There’s a slight smell of sulphur ever-present here in Serrazzano, and I used this as inspiration for my first printing experiment last week. By chance, there was a very sulphuric yellow at the ready. Today, in a mad dash to the finish line, keen to print with some of the luscio … | Continue reading
Sunday morning in Serrazzano. | Continue reading
L. and I drove a harrowing 20 minutes to get groceries yesterday. The most expensive item we bought was an 8-pack of Crodino, a non-alcoholic aperitif I’ve grown fond of, which was €6.25; meanwhile, the litre of red wine for supper was €1.51. We were billed 2 cents each for the c … | Continue reading
“Time to dry” is one of the significant limiting factors when you have just five days of press time, especially when multiple layers are involved. Yesterday, late in the day, the box design evolved to the point where we knew we needed to print solid colours on all the boxes befor … | Continue reading
Our apartment above the print shop in Serrazzano is heated by a woodstove in the kitchen. We’ve landed in Western Europe during some unseasonably cold weather; nearly everyone we tells us that it was so wonderfully warm “just a few weeks ago.” It’s 8°C outside this morning, thou … | Continue reading
It’s our first working day in Serrazzano. After a tour of the shops—printmaking is three floors down from our apartment; letterpress is reached by walking through a labyrinthine set passageways and steps—I set out to acclimate to the letterpress shop by printing something. | Continue reading
Pasted on a wall in Lucca, Italy. From the Movimento per l’Emancipazione della Poesia. | Continue reading
Here, by some miracle of privilege, luck, and tenacity, is the view from our home for the next five days, in Serrazzano, Italy. We are here for a printmaking residency at Two Cents Press. | Continue reading
Here’s me, explaining This Box is for Good to Frank Meeuwsen in the central train station in Utrecht. We didn’t need Dopplr for Frank to deduce we were in The Netherlands and ping me; from there, a plan was hatched to meet up and hand over four of the hot-off-the-presses Hilversu … | Continue reading
We are on day ten of our European odyssey, and we’ve already cycled in three countries. Lisa and I used the Malmö city bike scheme to make a run to the art supply store; in Copenhagen we rented bicycles for three of us to ride from the city centre to the Experimentarium science m … | Continue reading
I was sad to hear of the recent death of Sibyl Cutcliffe.While Sibyl was known for many things, including her service on Charlottetown City Council, I knew her as an early web pioneer. Sibyl acquired a WebTV in the late 1990s—the device was essentially an “Internet terminal” tha … | Continue reading
Deventer is the birthplace of Samuel Holland, who, among other things, led the survey of colonial Prince Edward Island and named Charlottetown. We just passed through on the train from Osnabrück to Hilversum. I had a similar brush with Deventer in 2014. | Continue reading
In 2005, on the closing night my first Reboot conference, I had supper at Cofoco. It was, in a number of ways, life-changing: Halfway through reboot, I decided that, fuck it, I had to just jump off. Pretend I wasn’t terrified, and see what played out. I went down to the “sign up … | Continue reading
Six years ago, the same neighbourhood. Olivia and I took an Uber to the railway station, on a rainy morning, and caught the train to Berlin. I didn’t know then that I wouldn’t return to Malmö for an eternity of topsy turvy. At supper the other night I told Olle and Luisa that I … | Continue reading
You hear that you can use a colander to see the solar eclipse, and it seems absurd, but you try it anyway, and it turns out to be the highlight of the experience. | Continue reading
The night I invented the Dirty Caper Martini. 3 parts vodka, 1 part vermouth, a splash of caper brine, shaken and filtered. Finish with a few capers. The things one is forced to do when the olives have run out. | Continue reading
Photo by Stephan Mosel. Some rights reserved. I turned 58 today. I was partially under the impression, for the last year, that I was already 58, so this seems like a bonus year: I get to be 58 again! Olivia and I were talking the other day about the number of things that 2024 rep … | Continue reading
Every once in a while you’d hear the rumour that Kris Kristofferson had a summer place on the Island, somewhere east of Charlottetown. Perhaps in one of the Keppochs. I do recall looking in the phone book once, and seeing a listing for “Kristofferson, K,” and I remember that bein … | Continue reading
Starting in my second year of high school, I was the president of the Computer Club. In the computer room at WDHS, right opposite the main office, there was a nascent computer lab, overseen by Mr. Shields, a chemistry teacher by day, but shepherd of the computers extracurricularl … | Continue reading
I remember thinking, when Apple Pay was released in 2014, “why on earth would I want to pay for things with my phone?!” It just seemed so cumbersome, fumbling with a phone to pay for a coffee. That’s what the things in my wallet are for! Fast forward ten years: I don’t even bothe … | Continue reading
I just published a detailed blow by blow of our March edition of This Box is for Good. | Continue reading
A notice came over the wire on Monday that Prince Street would be closed on Wednesday morning for “tree maintenance.” Our street, like most of Charlottetown, has lost a lot of trees in the last few years; Queen Square, and the St. Paul’s Anglican Church yard has been particularly … | Continue reading
Dave Atkinson, in yesterday’s edition of The Quack, reflecting on COVID lock-down from four years out: I tend to think of the early lock-down era as a lovely break from life that we were all unfortunately too scared and stressed out to enjoy. I do remember saying out loud I hoped … | Continue reading
Colin and Samir interviewed Jacob Collier, which led me to this BBC documentary about him. He is a fascinating phenom; clearly I’m late to the Jacob Collier party. | Continue reading
