I just signed up for a Swurl account and have been poking around the service to see what it can do. At first it seemed very much like Tumblr, which I have been using for a while now, but there are some notable differences. Swurl can only import certain types of feeds, as opposed to Tumblr which can handle just about anything. Swurl also has a commenting feature (titled Recent Conversations) that is really quite handy, and heaven knows I’ve often wished Tumblr had a native commenting feature. Swurl also creates a Timeline page for each user that visualizes their online activity. It’s nothing fancy, but interesting to look at and easy to scan. I’m not quite sure if it is a good thing to see the time I’ve spent online since 2005 in such a condensed format. In a way it is almost sad.

Swurl is very new, so I’m curious to see what sort of features they will be adding. I’d be very glad for the ability to pull in my blog feeds and my shared items for Google Reader.

Meet Oscar. He (she?) is the mouse that lives outside of my window. The bedroom in this new house is in the half-exposed basement. Oscar showed up after breakup this spring and is getting pretty fat and happy living off the seeds that fall from the bird feeder right above the entrance to his little mouse home.

I’d be much happier if he were eating the carpenter ants that have been snooping around that side of the house.

Solution: Send the Google Reader Shared Items feed through Tumblr and connect Tumblr to Disqus to enable comments. Granted, this solution is definitely a hackaround and far from elegant - but it gets the job done. At least until some genius-angel with free time comes along and solves this properly.

Step 1: Get the feed address(s) from your Shared Items pages in Google Reader.

My Shared Items page is here if you want to see what one looks like.

Step 2: Log into your Tumblr account and from the Dashboard follow the Customize link.

Click on the Feeds link in the menu across the top of the new page and “Automatically import my”… *RSS Feed* as *Links with descriptions*, then paste the address of your Shared Items from Google Reader into the Feed URL field. Finish the process by clicking the Start Importing this Feed button. Voila, Tumblr will start pulling in the feed(s).

Step 3: This is where you connect Disqus to enable comments. Log into your Disqus account, go to the Dashboard and find the Blog Integration button. Select Tumblr as the platform. Copy/Paste the code you are given and follow the instructions for placing it into your Tumblr template.

Step 4: Copy the two snippets of code from Disqus into your Tumblr template. Access your Tumblr template by going back to your Tumblr account to Dashboard -> Customize -> Theme. I would be more specific about what to edit, but your template may be different than mine. Your best bet is to follow the Discus guide on the same page you were given the two snippets of code.

You can check out what the final product looks like at my Tumblr page (I also pull in a couple other feeds such as my del.icio.us links). Notice the comment count is displayed for each item now. Now that it is all said and done you’re ready for comments on your Shared Reading. Don’t forget to tell your friends where they can find the link. I pull mine back into this site into the sidebar by using the feed generated by Tumblr.

If you find a more elegant and customizable solution than this one, I’m very interested to hear about it, so I hope you’ll share!

LastGraph generates a visualization of your music history information from Last.fm - free. I’m a sucker for pretty data, so of course I generated a visualization for myself (pdf). Unfortunately, by linking my poster I’m disclosing my secret affinity for Jingle Cats. Don’t judge me!

The past two weeks have been especially hectic and now that it is all over and the long weekend is slowing things down food is becoming more interesting (finally). On top of that I came across a site with the most beautiful pictures of food linked to recipes at TasteSpotting. Perfect timing.

Here’s a direct link to a Google map featuring a plastic bag.

[Spotted on BoingBoing]

This Saturday, 03 May 2008, is the Rhode Island School of Design’s Spring Alumni Art Sale (whew, say that 10 times). Since I live in Alaska I won’t be going, but am delighted to be able to look through some of the work that will be for sale by visiting their Flickr set. The great thing is that each item on Flickr links out the the artists’ web sites.

There are a couple pieces that definitely catch my eye:

Joel Greeb’s Illuminated Ballistic lamp. [more info on his site]
Mike Libby’s clockwork beetle [visit the InsectLab gallery]

“All hail robot Nixon”, and other similarly inspiring quotes are shining example as to why Futurama is infinitely entertaining. (No, I shouldn’t be working - I’m on lunch).

The incandescent bulb has passed into the domain of old technology with the recent adoption of compact fluorescent bulbs by every day consumers. So what to do with those old bulbs?

Inspired by Sergio Silva’s piece I set out to transform my old bulbs into ‘slow lights’. With a little assistance from these handy instructions on how to gut a bulb, a wick, a bottle cap, and some paraffin lamp oil my little Sunday morning project was a success.

When I moved to Alaska and started flying around the state I was awestruck at the vascular textures on the terrain created by the seasonal transformation of water to ice. Last night I was exploring Siberia on Google Earth and came across the most amazing imagery of water shaping the coastal landscape, in much the same way it does here in AK. [Flickr set]

This perspective on the landscape, afforded in the past to only birds and pilots, reveals captivating terrain that seems to possess some mysterious fractal quality. They appear familiar and at the same time alien. Taken out of context, they echo scaled patterns I have seen in slides of muscular tissue and in mold and in root systems of trees.

An area of Kotelny/Faddeyevsky Island. More information on this, one of the largest islands in the world.

An area Northwest of the village of Tiski in the Sakha region of Russia

Partially frozen lakes look like eyes. Located in an area Northwest of the village of Tiski in the Sakha region of Russia

An area Southeast of the village of Tiski in the Sakha region of Russia

A landscape that could be mistaken for a closeup of mold growth in a petri dish. In reality it is another area in the North of the Sakha region of Russia