My latest column for The Local is out! I discuss how climate change is pushing Toronto weather to extremes, Council’s patchy track record on going low-carbon, and the large and small things Olivia Chow can do to change that. Plus, the literal train wreck in Scarborough and two special upcoming meetings at City Hall.
New CBC MP3 stream URLs
Rejoice, Winamp users, the CBC MP3 streams are back! Many thanks to commenter AJNorth for finding a list of still-working MP3 URLs, and GitHub user canuckken for providing the Wikipedia page with radio station call letters.
Once more, here’s the playlists with all the stream URLs on Codeberg, and see the original blog post for more details.
CBC MP3 stream URLs down
Another update on the CBC radio stream URLs: as various people have kindly let me know, the MP3 links are down, probably for good. The M3U8 links still work, and most modern apps and devices should be able to handle them. However, I’m afraid legacy users are out of luck. Update, July 30: the MP3 links are back!
I’ve also moved the repo to Codeberg; however, the changes should be automatically mirrored on Github.
For more details, see the main blog post.
Tracking Olivia Chow’s First 100 Days as Toronto Mayor
In Olivia Chow, Toronto has its first progressive mayor in 12 years. How will she tackle the city’s many critical issues? Will City Council’s power balance shift? My new column for The Local tracks Chow’s first 100 days. In the first installment, I look at how the mayor—and organizers on the ground—addressed the asylum seeker crisis that unfolded at 129 Peter St. Plus, a few key items from this week’s Council meeting.
How to Choose a Mastodon/Fediverse Server
Featured image by @nestort@mastodont.cat, via Wikimedia.
In a previous blog post, I recommended some Mastodon servers for people moving to the Fediverse. Since then, the great migration of November 2022 happened, and an awful lot of those servers turned out to be horrifically ill-equipped for the increase in users. I don’t mean in terms of technical infrastructure, but governance and moderation.
So instead, I’m going to talk about what to look for in a server, rather than recommending any particular ones. Continue reading How to Choose a Mastodon/Fediverse Server
The Local: How Toronto’s Mayoral Candidates Plan to Address the Housing Crisis
How Toronto’s Mayoral Candidates Plan to Address the Housing Crisis
Yet another municipal election is nigh. In my new piece for The Local, I analyze six top mayoral candidates’ housing platforms, which range from ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ to an ambitious return to the days of government-built mixed-income social housing on a large scale.
Just the numbers (this table is in the article, too):
| Saunders | Bradford | Bailão | Chow | Hunter | Matlow | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total cost | Unspecified | Unspecified | $49M | $404M | $1B | $407M |
| Source | Not taxes | Not taxes | City Building Fund (existing) | City Building Fund increase | Property tax increase, reserve funds | Cancelling Gardiner East, freezing police bucget |
| Units | Unspecified | At least 16,000 (as in original Housing Now plan) | HousingTO targets, provincial mandate of 285,000 | 10,000–25,000 | 22,700 | 15,000 |
| Affordability | At least some units in developments on city-owned land | 33% of housing on under-utilized city-owned land, 20% in office conversions | 40,000 affordable rentals and 4,000 affordable ownership by 2030 | At least 7,500 at 80% AMR, 2,500 at 30% AMR | 5,660 at AMR, 3,468 at 80% AMR, 2,108 at 40% AMR, 6,135 affordable ownership | 45% affordable rental (30% at AMR, 10% at 80% AMR, 5% rent geared to income, or at 30-40% AMR); subject to consultations |
CBC radio stream URL update
It’s that time of year again: the CBC has changed the streaming URLs for Radio 1 and CBC Music, so I’ve updated the gist. Ici Première, Ici Musique, and the MP3 version are unaffected. For more information about why and how to use these, see the original post.
Arachtober 2022
I don’t always manage it, but this year I managed to post arachnids every day of #Arachtober! For those who don’t want to page through the thread, here’s an album of them all in one place. Continue reading Arachtober 2022
Introducing flipping.rocks
So I’ve recommended Mastodon servers in the past, but now I’m taking the leap and starting an instance of my own: flipping.rocks. In this post, I’ll tell you a little about it. Continue reading Introducing flipping.rocks
The Local: Candidate Tracker
The municipal election is nigh. I’ve been working behind the scenes, contributing research for The Local’s Candidate Tracker. Check it out—you can read up on Council candidates’ backgrounds, see where they stand on issues like shelter, affordable housing, and police funding, and compare them to incumbent councillors’ voting records.