Playing Placename Detective / / No Comments The British Placenames Mapper is an interactive map which allows you to search for patterns in British placenames. The map uses ‘regular expressions’ to find defined text patterns within placenames. These text patterns could be prefixes used at the beginning of a name (eg ‘Great’ or ‘Little’), suffixes used at the end of a name (eg ‘ford’ or ‘mouth’), or even patterns that occur anywhere within a Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Detective, Placename, Playing
All Your Dragons Are Belong To Us / / No Comments Forgive the somewhat silly title, but it’s not like I haven’t been silly here before. Almost four years ago I wrote a little post about a random text-generated app called the "Queen Maker": Let’s Make Everyone a Queen!. The idea for that app (which lives on at queenof.netlify.app) was to use a random text library called Tracery to generate random short "queen-based" stories. Yeah, that may not make much sense, but read the earlier post or play with the app to see. The important bit though was that it was inspired by a cool Twitter bot called Dragon Hoards. This bot, like many "fun" bots, is now dead, but it still makes me smile when I think about... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Belong, Dragons
Get Started in AI and NFTs with the Limewire API (Sponsored) / / No Comments AI media creation has expanded to incredible video art and a host of other important improvements, and LimeWire is leading the way in creating an awesome interface for the average user to become an AI artist. Limewire has just released its Developer API, a method for engineers like us to create dynamic AI art on the fly! Quick Hits Free to sign up! Provides methods to create a variety of quality images from any number of AI services and algorithms Create images based on text and other images Modify existing images to scale them, remove backgrounds, and more Use JavaScript, PHP, Python, or any of your favorite languages Documentation is clean and easy to understand Very easy to get started A... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: LimeWire, NFTs, Sponsored, started
The Easter Bunny’s Egg-cellent Adventure / / No Comments This year the Easter Bunny has been on a whirlwind world tour, hopping from continent to continent and hiding eggs in some of the most amazing places on Earth! Take part in the world’s largest egg hunt today by visiting the Tripgeo Global Egg Hunt.Are you ready to undertake a global egg hunt? If so grab your basket and get ready to embark on a virtual adventure of some of the world’s most Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: adventure, Bunny's, Easter, Eggcellent
Using Generative AI to Check for Spam / / No Comments A few days ago I wrote up an exploration I did in Spam APIs, "Spam APIs in 2024". After working on those demos and writing up my findings, I thought it might be interesting to see how a generative AI tool, like Googele’s Gemini would handle such a task. Initial Tests # So – once again – I’m a broken record on this – but I fired up AI Studio first to give it some quick tests. I began with this prompt: Given the following text, rate how much it appears to be spam by giving it a score between 1 and 10, with 10 being the most likely the content is spam. For my first test, I used a ‘bad’ sample (see my last post for a full listing of my sample data): 💪... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: check, Generative, spam, using
Mapping SpaceTime / / No Comments I recently stumbled upon Time Map, an interactive map which attempts to show points of interest around a location by walking time. Enter a location into the Time Map and a venue category (eg pizza restaurants) and the map will display a series of concentric circles around your location, each of which represents a minute of walking time. All the nearby points of interest are overlaid on top Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Mapping, SpaceTime
Automating Blog Post Headers with Firefly Services / / No Comments Yesterday I introduced you to Adobe’s new offering, Firefly Services, and demonstrated a simple example of how to generate images from prompt using the REST APIs. Today I thought I’d share one of the little demos I’ve made with the API, and one specifically built to help out with my blog – generating headers. My usual process for headers is to go to the Firefly website, enter a prompt, let it load, and then promptly change it to landscape and re-generate my prompt again. I always feel bad that the initial, square, images are essentially trashed. It occurred to me I could build a Node.js utility to generate the images at the exact right size and even quickly display them.... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Automating, blog, Firefly, Headers, Post, Services
Spam APIs in 2024 / / No Comments I enjoy building API demos so I generally keep an eye out for interesting APIs to play with. A few weeks ago it occurred to me that I had not seen anyone talking about or sharing information about Spam APIs. I may be showing my age a bit, but it feels like spam was a much larger issue back in the early days. It was something you always heard about and worried about but not so much anymore. Much like nuclear war. I did a bit of digging and it turns out Chris Coyler had similar thoughts 4 years ago: "Spam Detection APIs". I thought I’d check out a few myself and share the results. Here, in no particular order, are the APIs I tried. Test Data # Before I looked into any APIs, I gathered... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 2024, APIs, spam