A long long way from home

After doing geocaching for a little over a year, I still love it. But geocaching has some features that makes the activity pattern change a bit over time. In the beginning there’s a lot of caches not very far away, and you can go grab caches in between other things that you need to do, like shopping and dropping the kid off in kindergarten. However, after some time you need to drive for quite some time or do time consuming walks in the woods just to get to the cache site – as there is a proximity limit of 161 metres between caches and the bureaucracy of placing geocaches is quite overwhelming for the less eager among cachers . This makes having time for geocaching more difficult since you have to dedicate whole days to geocaching since the distance to the nearest cache is steadily growing – and not everyone has full days to spend on something that does not help in building the house or fixing the garden… Of course, those rare business trips to other cities are treasured as that often gives one the possibility of finding a cache or two.

Enter: Gowalla. This is more of a social networking thing compared to geocaching, it helps you see where your friends are, and their status updates. Gowalla is actually quite similar to geocaching, in that it has geographical spots that you can find, and you can log that you have found them on the system’s website or on a mobile client. However, there’s a lot of small differences. While Geocaching uses various physcal containers that you actually have to get a hold of in order to write something in the enclosed log book, Gowalla only reqires you to be in the proximity of a spot in order to log – or Check In to – the spot. This means you can find and log the spots without even getting out of your car, and you don’t need to worry about getting a cache muggled which may result in unwanted attention from law enforcement and so on – a great advantage in urban areas. Also placing spots is a lot less hazzle with Gowalla – there’s no formal requirements for placing a spot and no approval process. So anyone can play Gowalla very easily. Geocaching also has this more or less unwritten rule that one should only find a cache once, while Gowalla encourage you to find the same spot multiple times by introducing a leaderboard for each spot. Gowalla even has virtual “cache content” (swag) that’s trackable like Geocaching’s travel bugs. But I can’t say I’m really into that part of Gowalla -yet.

Of course, Gowalla is a more virtual game, and is as such not really much suited for the family sunday trip with kids – the instant reward of having your toddler/child finding tupperware treasure chests in the woods is something Gowalla just can’t provide

For the Norwegian readers out there this piece on NRKBeta has more about Gowalla. Translated version here.

Convert a $3 pen into a $200 pen:
Collaborative DIY site Instructables shows us how to convert a $3 pen into a $200 Mont Blanc pen by filling the shell of the former with the innards of the latter.

The whole thing is pretty simple: All you need is a G2 Pro pen (~$3) and some Mont Blanc refill cartridges (~$12). With a little bit of trimming of the plastic on the refill cartridge, you should be able to fit it easily into the G2, and voila – expensive pen gets super-cheap. I love it! Thanks Eytan! — Adam Pash

Save $200 in 2 minutes and have the worlds best writing pen [Instructables]

Just take a look at this article – my God, those Googlers have a sweet deal.

At my workplace we are beginning to appreciate the need for privacy as well, so we will be stuffing two to three people into the same office. I am really looking forward to it.

The main thing here is getting interesting stuff to read about. And since all stories get ripped from both of them and pasted into the other, the only thing dividing them is the voting system. Both voting systems are Web 2.0 through the nose, only leve1 actually let you de-hype a story, while digg is just saving up all the hype a story can get.

One small detail is missing before any of them is user friendly, though: A simple a-href linking to a framed version with voting buttons on top.. That way I could middle-click interesting stories and make Firefox open them in the background while I read through leve1 at my own pace, and may then take the journey through the articles and easily vote for them there and then – AFTER reading them. The framed version should also have a direct link to the actual story for easy bookmarking.

But now I’m off to look through leve1 a bit more.