Conch Ave
Posts from May 2009
Ocean Forest
Paul and Babe
Crescent City
Saturday Morning
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A little web app for creating a shadow image for custom Google Maps icons.
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Handy little wizard for generating custom Google Maps icons.
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Nice royalty-free icons, including the new free Payments set.
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Handy bit of JavaScript to get the longitude and latitude of the center point on a Google Map. This works great as a bookmarklet.
Moving Through Water
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MetaFilter is turning ten and we're celebrating with meetups across the globe. We have members planning meetups on six continents. We just need to find a MeFite in Antarctica to cover them all.
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A collection of pictures and postcards from Portland's past. The design is wacky but the stories are good. [via MeFi]
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Fun discussion of the song Aquarela do Brasil, WWII propaganda, Frank Sinatra, and Disney.
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Why are passenger trains slower today than in the 1920s? Short answer: more freight, interstates, jets. [via MeFi]
UFO Display
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Andy funded a chiptunes jazz album in less than two hours with his new project Kickstarter. Nice demonstration of the new service and the album is a fun project I'm looking forward to hearing.
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A list of all the books mentioned in the classic Ask MetaFilter thread: What single book is the best introduction to your field?
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For all your Star Trek bridge needs.
Music Share: En la Caleta
I used to play guitar and I still remember the day I discovered the pentatonic blues scale. It was like discovering the DNA of all the music I'd grown up listening to. I eventually learned that you could draw a straight line from Robert Johnson to just about any of the music I was listening to.
I'm still startled when I hear music that's built from entirely different DNA. And that's what flamenco feels like to me because I can't picture the structure as it's playing and I have no sense of its history. It's obviously following some strict rules, but I don't have a handle on them yet. I especially like this track with unusual rhythm called En la Caleta from what I think was Paco de Lucía's debut solo album in 1967.
I'm still startled when I hear music that's built from entirely different DNA. And that's what flamenco feels like to me because I can't picture the structure as it's playing and I have no sense of its history. It's obviously following some strict rules, but I don't have a handle on them yet. I especially like this track with unusual rhythm called En la Caleta from what I think was Paco de Lucía's debut solo album in 1967.
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Ryan Tate on Oakland bloggers: "...I often found that bloggers were the only other writers in the room at certain city council committee meetings and at certain community events. They tended to be the sort of persistently-involved residents newspapermen often refer to as 'gadflies' — deeply, obsessively concerned about issues large and infinitesimal in the communities where they lived."
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"They certainly don't make SF book jackets like they used to." Fun post about classic Penguin book covers. I enjoyed browsing through the Penguin Covers on Flickr as well, and I recommend Penguin By Design by Phil Baines for even more design inspiration.
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Eric Johnson covered on a Nintendo. He mimicked the guitar tones (including harmonics) well. I can almost picture the side-scrolling shooting spree this could back. [via waxy]
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Lifehacker brings down the hammer on commenters. Interesting to see what will earn someone an instant ban from their site; it's a catalog of bad online behavior.
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Nice collection of YouTube videos featuring many Jazz legends at their peak in 1959. (My favorite is Horace Silver's Señor Blues.)
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Nice post about commercial illustrator Frank Soltesz who drew cut-away illustrations in the 40's and 50's.
Post Google Reader Shared Items to Delicious
As you can probably tell if you read this site, I'm a fan of Delicious. I regularly bookmark sites, images, or files I've found on the Web at Delicious and add a note or summary. Half of my motivation is finding links I want to get back to and half is sharing the link with others. That's why I also auto-post my Delicious links here once a day and mark them with "gathered from delicious".
Over on the other side of the Web I use Google Reader to keep up with the world. So naturally I find a lot of interesting links there and want to post them to Delicious. 90% of time I just click to the original source and hit the Delicious Bookmark button in my browser if I want to post the link. But Google Reader has a feature similar to Delicious called Google Reader Shared Items. If there's something I know I want to share even without visiting the original source, I just click a button and it's shared with the world.
But what if I want to cross the streams? I already have something that imports links from Delicious to my blog, I like their service for searching links, and it seems like I should be able to easily bookmark within Google Reader for the 10% of links I share there. Well, of course Google doesn't offer that integration because they have a competing product. In that case: Greasemonkey to the rescue, no? Well, I tried every script that attempts to add a Delicious button to Google Reader and none of them worked. (I'm guessing Google is either actively thwarting these scripts, or the script authors don't have time to keep up with Google's HTML changes.) So it was time to roll my own. But I don't want to keep up with Google's changes either, so Greasemonkey is out. There had to be a better way.
Google offers the shared items as an ATOM feed which makes scripting them fairly easy. You can find your shared items feed by logging into Google Reader, clicking "shared items" in the top-left menu, click "at this webpage" in the shared items note, and then you'll find the URL at the "atom feed" link in the popup. (shew.) I decided to import my Google Reader shared items into Delicious with a Perl script I can run on a schedule. Since there are so many Greasemonkey scripts out there to do this kind of thing I thought it might be worth sharing:
greadertodelicious.pl (click for the source)
To use this script you'll need a couple of Perl modules: XML::Atom::Syndication for parsing the Google Reader feed and Net::Delicious for posting via the Delicious API. Once installed, edit the script to include your Google Reader shared items feed URL, Delicious user/pass, and then save the file as greadertodelicious.pl. Run the script every so often with
Here are a couple snags I hit. You can tag items at Google Reader, but unfortunately Google doesn't make your tags available in the shared items feed. For now I'm simply tagging imported items with "googlereader", and adding appropriate tags at Delicious. I also didn't want to import all of my older shared items, so in the script I set a start date with
Over on the other side of the Web I use Google Reader to keep up with the world. So naturally I find a lot of interesting links there and want to post them to Delicious. 90% of time I just click to the original source and hit the Delicious Bookmark button in my browser if I want to post the link. But Google Reader has a feature similar to Delicious called Google Reader Shared Items. If there's something I know I want to share even without visiting the original source, I just click a button and it's shared with the world.
But what if I want to cross the streams? I already have something that imports links from Delicious to my blog, I like their service for searching links, and it seems like I should be able to easily bookmark within Google Reader for the 10% of links I share there. Well, of course Google doesn't offer that integration because they have a competing product. In that case: Greasemonkey to the rescue, no? Well, I tried every script that attempts to add a Delicious button to Google Reader and none of them worked. (I'm guessing Google is either actively thwarting these scripts, or the script authors don't have time to keep up with Google's HTML changes.) So it was time to roll my own. But I don't want to keep up with Google's changes either, so Greasemonkey is out. There had to be a better way.
Google offers the shared items as an ATOM feed which makes scripting them fairly easy. You can find your shared items feed by logging into Google Reader, clicking "shared items" in the top-left menu, click "at this webpage" in the shared items note, and then you'll find the URL at the "atom feed" link in the popup. (shew.) I decided to import my Google Reader shared items into Delicious with a Perl script I can run on a schedule. Since there are so many Greasemonkey scripts out there to do this kind of thing I thought it might be worth sharing:
greadertodelicious.pl (click for the source)
To use this script you'll need a couple of Perl modules: XML::Atom::Syndication for parsing the Google Reader feed and Net::Delicious for posting via the Delicious API. Once installed, edit the script to include your Google Reader shared items feed URL, Delicious user/pass, and then save the file as greadertodelicious.pl. Run the script every so often with
cron, and your Google Reader shared items should start showing up at Delicious.
Here are a couple snags I hit. You can tag items at Google Reader, but unfortunately Google doesn't make your tags available in the shared items feed. For now I'm simply tagging imported items with "googlereader", and adding appropriate tags at Delicious. I also didn't want to import all of my older shared items, so in the script I set a start date with
timelocal() and compare it with each shared item's cryptically labeled crawl-timestamp-msec—as it turns out that's the time the item was shared as a Unix-ish timestamp. If the item was shared before the start date set in the script, it's not posted to Delicious.