Scrambled Maps on Toast / / No Comments I have a new favorite daily breakfast map game. Everyday my espresso and avocado toast is now served with a side dish of Scrambled Maps.Scrambled Maps is a new daily map challenge. Everyday Scambled Maps presents you with a map of a different city of the world. The only problem is that all the map tiles on this city map have been mixed up. Your task is simply to drag the tiles back into the Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: maps, Scrambled, Toast
Using AI to Roast Your Photos / / No Comments Chalk this up as another of my "this is probably not a good idea, but it’s fun" blog posts. A few weeks back my buddy and ColdFusion Evangelist Mark Takata shared a fun little thing he did with GenAI – using it to roast himself. That immediately set me off on a quest to see just how much fun I could have with the idea. Now, to be clear, I do not like mean people. But having a disembodied set of code routines roast me? Sounds perfect. Back in December last year, I built an experiment where I used the device camera on a mobile web app and asked Google Gemini what kind of cat breed was in the picture: Using Generative AI to Detect Cat Breeds That experiment worked really well... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: photos, Roast, using
The Map to the White House / / No Comments NBC has launched the 2024 edition of its Road to 270 interactive electoral college map. The map visualizes the current likely, possible and fantastical outcomes of the 2024 U.S. Presidential race. Last night Kamala Harris and Donald Trump went head-to-head in their first presidential debate. The Philadelphia debate was a hugely significant opportunity for both Harris and Trump to present their Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: House, White
Using the Chrome AI Summarizer (Early Look) / / No Comments I’ve looked at Chrome’s on-device GenAI development a few times now, and as a feature it is moving pretty fast. In fact, that first post and my follow up both don’t work anymore due to the API changing. I’m fine with that as I knew it was a bleeding edge feature, but I just want to warn folks ahead of time that everything you see here may, no, will change, probably a lot. As before though, I’m keep getting more and more excited about the possibilities here. I’m still not certain this will see the light of day (in mainline Chrome) or expand out to other browsers, but it’s quite interesting. Most recently, Google has added three new APIs to the feature: A... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Chrome, Early, Look, Summarizer, using
How to Download a YouTube Video or Channel / / No Comments The ability to download media on the internet almost feels like a lost art. When I was in my teens, piracy of mp3s, movies, and just about everything else via torrents and apps like Kazaa, LimeWire, Napster, etc. was in full swing. These days sites use blob URLs and other means to prevent downloads. Luckily we have tools like yt-dlp to download individual YouTube videos or entire channels of content. To download an entire channel, you can use yt-dlp: yt-dlp https://www.youtube.com/@beetlejuicearchives3490 If you’re like me and only care for the audio, you can use a few more arguments: yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 https://www.youtube.com/@beetlejuicearchives3490 youtube-dl used to be... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Channel, download, video, YouTube
China vs America – World Influence Map / / No Comments The Global Influence Index (GII) shows the influence of the United States and China on 191 countries around the world based on 28 different economic, security, and political criteria. Using the GII’s new 3D globe you can tell at a glance where in the world either the U.S. or China has the greatest influence.Individual countries on the GII globe are colored to show whether they are aligned more Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: America, China, Influence, World
Let’s Map Traffic Incidents… Again / / No Comments This blog has been around for a while (twenty one years currently) so it isn’t too uncommon for me to revisit old topics and demos and rebuild them. I think today’s post may be something of an outlier though. Way back in 2010, early 2010, I built a Proof of Content 911 Viewer that wrapped a local police department’s web site, lafayette911.org. Note the cute disclaimer at the bottom of the site saying you have to ask permission to link to it. Tell me you don’t know how the internet works without telling me you don’t know how it works. Anyway, back in 2010 I used Yahoo Pipes (pour one out for a cool as heck web service) to scrape the data and store it in a database.... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Again, Incidents, Lets, Traffic
The Book Banning Map of America / / No Comments The American Library Association (ALA) reports that attempts to ban books “surged 65% in 2023 compared to 2022 numbers, reaching the highest level ever documented by ALA.” Nearly half of the books targeted for banning were related to issues of LGBTQ+ communities or race.Now the ALA has partnered with Little Free Library and PEN America to release an interactive map which shows Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: America, banning, book