olle is a member of. Located inside a larger facility called Utkanten – “an open space for a broad specter of alternative cultural, social and political activities” – Forskningsavdelningen is a group of people interesting in machines, technologies, and society. And so touring around their space you come across everything from old PCs taken apart to copies of the Whole Earth Catalog.

As related here, this past Saturday Utkanten was raided by the police:

At 20.45 on Saturday the 28th of November the police raided the social centre Utkanten in Malmö, where the hackerspace Forskningsavdelningen is housed. Twenty officers in full riot gear and ski masks broke into the space through the entrance and a backdoor, using crowbars. Shortly thereafter twenty to thirty more showed up, mostly dressed as civilians and some of them IT technicians from Länskriminalen (county police), who are suspected to be interested in the hackerspace. They stayed in the building for about six hours.

Although their nominal reason for the raid was to investigate an alcohol violation – there was a punk concert happening in another part of Utkanten at the time – they quickly expanded the breadth of their raid to include Forskningsavdelningen, and walked away with a good chunk of the group’s kit: PCs, wireless routers, a digital camera and even 5 bottles of rum and a pocket calculator.

Why should you care about this?

Raiding Forskningsavdelningen is tantamount to raiding a public library and carrying off the books on suspicion that they might be used for nefarious purposes. While the space may look rough around the edges and somewhat sketchy and un-public-library-like, at its heart Forskningsavdelningen is about people educating themselves and each other about technology, a mission it shares in common with libraries, schools, universities.  And with me.

Raiding Forskningsavdelningen is an affront to our right (and responsibility) in a free society to understand and interpret the world around us.

And that’s something we should all take seriously: right now it’s the rum-swilling Swedish hackers in the anarchist space that get raided; how long before the police come knocking at my door because of my map-mashing, corporate database-hacking, rabble-rousing?

Forskningsavdelningen is looking for donations to help them replace the stolen equipment; I’ve just donated and I encourage you to.

Annie B. Copps is one of the great talents at Yankee Publishing, and her new Annie Cooks series of videos is particularly good. In the most recent episode she shows how to make Potato Bread from leftover Thanksgiving mashed potatoes:

Disclaimer: Yankee Publishing is a client of Reinvented Inc. But this is an unpaid endorsement: I really do like Annie’s videos.

Just over a year ago I released the Charlottetown Bus Schedule by Telephone service, a hack that combined the data from the Charlottetown Bus Schedule with some Asterisk magic and a spare voice-over-IP telephone number to make schedule information for the main University Avenue bus line in Charlottetown available over the telephone at (902) 367-3694.

Like the work I’d done earlier with wrapping maps and mobile apps around bus schedule information, I did this as a free public-service project: I want more people to use the bus, and if it’s in my power to give them information to help them do this, I have an obligation to do so, I reasoned.

Five months later I received the delightful surprise of seeing one of the buses that serves the route re-branded as The Talking Bus, making about as obvious and powerful an advertisement for the telephone service as I could imagine.

The telephone information service has been running for a year now. Here’s a summary of the results so far (information that’s always been available, day by day, over here):

• 2,278 calls have been received in total, or 6 a day on average.
• On the busiest days, October 27, 2009 and September 14, 2009, 26 calls were received.
• There was at least one call received on 334 of 371 days the service has been operating.
• Calls have been received from 651 distinct telephone numbers.
• Almost all of the calls were from area code 902 (Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island), with a smattering from Alberta, Ontario and other places.
• Almost 75% of calls came from mobile phones (exchanges 314, 940, 218, 626, and 393).
• The popularity of the stops for which specific schedule information was requested:
  1. UPEI Student Centre
  2. Confederation Centre
  3. Charlottetown Mall
  4. Atlantic Superstore
  5. Sea Treat Restaurant
  6. Wal-Mart/Old Navy
  7. Royal Bank/Coop
  8. Atlantic Technology Centre
  9. Sobeys/Farm Centre
• The most popular time to call was between 4:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. 10% of calls were received during that hour.

The operating cost for the service, which I pay from Reinvented’s pocket, is $3.00/month for the 367-3694 telephone line and $20/month for a share of the digital phone line running into the server room here, for a total of $276/year.  Or about 12 cents per call processed.

By contrast to all of this, the telephone service’s older web-based cousin, TheBus.ca, received 15,381 unique visitors during the same 12-month period.

All in all I think it’s been a successful project, and one that’s worth continuing.  As always, I welcome suggestions for improvements.