I dropped in to see my friend Don Moses this morning out at the Robertson Library (one of the spin-off benefits of renewing my UPEI Sports Centre workout routine is that I’m back on campus again three times a week). I planned just to stay for a few moments, but ended up staying for an hour as Don took me on a cook’s tour of projects near and far, including:

• The continuing evolution of IslandLives.ca, a project to digitize Prince Edward Island community histories that I was involved with a little in its earlier stages. There have been some nice additions to the collection – like Out of Thin Air, the history of radio station CFCY (I own a physical copy, and it’s a great read) – and some good usability improvements, like showing pages matching keyword searches (like this search for Kingston).
• Behind the scenes the web-based TEI editor that UPEI has developed to allow for community annotation of the Island Lives collection looks fantastic: it’s much honed since I saw a very rough demo in the spring, and once it hits the open source stream I’m sure others will put it to unanticipated other uses.
• The map digitizing project is really starting to take off and I got to see a few examples of high-resolution map scans, and some of the arrows in the digitization quiver, like using Quantum GIS for geo-referencing. The project, especially when it and Island Lives start to synergize, is really going to be amazing: take a look at Hypercities to get an example of where this sort of thing can lead.
• Exhibit, a framework for rendering JSON data into interactive applications that include things like faceted search and mapping, looks very promising; I might have a go a rendering the Peter Rukavina Timeline in Exhibit as a learning exercise. See also the pedigree maps at WeRelate.org.

If you’re interested in digitization, mapping, GIS and history, the Robertson Library is the place to be these days; I look forward to seeing what they cook up next.

Regular readers may recall that a month ago, as soon as it went on sale in Canada, I bought myself a Kindle.

I really like the Kindle: it has an extremely readable screen, there’s a decent collection of e-books available, both from Amazon.com (for purchase) and from elsewhere (for free), and, as Jeff Bezos said it would, the Kindle recedes into the background when you’re reading, so it “feels like a book.”

There’s only one problem for me, though: the “next page” buttons happen to be designed in a way that makes my latent repetitive stress issues flare up.  There are two of these buttons, one on each side of the Kindle, and a combination of where they’re located and the degree of resistance you meet when going to push them in just happens to tweak all the wrong RSI buttons for me.

This is unlikely to be an issue for many other people, and unless you’ve been tap-tap-tapping at a keyboard for 25 years as I have, you’ll likely quite enjoy the page-flipping mechanism on the Kindle.

So, I’m selling my Kindle. The Kindle is sold: only took an hour!

From The History Blog, via my friend Luisa: Pompei in Google Streetview.

One of the outcomes of the erstwhile “smart communities” project in Charlottetown is streaming video of City Council meetings. Unfortunately the technology used for the broadcasting is proprietary Microsoft Windows Media-based, which, among other things, makes it very difficult for non-Windows users to watch the videos. But there are ways.

On an Intel Mac (i.e. a relatively modern Mac, not an older Power PC-based one) here’s what you need to do:

1. Install rev11 of MPlayer for OS X. Note that this isn’t the current version of MPlayer for OS X, it’s the previous revision. But it’s the only one that will work, at least for the time-being.
2. From the main MPlayer site, download and install the “Binary Codec Packages” for “Mac OS X x86” – right now the link is this one.
3. Use MPlayer to open the links to videos you find here – like mms://142.176.19.86/Archive/Dec09.wmv, for example.

The video and audio quality are atrocious – it’s not clear how much of this is due to MPlayer and how much of it is due to the quality of the original broadcast. Oh, and you can neither rewind nor fast forward. Here’s what it looks like when it’s working:

By the way, if you’re interested in looking inside the PHP code that drives “The Talking Bus,” the code for the Asterisk AGI script – thebus.php – is open source.

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