There’s a certain sort of “PIN pad” — the gizmo that you type your PIN into when paying with a debit or PIN-enabled credit card — here in Canada that looks like this:

Starting last year many restaurants that use this sort of PIN pad have opted to enable a feature that allows customers to add a tip to the bill by selecting one of three options: nothing, a percentage of the total bill, or a dollar amount. These options are presented on the display as $0, % and $ and you need to press one of the three top buttons to select your choice.

The percentage option is my favourite and so I’m left to press the middle button. But for the longest time, no matter what restaurant I was at, I couldn’t get the middle button to work; I thought the button was broken, but it seemed odd that it would be broken at all restaurants.

It turns out that although the three buttons look the same, they work differently: the right and left buttons are “push in”-style whereas the middle button is a “toggle up or down” button. And if you try to “push in” the middle button, it doesn’t work, and seems like it’s broken.

There’s a subtle indication of this difference in the design of the buttons: the right and left buttons have a white background and the middle button has small “up” and “down” arrows on it. But the indication is so subtle that, especially in a busy restaurant with a line at the cash where you’re not able to study the PIN pad in detail, it’s not enough to signal the difference.

And, indeed, there shouldn’t be a difference: the three buttons to select three equally viable options should operate in the same fashion.

Even though I know about this UI quirk, I still get caught by it most of the time.

I’ve spent the week experimenting with the Minimap Sidebar, a Firefox extension that adds a variety of mapping-related tools to the browser. It’s an amazing piece of work, and almost every “I wonder if it will do this” turns out “wow, it does.”

For example, I was able to grab my “personal landmark collection” from Plazes by logging into and visiting the KML feed of my Plazes. Because Minimap will import KML files, I then simply imported the KML file and now have a local copy of every place I’ve visited in the last five years. Here’s what it looks like zoomed in to Charlottetown:

Minimap also allows you to copy and drag addresses from any web page into the sidebar to have the addresses shown on the map and added to your personal collection:

Keen eyes might spot that it’s an OpenStreetMap map displaying there: that’s because Minimap supports all manner of Google Maps as well as OpenStreetMap as the base map. Other cools things that Minimap supports:

• Import of locations from KML and GPX files.
• Export of locations from KML, GPX and CSV files.
• Automatic detection of microformat-represented locations in web pages with option to map.
• Integration with Yahoo’s Fire Eagle web service.
• Tagzania integration.

And because Minimap is just a regular old Firefox extension, the complete JavaScript source code is freely browseable and modifiable (indeed you can grab the source using Subversion). And because the extension is GPL licensed, you can built on it to create and release your own custom browser-based mapping toolkit.

Minimap’s performance when you throw a lot of locations at it degrades somewhat; I’m assuming that this is, in part, because it uses RDF to store locations (my RDF file — it’s flock_maps.rdf in the Firefox profile directory — runs to 13,000 lines long for the 736 locations I have stored). I’ve been in touch with the extension’s author about the possibility of migrating the storage engine to SQLite and he said this is in the works (and, further, pointed me to SpatiaLite, which I didn’t know about and that looks very cool).

All in all a brilliant piece of work and an extension that, if you’re interested in GIS, location, mapping and how they all relate to the web, is worthy of a look.

Back in the depths of winter the folks at Taylor’s Taters at the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market, the official potato, turnip and carrot supplier to our family, announced to us that this would be their last season at the Market as this was the year to retire and sell the farm.

I reminded Oliver of this fact this morning at the Market and suggested we do something to mark the occasion. Unfortunately this caused Oliver to panic at the thought that he would never again be able to eat potatoes, turnips or carrots and to salve his distress I suggested we could go and talk to the Taylor’s Taters people and seek recommendations for alternative sources of same.

Much to our collective relief we learned, on doing this, that the retirement has been delayed a year, seed for this years crop has been ordered, and Taylor’s Taters will live to see another year.

Oliver, needless to say, was delighted that he’ll have potatoes, turnips and carrots in his diet through at least 2010.

Confusion has reigned out at the University of PEI Sports Centre for the past month as the general locker rooms have been closed for renovations and smaller team locker rooms temporarily re-purposed for we fitnessing civilians. A situation made somewhat more complicated by the impending switch to a more secure access policy for the entire facility that will involve much more card swiping to gain entry.

Now confusion of this small scale is usually something that can be mitigated by strategic use of signage. And on the card-swiping front there were clear notices posted well in advance all over the place.

As to the locker rooms, well:

Setting aside the fact that the dates have slipped (it’s 5 days after the March 30 reopening date promised), the overlapping mess of signs says, in essence “don’t go here; no, wait, yes go here; no wait, don’t go here.”

Perhaps I quibble about something trivial? But working out, at least for me, is already fraught with enough stress (remember locker combination, avoid accidental penis gazing, remember to drink enough water, don’t die, etc.) that problems left gaping that could easily be solved by better communication are confounding.

I’ve had a GrandCentral account kicking around for a while, and today I checked in and found out that I was eligible for a free migration to Google Voice (think “Gmail, but for telephone calls”). Once of the nice features of Google Voice is its automatic transcription of incoming voicemail messages. To test this out I left myself a message, which it transcribed as:

hi peter it’s peter regarding a calling i would like to get together with you this afternoon to me about the penske file could you give me a call when you get a chance at (785) 756-0000 again your regarding a (785) 756-0000 thanks talk to you soon

Here’s the MP3 they recorded that was used for the transcription. Not a bad job, but certainly not perfect, especially near the end.

Remember Cafe Diem, the summer-only coffee shop on Victoria Row in Charlottetown? Well after its initial multi-year run as a Rodney Jones joint, followed by a summer managed by Mamdouh Elgharib, this summer, sources say, it will be operated by The Murphy Group, another step in their complete assimilation of all Charlottetown eateries.

If you’re confused, remember there’s always the handy Which Murphy is Which? page.

Good news: starting this Saturday, April 4, 2009 there will be regular bus service to the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market. Kudos to Trius Transit and the Market folks for working to make this happen.

The bus — it’s just a re-routing of the regular Route #1 with some additional runs — leaves the Confederation Centre of the Arts every 30 minutes starting at 9:00 a.m. and running to 1:30 p.m. and the trip takes about 15 minutes.

Buses from the Market back downtown leave at 10 and 38 minutes past the hour from 9:10 a.m. to 2:10 p.m.

Buses run up University Avenue to the Atlantic Superstore, making all regular stops, and then down Belvedere Avenue to the Market, turning left into the University of PEI and running around the UPEI access route to the regular UPEI pickup off University Ave., and then continuing to the Charlottetown Mall as usual. On the return run buses do the reverse, circling around the back of UPEI and out by the Market.

Regular fare ($2) and transfer protocols are in force. On Saturday, as usual, you can get automated telephone schedule information about the next bus by dialling 367-3694.

This is a three month trial period so, please, if you’ve any interest in this being a regular option for getting to the Market, show up in force this Saturday and demonstrate that the service is useful. Tell your friends!

If you’re looking for a hearty lunch in Charlottetown today to take the edge off the return of winter, I highly recommend the Chicken-Tomato Soup at Leonhard’s. It’s served with a slice of olive baguette, and it’s fantastic.

For those of you living in places where “spring” means “balmy breezes wafting over the cherry blossoms,” here is what it means on Prince Edward Island:

At Heathrow Airport last weekend I picked up the April 2009 issue of Emigrate magazine, a magazine targeted at British residents interested in emigration to Australia, New Zealand, the USA or Canada. Prince Edward Island is mentioned a few times in this issue; for example, in the Destination Doctor feature: