Dr. Glendenning died this week.

On the spectrum of thoughts about how we educate our children (and ourselves), there was no one I was more aligned with.

And there was no person who had more lasting influence on education on Prince Edward Island than he.

My friend Dave wrote a loving remembrance.

Brilliant words from Robin Sloan in his latest newsletter:

Consider the printer!

There’s a reason they are the eternal bane of computer users. It’s because, in most systems, they are the bridge between the digital and the physical: the place where a stream of symbols collides with dust, moisture, friction, obstruction … welcome to the real world!

Engineers have been toiling for many decades to perfect the printer, and still, it jams. After all this time, the printer remains, notoriously and hilariously, the weak link.

But it’s not the printer’s fault that it sits across a step-change in complexity; visualize wild vortices, brutal turbulence. The digital, no matter how hard it tries — and it does try — cannot match the gnarl of the physical.

Brilliant in part because, yes, printers. Who among us has not done battle. It’s like the bits actively resist becoming atoms.

(I’ve found the same thing with 3D printers, laser cutters, Cricut machines).

In the same newsletter Sloan writes about magic circles (canonical magic circle video introduction), and includes what amounts to career advice that I would happily offer to anyone:

Think about your work and your interests. If they are fully inside the magic circle of “symbols, in, symbols out”, then your world is changing, and will soon change faster, and it’s probably time to get creative about what you might do differently, and how you might “season” your work with the physical.

“Season your work with the physical,” that’s what Sloan has been doing lately, and it’s at the heart of what I’ve been doing for as long as I can remember.

I received the sad news this morning that my friend Allan Rankin has died.

I was introduced to Allan many years ago: he and Roy Johnstone and I got together to see about having me make websites for them. Both had just released albums, and there was a sense in the air—a tentative, early, faint sense—that musicians should have websites. And so was hatched AllanRankin.com. In the process I became a fan of Allan’s music: rich, evocative, well-crafted songs about the Island he loved so dearly.

Over the years since, our paths crossed innumerable times, personally and professionally. Allan was one of my mentors in how to live a good life in my adopted province, and he bestowed a great compliment on me by calling me a “new growth Islander.”

Allan was witty, creative, contrarian, and wickedly smart. 

While he was a political candidate–he ran for the NDP against then-Premier Alex Campbell in 1974–Allan excelled at being just out of view. He was instrumental in nurturing the careers of many worthy public servants over his years in government. 

He was an incisive writer, both as a songwriter and in the column he wrote for several years for The Eastern Graphic.

By times a New Democrat and a Liberal, Allan ended as a fervant supporter of the Green Party, support that advanced the party’s cause greatly.

My favourite times spent with Allan, though, were at the movies. 

Both fans of action-adventure films, with partners who weren’t, Allan I would meet for late nite showings of the films of Tom Cruise at the Cineplex in Charlottetown, the hour and the circumstance giving an air of international mystery to the affair.

My favourite song of Allan’s is Raise the Dead of Wintertime, a song that only Allan could write, and a song that so-captures a slice of Prince Edward Island. From Allan’s notes about the song:

One perfectly still and beautiful winter’s morning at Christophers Cross, in western Prince Edward Island, Vincent Handrahan hitched up his little morgan horse and we took a ride over the back fields, surveying the supply of fire wood that had been cut and still needed hauling. That sleigh ride, and the hardworking and resourceful people of West Prince, inspired ‘Raise the Dead of Wintertime.’

I cannot help but have a tear come to my eye when I listen to him singing this line:

And when at night we’re by the stove
Our bellies full and our stories told
The winds of winter might blow cold
But none of us will feel it

Goodbye, old friend. I will miss you.

If there’s a lesson about getting on in prison it’s that everywhere there are human communities that don’t rest on authority and coercion and that people form their own neworks of mutual support. 

Distant friends of the blog, Jeremy Cherfas and Edward Hasbrouck, chatted about food in American prisons on the latest episode of of Eat This Podcast.

I’m happy to have played a role in midwifing the episode.

Nolan Lawson, in We mourn our craft:

Someday years from now we will look back on the era when we were the last generation to code by hand. We’ll laugh and explain to our grandkids how silly it was that we typed out JavaScript syntax with our fingers. But secretly we’ll miss it.

We’ll miss the feeling of holding code in our hands and molding it like clay in the caress of a master sculptor. We’ll miss the sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that eventually relents to the debugger at 2 AM. We’ll miss creating something we feel proud of, something true and right and good. We’ll miss the satisfaction of the artist’s signature at the bottom of the oil painting, the GitHub repo saying “I made this.”

I worked professionally as a computer programmer from 1980 to 2023, so I have 43 years of experience “sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that eventually relents to the debugger at 2 AM.” 

I wrote millions of lines of code, from scratch; a good chunk of that was without benefit of the Internet, and its infinite reference library. None of it was AI-assisted.

I know the power—and the frustration, oh the frustration—of code, test, iterate, test, iterate, test. It’s how I learned my craft, it’s how I developed an intimate relationship with the machine.

Like Lawson, I will miss the “feeling of holding code in our hands,” both as a trade and as a sort of spiritual practice.

Our friends Mike and Jessica, owners of The Gallery, the coffee shop around the corner from our house, were closed for a few weeks this winter for renovations. Because we had some experience using a Cricut to make vinyl signs, we were recruited to create some signage for the renovated space (which reopened today!).

We created and mounted two pieces.

One is for the freezer filled with frozen soup:

The vinyl for this sign was Oracal 631 Cyan. It cut beautifully on the Charlottetown Library Makerspace Cricut, and was very easy to “weed” and mount.

The second piece was for the large main room in the café:

Jessica came up with the wording — art is connection / connection is community — and I found the spirit of the words by aligning the two “connections” above each other.

This vinyl was Cricut removable black “SMART” vinyl (which means it doesn’t need to be cut with a backing board). It was someone more challenging to weed, and the large size (almost 5 feet wide) made it trickier for Lisa and I to mount, but we figured it out.

We’re very happy to have been able to contribute a little to one of our favourite places to spend time.

For the last while I’ve felt like our monthly electricity bill has been creeping up significantly. I generally pay the bills in a rush of paperwork, so can’t claim to have been paying careful attention, but a simple check of January 2021 ($95.78) to January 2026 ($180.95) showed me that my intuition was right.

I set out to find the reason.

Fortunately, for the last 12 years I’ve been archiving my home electricity usage using a little device tucked away in a cupboard that connects to my electric meter every few minutes and grabs the current reading. I’ve archived over 750,000 readings in a database, giving me a rich source of data for analyzing trends and, perhaps, identifying the cause for the increase.

Google Gemini has proven very capable at doing this sort of data analysis. I exported a CSV file of the electric meter readings to it, and asked:

This is a CSV of my electric meter readings from 2014 until the present. The relevant columns are datestamp, which contains the date and time, and reading, which is the reading on the electric meter. The readings need to be divided by 100 to get the value in kWh.

I’d like the following:

1. A chart and/or analysis showing when during the day we’re using electricity.
2. A chart showing the trend of daily usage over this period.
3. Any helpful conclusions about whether the gradual increase in consumption from 2014 to present is related to time of day.

It returned some very helpful analysis, including:

Your consumption remained remarkably consistent for the first seven years of this dataset.

2014–2021: You averaged approximately 13–16 kWh per day.

The 2023–2024 Surge: Starting in late 2023, your daily consumption began to climb rapidly. By 2024, your average daily usage reached 28.9 kWh, essentially doubling your historic baseline.

Recent Stability: 2025 and early 2026 show that this higher usage has become the “new normal,” maintaining an average of 23–28 kWh per day.

And:

Comparing the hourly profiles of 2015 vs. 2024/2025 yields a clear answer: The increase in consumption is occurring across all hours of the day, but the impact is most extreme during the evening and overnight.

Evening Intensification: In 2015, your evening peak (8:00 PM) was roughly 0.9 kWh per hour. In 2024/2025, that same peak jumped to nearly 2.0 kWh per hour. This suggests that whatever was added to the home (e.g., a heat pump, EV charging, or new appliances) is being used most heavily during the evening.

Rising Baseload: Your overnight usage (3:00 AM) was historically near-zero (approx. 0.4 kWh/hour). It has now roughly doubled to 0.8–0.9 kWh/hour. This indicates a “phantom load” or an appliance that runs 24/7 (like a heat pump in “maintain” mode or a new large refrigerator/server).

Conclusion: The increase isn’t just a shift in when you use power—it is a massive increase in volume across the board, with the evening peak now being much sharper and more expensive than it was a decade ago.

I followed up:

Is there any date that you can point to where the usage obviously goes up?

The reply to that question included a chart showing the daily usage increase very clearly:

And another chart focusing on the period from mid-August to mid-October:

Its commentary:

The “Smoking Gun”: September 5–10, 2023

While your usage had small fluctuations over the years, there is a dramatic and permanent “step up” that begins the first week of September 2023.

Before Sept 5, 2023: Your daily usage was consistently in the 12–18 kWh range.

After Sept 5, 2023: Your usage immediately spiked into the 35–45 kWh range and has never returned to its old baseline.

…

Since this shift happened in early September (during a period where roof heating wires wouldn’t be in use), and the consumption remained high through the winter and into the following summer, this points to a permanent addition to the household infrastructure.

I went spelunking through my photo archive to see if there was anything that might jog my memory about that time, and, sure enough, I found this receipt from Canadian Tire for a duhumidifier:

A look through my email from the same period confirms that I did, indeed, install the dehumidifier in our (very humid) basement the first week of September 2023.

A followup conversation with Gemini suggested that leaving this unit on 24/7 from that point on could consume as much as 11 kWh per day, which explains a significant chunk of the increase.

At the current cost of 17.3 cents/kWh, the dehumidifier costs us about $60 per month to run.

There are a few other smoking guns—heating wires on the back roof that don’t have a temperature-dependent controller, summertime air conditioning, a fan we run every night to bring fresh air into our bedroom—but it looks like the dehumidifier is the likely cause of the big jump.

As a companion to this video (linked to here), I calculated what it cost me to charge my 2016 Kia Soul EV electric car in 2025: the total was $267.07.

Here’s a summary of where that charging happened, and how much it cost:

Charging at Home

At home I charge the car with an EVDuty level 2 charger. The EVDuty app lets me export my charging session data as CSV files, which I then totalled in a spreadsheet.

• I charged the car at home 78 times.
• Charging used a total of 1,036 kWh of electricity.
• At the going rate of 17.23 cents per kWh, the cost for that electricity was $178.50.

Charging on the Go

Most of the time when I’m on the go I’m charging using level 2 or level 3 chargers that accept the Flo system’s card. The Flo website allows charging data to be exported as an Excel file.

• I charged the car at Flo stations 18 times.
• Charging used a total of 189 kWh of electricity.
• Total Flo charges were $88.58.

Flo chargers bill by time, not by kWh. The effective cost per kWh of my charging at Flo stations was 47 cents.

Otherwise

There are a few other places I can’t account for.

When we’re out by the shore, I charge the card overnight using a level 1 charger plugged into a regular household outlet; I don’t account for that electricity. 

And there were a few times I used free chargers, like the old Sun Country Highway ones, a few of which are still around. 

Combined, I probably charged like this about 10 times.

From this week’s University of Winds:

On Friday, an especially timely video from Technology Connections was published on YouTube: You are being misled about renewable energy technology. I downloaded and watched it on the train. I will watch it again later today.

I so very much want everyone who subscribes to this newsletter to watch this one-hour video because it communicates the best expression that I’ve come across that explains why solar power is both economically inevitable and the best choice for our renewable energy transition even with all the batteries that it will require.

Let me tell you how committed I am to sharing the message that we all must transition to renewable resources and electrify everything: my household took advantage of the last federal interest-free loans and installed solar panels on our garage – which went online this month! – for the non-insignificant cost equivalent of a kitchen remodeling job.

Watching the video is an excellent antidote to what you’ve just been through if you just watching two seasons of Landman. 

I created this to scratch my own itch, but others might find it useful to: you can now subscribe to a daily email summary of Prince Edward Island electricity load and generation.

If you subscribe, every morning just after midnight you’ll receive a summary of the previous day’s data that looks like this:

The “Peak Load” is the maximum amount of electricity required to power PEI on that day, in megawatts, and the time that peak was reached.

For each of the generation types—wind, solar, fossil, imported—I list the peak generation reached that day, and the percentage of the load that generation was meeting at the time of the peak.

Under the chart there’s a note about what percentage that day’s peak load was of the highest peak load ever.

This newsletter is an experiment; don’t build systems or practices that rely on it, as the experiment might not work or be maintained for the long term.

Oh, and if you’d prefer an RSS feed for the same summary, here it is.