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7 min read 07

UofWinds 431, Week 07 2026: Community Lighthouses, What does it mean to make something, Simon Willison's Tools


Good morning. I'm writing at my desk, surrounded by a trio of beverages: a coffee, water in a sticker covered YETI bottle, and a small thermos carrying the extras of a smoothie that I made yesterday. I'm moving slowly on account that I'm just coming out of a cold that is lingering.

It is a long weekend here, not on account of Valentine's Day, but because Monday is Family Day in Ontario. It's also the start of the spring break at the university where I work, so many of my colleagues and friends have scattered elsewhere. But I will be staying put this week, only planning for a family vacation for the end of April. Our tentative destinations are Vancouver and Vancouver Island.

As I am writing this, I am somehow able to listen to the 12 February episode of BBC Radio 3's Night Tracks program. I found this particular episode so enjoyable that I captured it as a playlist that exists for you to sample if you perhaps need music to stretch time into the eternal.

Community Lighthouses


I have a Google Slide deck where I collect images that strike me in the moment. I cut and paste images that I've stumbled upon, just like if it was a paper scrapbook. In some ways, it resembles a photo-journal, as I have the intention of collecting at least one image a week. This collection is just for me, but if you would like to subscribe to a newsletter that shares striking photos over the last week, then let me bring your attention to Reading the Pictures which I learned about from Nancy Friedman.

The editor of Reading the Pictures selected this image from the Bad Bunny Halftime Super Bowl, but for my slide deck, I decided to capture an image of Benito carrying the light-blue version of the flag of Puerto Rico, walking towards the camera, with three light poles in the background. It was a visual complaint of the corporate capture of the PR energy grid and it pleased me immensely.

Earlier this month, I published a blog post entitled, How I Generate Solar Power (and why). Here's a very short excerpt that introduces the idea that there are two ways to set up your solar panels: attached to the electrical grid or attached to a battery.

Another thing that’s good to know is that if you opt to connect to the electrical grid rather than an on-site battery, is you are considered a part of the grid. If your local grid goes down, then your solar inverter will also shut down. This is by design to ensure that there are no live-wires that can endanger workers who are addressing the power outage. If you live in a place where the grid is unreliable, you are more likely to opt for solar + battery storage. Where I live, the grid is very reliable so I’ve opted for net-metering.

If you live in a place where you cannot trust the local grid to provide reliable electrical power, then it makes more sense to capture electricity in a local battery so that you can draw from its reserves in case the power goes out. One of the challenges of solar power is that it requires finances and financing that makes for a high up-front cost that only will pay for itself over time. Without appropriate financial instruments to allow the less-affluent to take advantage of solar, only those with resources can prepare themselves with stored energy in case of power outages.

This is why I am so glad that the Community Lighthouse project exists.

The Community Lighthouse Project, organized by Together New Orleans, seeks to build a network of 85 congregations and community institutions equipped with commercial-scale solar power and back-up battery capacity across New Orleans. Power outages are the leading cause of disaster-related death in Louisiana and the Gulf Coast. Community Lighthouse aims to stop those preventable tragedies. 127 Energy is proud to be leading the project development of each Community Lighthouse site, coordinating the design, implementation and operation of the solar plus storage microgrids at each location. The long-term goal is to ultimately develop 500 Community Lighthouses all throughout the state of Louisiana so everyone can be just a short walk away from electricity when they need it, starting with those communities most at risk. Already with 15 Community Lighthouses operating to date, it is the largest renewable energy community resilience hub network in the world.

While I love the name of Community Lighthouse, as it feels like a nod to Adam Greenfield's Lifehouse, the proper term for such a set up is a local energy network [ht].

What does it mean to make something?


What does it mean to make something? is the title of the most recent post of the best-named newsletter in the world, You Have Run Out of Complementary Articles by Bijan Stephen.

Last night I did something unusual: I went to a comedy show to see a friend's friend do standup. I know, right? Thing is, it was delightful. (This is a rare thing.) And it got me thinking again about a question I've been rotating in my mind for the last couple months: what does it mean to make something? Those comedians were up on stage (there wasn't a stage) performing new jokes to people they didn't know because they wanted to.
The thought hit with the force of revelation, possibly because of the drinks. But it felt resonant. Performing at the back room of a bar on a Thursday night isn't going to make you famous, even if you are farming crowdwork clips for the disaffected scrollers on TikTok. And everyone in the room knew it. They were there because they wanted to be, because they loved the thing they were doing. It was about simple pleasure. And sex jokes.
So again: What does it mean to make something?

I have been thinking about the same question as of late.

Am I currently (secretly) making something? No.

Am I reading about how other people are making something? Yes. That's what I'm doing. Again.

I've long been curious about the process that an art student goes through to become an artist on the other side. I've picked up books filled with prompts for artists and have read how artists think through their work, but the process still felt opaque to me. I have always struggled with a stubborn need to know a why before the how, and this stubbornness does not always serve me well.

But this week, I finished a book that helped me see what happens in the classrooms of some of the most prestigious design and art programs in the United States.

Learning to See is an engaging and profound account of how professional artists and designers create and how they teach others to do it. Keith Sawyer, a leading creativity researcher, spent over ten years interviewing a hundred professors who've taught in 50 different colleges, universities, and institutes. He also interviewed students to learn about the personal transformation they go through as they learn to see and think like successful creative professionals. Learning to See describes project assignments and studio class sessions in over 20 different disciplines, revealing the shared essence of art and design.

Learning to See is the result of an exhaustive research project in educational pedagogy in the visual arts and as such, it isn't a book I would recommend to everyone. But for me, it was revelatory to have first-hand observations of how art schools teach a creative process that generates results that are of the artist and not an instantly readable cliché, and how the same process can also lead to creative design that does communicate something more readily understandable but with a new perspective. My favourite chapter was about how art professors engage in studio talk – open-ended, non-committal observations that are framed from the perspective of the work and not the artist – that sometimes frustrate art students who don't always understand or appreciate that what they are hearing is a way of thinking about the process of art.

There is, of course, still mystery that remains at the heart of the creation of art. The creative process requires us to draw upon our intuition and to pay attention to what catches our attention. The process requires experimentation, observation, and working with materials and noticing how the materials respond and making choices accordingly. One makes a body of art with one's whole body.

Simon Willison's Tools


When I had the opportunity to use research funds as part a new position at work, I chose to acquire a MacBook, specifically so I could make use of Simon Willison's Datasette, an open source tool for exploring and publishing data.

Simon hasn't been updating Datasette much as of late, as he has been fearlessly exploring many facets of what Ai and LLMs can do and sharing what he's learned at a rate that is, frankly, difficult to keep up with.

Simon has also provided a set of online tools that I've found quite useful. Some of these tools will require connecting to a paid version of an LLM, but the ones that I have used are tools that are not only free, but they run in the web browser, so I don't have to worry about uploading files to some unknown server somewhere.

I haven't used all these tools, but these are the ones that I have bookmarked in case I may need them later:

Image and media

Text and document

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