The Treats of San Francisco / / No Comments The California Migration Museum is celebrating one of the wonderful benefits of living in a multi-cultural city with a new interactive map of San Francisco’s food scene. Melting Spots: An Immigrant Map of San Francisco Food showcases some of the many immigrant-inspired dishes in the city which have added richer flavors to the city’s food scene.Did you know, for example, that the Mai Tai, the Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Francisco, Treats
Scraping Recipes Using Node.js, Pipedream, and JSON-LD / / No Comments It’s pretty well known now that most, if not all, recipes on the internet are 90% crap and 10% actual recipe, at best. Obviously, there are outliers of course and obviously, if you are sharing your recipes online you are free to do so as you see fit, but speaking for myself, when I click a link to a recipe my assumption is that I’m going to have to "work" to figure out where the actual details are amongst the humorous backstories and other tidbits that don’t actually tell you how to make what you’re trying to make. That’s why I love apps like Saffron. Not only is it incredibly minimal and laser-focused on recipes, it has an incredibly good "recipe... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: JSONLD, Node.js, Pipedream, Recipes, Scraping, using
Using JSON Schema with Google Gemini / / No Comments Back about a month ago, I wrote up a post on how to generate JSON results using Google Gemini, "JSON Results with Google Gemini Generative AI API Calls". While you should read that post first, the process basically boiled down to: Setting the response type of the result to JSON. Without this, Gemini will return JSON but encoded in Markdown. Using a System Instruction to give directions on the "shape" of the JSON, i.e., use this key and that key. While these techniques work well, recently yet another feature was added that makes this even better, JSON schema support. JSON Schema is an abstract way to define the shape of JSON and can be really useful in validation. The website... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Gemini, Google, JSON, Schema, using
The Lost Pathfinder Game / / No Comments The Lost Pathfinder is a new online game which requires players to connect a path from one side of map to the other.At the beginning of each round of The Lost Pathfinder you are presented with an isometric grid on which all the road tiles have been mixed up. All you have to do is to rearrange the road tiles in order to complete a path from one side of the map to the other. To help you restore Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Game, Lost, Pathfinder
Every Ship Sunk in WWII / / No Comments Over the course of the Second World War more than 20,000 ships were sunk around the world. Esri’s Paul Heersink has spent the last ten years scouring historical records to create and map the ‘most comprehensive dataset’ of ships sunk in WWII.Resurfacing the Past is a fascinating story map which not only visualizes where Allied and Axis ships were lost in WWII, it also explores the WWII sunken Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: every, ship, Sunk, WWII
Game Dev Diary – Cat Herder – Part 2 / / No Comments Welcome to my second game diary for [Cat Herder, which I’m subtitling – "Rise of the Machines". This update is all about the ‘machine’ aspect of the game. Let me explain. Right now each cat (well, you can only have one unless you cheat) has three needs you must manually take care by clicking the right button to match the mood. The idea of the machine feature is that they will automatically handle this for you, providing you have enough of them and the right type. The first thing I needed to figure out was how to enable this feature. I decided on a one time check to see if you have 75 or more purrs (the currency of the game). This is a one-time check because as... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Diary, Game, Herder, part
Indian Election Maps / / No Comments Counting is now underway of the votes in the world’s largest election. Over 642 million people are expected to have voted in the 2024 Indian General Election, the result of which will be declared today (June 4th). Based on the earliest results it appears that current prime minister Narendra Modi is likely to keep his job, but that his party, the BJP, will win less seats than in 2019.The Times Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: election, Indian, maps
Game Dev Diary – Cat Herder – Part 1 / / No Comments Over a year ago, I released my first "idle clicker" game, IdleFleet. IdleFleet is a simple "space merchant" game built with Alpine.js. I’ve worked on it off and on since the initial release (which was in Vue.js by the way) and still have updates I want to add, but a few weeks ago I started work on a new game I’d like to share with you, Cat Herder. The Game # Cat Herder is very much in its early stages so while I’ll (eventually) link to it, you can’t do much with it now. The basic idea is that you have one cat… to start with that is – and have to keep it happy. Cats have three basic moods: Wanting to be left alone Wanting to be fed Wanting... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Diary, Game, Herder, part