The first crocuses of the year appeared in the front garden at 100 Prince Street today, March 14. See also 2020 (March 24), 2021 (March 12), 2022 (March 18), 2023 (March 20). | Continue reading
This little video featuring Flatland Cavalry is a delight. We don’t have to do this like that Comin’ at it like a heart attack And all our tears can’t wash the hurt away It’s a shame we had to fall this far To find the bottom of a broken heart Ain’t nothin’ left down this path We … | Continue reading
Other than simply “being able to browse the web,” I have four specific things I need in my web browser of choice: Available for both my MacBook Air and my iPhone (and syncs bookmarks and browsing history between the two). Supports 1Password for password management. Supports Kagi … | Continue reading
Lisa and I have given This Box is for Good a website all its own. | Continue reading
Ann Patchett, in These Precious Days: I hadn’t meant this as a dating strategy, but it functioned as one just the same, so I pass this along as advice: if you meet someone you like and you have the means to do so, ask that person to go with you to Vienna. | Continue reading
A few years ago James A. Reeves threw sunshine on Prince Edward Island, and on Clark and me: Today I noticed two of my favorite blogs come from Prince Edward Island. Over the past few years, Peter Rukavina and Clark MacLeod have become welcome presences in my feed that epitomize … | Continue reading
The Funniest, Simplest Game to Play Before Dinner: So, this week, the boys and I went to dinner with our friend Grace, and while we waited for our food, we played the funniest simple game. As a group, you try to count to 20, and anyone can call out each number, but two people can … | Continue reading
Thelma writes about her parents’ trip to Miami, 60 years ago this month, and how it conflued with world events. A lovely story. | Continue reading
How to buy sustainable salmon: an expert guide to navigating the nuance of eco-labels is a helpful guide. Smoked salmon on a bagel is a Saturday morning ritual here, after two decades of it being a Saturday morning Charlottetown Farmers’ Market ritual for me and Olivia. In the tr … | Continue reading
The personal blog of Peter Rukavina. | Continue reading
I’m posting this here as a service to the stymied. My 1Password, both on mobile and desktop, was complaining about being “offline,” despite my not actually being offline. The error message on the desktop, accompanied by a red cloud icon in the app’s toolbar with a slash through i … | Continue reading
Polly Coles writes, in The Politics of Washing, her memoir of living a year in Venice with her husband and four children, about a vaporetto that carries only residents, not tourists: But it is not only colour and numbers that distinguish the passengers on the Three; it is a subtl … | Continue reading
This is a very niche post, which I write simply to help others who fall in the niche with me; the rest of you can move right along. As I’ve mentioned before in passing, my RSS reader of choice these days is Reader, from the team that brought us Readwise (itself an estimable “high … | Continue reading
I am a paying customer of Kagi, decamping from a lifetime of Google as my default search engine. The search results are almost always better than Google’s, especially for the non-commercial web. Like every other toaster on the planet, Kagi is using AI to deliver what they call ”q … | Continue reading
Through his weekly People and Blogs newsletter, Manuel Moreale is emerging as a sort of “Aslan of the small web.” With Phil Gyford, whose ooh.directory is an old-style-Yahoo! directory of “blogs about every topic,” Kagi’s Small Web search, and Marginalia’s search, the personal, n … | Continue reading
I’ve been working out, twice a week, one-on-one, with Coach Cayla, for the last 22 weeks. That’s almost 50 workouts; a lot of Bulgarian Box Jump Reverse Crunches. As Lisa will attest, in the early days I used to drag myself home from the gym, exhausted. I just wanted to lie down. … | Continue reading
In letterpress, lockup is the process of assembling a jigsaw puzzle of rectangles around the type to lock it all in place, with the ultimate goals of (a) having it not fall out while on the press and (b) having all the type level, so that it gets inked evenly and prints uniformly … | Continue reading
Lisa and I walked up to CBC Charlottetown this morning to record an interview with Matt Rainnie about our This Box is for Good project. As usual, Matt was an amiable and welcoming host. | Continue reading
We played a rousing game of Monopoly with my mother last week, using an older game that came from my sister-in-law’s family. I love the typography and the concision of the “Brief Idea of the Game” section: | Continue reading
The other morning at breakfast we were wondering what percentage of squirrels are online. We were wondering this because, the previous day, I’d left a This Box is for Good box filled with chocolate on the doorstep of a friend, and Lisa wondered if, before it got to her, it might … | Continue reading
François Chollet, software engineer and AI researcher at Google, writes on Twitter (via Simon Willison): People seem to be falling for two rather thoughtless extremes: 1. “LLMs are AGI, they work like the human brain, they can reason, etc.” 2. “LLMs are dumb and useless.” Reality … | Continue reading
I’ve been scheduling interviews for the last few days, and part of that job has involved taking a spreadsheet exported from Typeform (where we collected responses to a questionnaire from candidates) and trying to find a way to make a report from it. You’d think this would be easy … | Continue reading
The East Pointers released Stronger Than You Know a couple of years ago: The sound when the power goes out Is so quiet and so loud The wind’s blowing in some hard It could knock your house down Big waves and murky waters Snow beaten sons and daughters Hold on a little longer You’ … | Continue reading
Almost forty years ago I drove across North America with my friend Joanna, from Peterborough, Ontario to Vancouver, BC. We crossed over from Canada to the US in Sault Ste. Marie, and as we made our way through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, it became evident that it was deer hu … | Continue reading