Weather or Not / / No Comments Do you dream of the perfect vacation weather? Sunshine on the beach, crisp mountain air, or vibrant fall foliage? Imagine a tool that helps you find the ideal destination for your desired climate, anywhere in the country and for any month of the year. This is the promise of Weather or Not, a new interactive map that leverages average weather data to recommend the best time to travel Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Weather
Six Free Alternatives to GeoGuessr / / No Comments I am a huge fan of GeoGuessr, but unfortunately without becoming a paid subscriber it is now a very limited game. I don’t blame GeoGuessr for developing its subscription model. The Google Maps API isn’t cheap and I’m sure Google sends GeoGuesssr huge invoices every month. However that does mean there is a huge potential market for a free Street View game. A market that OpenGuessr now hopes to Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Alternatives, free, GeoGuessr
Automating Movie Recommendations with Generative AI and Pipedream / / No Comments For the past few months or so, I’ve started tracking my movie watching with Letterboxd. I’m not doing a lot of reviews, mostly just logging, but I find it neat to look back and remind myself of what I’ve watched recently. You can see my profile if you’re curious, or check out my "Now" page as well. I thought it might be interesting to see if I could use my Letterboxd data along with Google Gemini as a way to suggest the next movie I should watch. I was able to build a quick workflow using the incredible Pipedream in a few minutes. Let me share with you how I did that. What does it do? # At a high level, my workflow does the following: It runs, automatically,... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Automating, Generative, Movie, Pipedream, Recommendations
Mapping a Global Coral Bleaching Event / / No Comments Last week the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that the ‘world is currently experiencing a global coral bleaching event’. The Earth has experienced 10 consecutive months of global heat records, and in the last year the average global temperature has exceeded pre-industrial levels by 1.58C. These unprecedented sudden rises in air surface temperatures are Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Bleaching, Coral, Event, global, Mapping
Slim City / / No Comments For a number of years I’ve had the idea of creating an incremental game which involves slowly creating a city map by adding different map elements over time. This week I decided to try and put that idea into action. The result is Slim City, an idle game which requires you to click on building footprints on an interactive map to build and create a map of a city neighborhood.In Slim City the more Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: City, Slim
JSON Results with Google Gemini Generative AI API Calls / / No Comments Forgive the somewhat alliterative title there, but today’s post covers something that’s been on my mind since I started playing with Google Gemini, specifically, how to get the results of your API calls in JSON. To be clear, the REST API returns a result in JSON, but I’m talking about the content of the result itself. Before I continue, a quick shot out to Allen Firstenberg who has been helping me off and on with Google Gemini stuff. Anything I get wrong though is entirely my fault. 😜 Ok, so before I go on, let’s look at a typical result. Take a prompt like so: "What is the nature of light". Pass this to Gemini via the API, and the result you get, once you... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Calls, Gemini, Generative, Google, JSON, results
The 2024 Cicadapocalypse / / No Comments 2024 is set to see the emergence of two large periodical cicada broods. Both Brood XIX (13-year cicada) and Brood XIII (17-year cicada), are expected to emerge together in 2024 for the first time since 1803. This double emergence has been nicknamed a “cicada-geddon” by some.Periodical cicadas are native to eastern North America. They spend most of their lives underground as nymphs, feeding Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: 2024, Cicadapocalypse
HTML popover Attribute / / No Comments Modals have been an important part of websites for two decades. Stacking contents and using fetch to accomplish tasks are a great way to improve UX on both desktop and mobile. Unfortunately most developers don’t know that the HTML and JavaScript specs have implemented a native modal system via the popover attribute — let’s check it out! The HTML Creating a native HTML modal consists of using the popovertarget attribute as the trigger and the popover attribute, paired with an id, to identify the content element: <!-- "popovertarget" attribute will map to "id" of popover contents --> <button popovertarget="popover-contents">Open popover</button> <div... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Attribute, HTML, popover