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
TL;DR We are recruiting for two positions to help support Olivia: a Supportive Roommate (details) and an Autism Life Skills Coach and Case Manager (details). Maybe you’re interested? And please share these opportunities far and wide. Just under a year ago, Olivia moved into her o … | Continue reading
One of my prized pieces of equipment in the print shop is a numbering machine. It’s an ingenious piece of kit: every time the press makes an impression, the number increments. I’ve used it for raffle tickets and trading cards and, this season, for our This Box is for Good boxes. … | Continue reading
Three items in my inbox this week, all opportunities to learn something new. Climbing Toddlers At Red Rock Climbing Wall, there’s a new Toddler Power Hour every Friday from 4:30 to 5:15, starting February 16th, 2024. From the announcement: An action-packed session of supervised c … | Continue reading
I’ve been using Readwise Reader since it was released in beta, and I love it more than a little: it’s an all-on-one reader app for RSS feeds, email newsletters, PDFs, and ebooks, with helpful tools for annotating, sharing, summarizing, filtering, and searching. Here’s what it loo … | Continue reading
For $5.00, L.L. Bean in Halifax will make you shoelaces in the colour and length of your choice. It takes about 5 minutes. | Continue reading
There used to be a Freshii a few doors up from my office, and it became an occasional lunch spot. At Freshii, you ordered at the cash register, gave your name, and picked up your order with your name printed on it. The first time I went in, I gave my name as Pete, a nickname I ab … | Continue reading
Three culinary discoveries last week, made with Lisa, all clustered around Orwell Bay, east of Charlottetown, and each worthy of a visit. The Boys Comfort Cuisine in Earnscliffe was a referral from our friend Sue, who’s a regular customer. Partners relocated from culinary Montre … | Continue reading
Five years ago I moved my office and letterpress shop from The Guild to the basement of St. Paul’s Parish Hall. It was a helpful move, allowing me to be closer to home—about 45 seconds, if I hurry—to help support teenaged Olivia and ailing Catherine. What I gave up in natural lig … | Continue reading
The personal blog of Peter Rukavina. | Continue reading
My friend Ian lamented, in 2004, in but enough about me, our societal lack of intrapersonal curiosity: Having just returned from another evening deep in the flats of Hollywood, I (shockingly) have a complaint. And this complaint is not even California-centric; it’s just as bad i … | Continue reading
Canadian Tire has now completely switched over to digital price tags, wireless e-ink shelf displays that show the item name, price, and barcode. Under the hood I imagine this both saves hundreds of hours of staff time, and involves running a complicated hundred-thousand-device … | Continue reading
“Do you like pineapple?”, Lisa asked me this morning, as we were sitting on the couch, in the peace between breakfast and the school run. Lisa and I met 516 days ago. Today was the day we broached pineapple. My friends Bill and Michelle are both the same age as I am, born the sam … | Continue reading
As the generous L2 made us breakfast in bed this morning, our planned breakfast meal of smoked salmon bagels got shunted ahead to lunch. “I propose that we take the lunch, get on our bicycles, and go for a picnic,” said Lisa. “Yes!”, I replied. We cycled out Riverside Drive to Mu … | Continue reading
We didn’t plan to visit Lyon on our trip to France: technically this was because we had a “no revisiting places one or the other of us has already been” (with an exception for Paris). Lisa had passed through Lyon on the train at one point, so it got ruled out. But Lyon was halfw … | Continue reading
Sometimes EV charging exigencies call for drastic measures. To McDonald’s France credit, every single piece of packaging on our tray was compostable or reusable, including the French fry container. | Continue reading
New from Beau Miles, The 12 Days of Newness. A delightful idea, delightfully executed. | Continue reading
The personal blog of Peter Rukavina. | Continue reading