Jott is a very neat concept: after you sign up for an account, you phone a toll-free number, speak a destination (“me” or “mom” or “pat binns”) and then dictate a message. Jott takes your message, converts it to text, and delivers it to the destination you specified.

My first test of the service didn’t work all that well, though. My message was:

I need to contact Diane Griffin about the report for the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust.

The Jott transcription of the message was:

I need to contact Diana Crissine about the report for Allan land trust.

To the service’s credit, the words it didn’t recognize properly were proper names, and I did have the option of spelling those out (proper names are the bête noire of text-to-speech and OCR).

Market focus on Canada is an article in the expat-focused GuardianAbroad website providing a basic overview for non-Canadians looking to purchase property here. Always interesting to see the country from the outside in.

By the way, the Humber Valley Resort in Newfoundland mentioned in the article was the subject of an episode of Venture’s Dreamers and Schemers on CBC Television last season (you can likely catch it as a re-run on Newsworld this spring or summer).

An interesting side-note to their story: the airline they charter to ferry Europeans to Deer Lake, Newfoundland is the self-same Monarch Airlines that we flew last month from London to Lisbon.

Last night while waiting for the bus uptown, I stopped in at Indigo to get out of the rain and browse around for a while. In the cookbook section I came across a couple of volumes from German publisher Gräfe & Unzer in a series they call “basics” and I ended up purchasing Vegetarian Basics, which turned out to be on sale for about $10.

The design of the books is beautiful: they’re full of colourful photographs of sexy Germans making food (and photos of the sexy food itself), the writing is witty and the recipes simple. They are less “cookbooks” and more “cooking manuals” but without any hint of the prostration required for the “…for Dummies” books.

It turns out that Sebastian Dickhaut, who conceived of the basics series, has a weblog which, although it’s in German (Google’s English translation thereof), is worthwhile reading if you don’t read German for the beautiful photos of food you’ll find there.

There’s more about Sebastian on his personal website; here’s a poorly-translated (by Google) partial biography:

Born I am 1963 in bath Nauheim in Hessen. My father had bought an old hotel before there, had made from this a psychiatric sanatorium and had finally married my nut/mother. At the beginning they still drove in the morning on the supermarket, in order to get food for the hospital kitchen, in which I was dearest during the day. Each noon met we there in a Glaskontor beside the enormous stove, in order to eat with the cooks and physicians to noon.

There are plenty of copies of Vegetarian Basics left at the Charlottetown Indigo, and many copies of the meat- and fish-included Cooking Basics too (which is bound in resplendent yellow). They’re all piled on a table in front of the faux fireplace on the right-hand side of the store.

I mentioned this five years ago, but it bears repeating: Prince Edward Island residents can pay $10 for a “community ID” and get borrowing privileges from the Robertson Library at the University of PEI. Mine was due for an update — since I originally got it many years ago they went all “smart card” — and so I stopped in today and got a new one:

My operative G. tells me that I can somehow parlay this into a card that lets me add cash and use the photocopier in the library too, but I haven’t tried that yet.

Holland College extends similar privileges to Islanders.

Add to this the feature of islandlibraries.ca that lets you request items from the Provincial Library, Holland College and UPEI collections be delivered to your local library.

PEI residents have excellent, free access to a stunning array of library resources.

Make Internet TV, from the same people who bring you the Democracy Player, brings together in one place almost all the information you need to make your own television show on the Internet. Put this together with the secret cache of video gear at UPEI and there’s nothing stopping you.

Over the years I’ve heard rumours about a collection of audio- and video-production gear that’s been accumulated, under various projects and grantings, in the basement of the Robertson Library at the University of PEI. Today, after a meeting upstairs in the Library, I got a cook’s tour of the secret multimedia bunker, and I was floored: there’s enough gear down there to let you film and edit a Hollywood movie.

There’s a full-fledged sound-dampened audio booth with mixing board, digital recording setup, complement of microphones and speakers and next door there’s a ProTools audio editing setup. In other words, you can record everything from a podcast to an album and not have to leave the basement.

And around the corner there are digital video cameras, an AVID non-linear editing suite, and, it would seem, enough mobile gear to let you set up a decent location shoot.

There’s also enough unused computing power to let you run a small anti-ballistic missile program.

It would appear that, for most intents and purposes, the equipment is sitting there left fallow. Although it might require navigating a bureaucratic thicket to figure out how to secure permission to put the gear to use for your own webcast / podcast / documentary / television show / solo acoustic album, I can’t imagine it would be all that difficult.

Often when People Of Ideas get a new one — “I’d really like to make a documentary about…” or “someone should really made a live weekly podcast about…” — they run up against a problems with resources, funding, and/or infrastructure. And if they try to solve those problems they can find all their energy sucked away by the task.

The gear at UPEI — just sitting there ready to be used — dispenses entirely with almost all of these problems. What are you waiting for?

Through an intriguing set of twists and turns (mostly due to the good works of Karin LaRonde), I’ve got 10 minutes on the agenda of the Annual General Meeting of the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market tomorrow night to talk about things we can do to encourage customers of the market to leave their cars at home and take the bus, walk or cycle to the market.

This all started from a wacky idea I presented to Karin last fall where I suggested that, in an effort to get more people than just Oliver and I riding Bus #3 to the market every week, I would offer to pay the bus fare for anyone else who wanted to join us. Over the winter I expanded my thinking to include other non-automobile ways of travel.

I’ve prepared a handout for distribution at the meeting wherein I briefly lay out the effects of all that driving, and provide some information about alternatives, and some suggestions for small actions the market can take.

If you have any additional practical suggestions that I can take forward, please let me know.

Every since reading about Viridian Electricity Meter contest in WIRED magazine in 2001, I’ve wanted one. Except that the designs were all imaginary. It seems there’s now an Newfoundland company that can sell me what I want: look at the PowerCost Monitor:

With a PowerCost Monitor you can tell at a glance how much electricity your home is consuming - moment-to-moment and in total. This is the advantage of real-time feedback on your electricity. Why wait for your electricity bill when you can see what you are spending on electricity as you spend it! Tests in Ontario and elsewhere have proven that householders who use real-time feedback can reduce electricity use by as much as five to 20 per cent.

Best of all, it seems that you don’t even need an electrician to install these units: they strap over top of both electromechanical and electronic meters.

Thanks to the kindness of the lads upstairs, my Mom and Oliver got a chance to experience the Nintendo Wii this afternoon. Mom and I bowled a couple of rounds, played tennis and golf, and went head to head in baseball. During our baseball game it came to pass that I was batting as Jesus (in the baseball game the batting order runs through the “Mii” characters that earlier users of the console have set up; Jesus was batting third). I scored a home run on the first pitch, and Jesus ran the bases. This must be a Sign. A good time was had by all.

Suggesting that media now really is global, I read about (Wallpaper founder and expat Canadian) Tyler Brúlé’s new magazine Monocle on André Ribeirinho’s weblog and then, two days later, found it on the newsstand at Indigo here in Charlottetown.

I’ve only begun to make my way through the first issue — it’s huge — but on first blush it seems to be a cross between The New Yorker and COLORS. The design and organization of the printed magazine and the Monocle website are very compelling. I’ll report back after I’ve finished the issue, but early signs are positive.