Welcome to the Metaverse / / No Comments Imagine a digital world layered seamlessly over our own, where every street corner and landmark is brought to life in 3D by a global community of gamers. This is Niantic’s vision for the real-world metaverse, and it’s already starting to take shape.For several years, AR gaming company Niantic has been leveraging its hugely popular games, such as Pokémon GO and Pikman Bloom, to gather location Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Metaverse, Welcome
Executing Dynamic Code in a Reveal.js Presentation / / No Comments Please take what follows with a Titanic-sized grain of salt and do your best not to do what I did, but despite that, I thought this little hack was interesting and I figured I’d share it anyway. I typically use Reveal.js for my presentations, especially when talking about the web platform, as it makes it easy to do slides and demos, all in my browser. Usually when I want to embed live code in a slide, I just use a CodePen embed. While this works well, sometimes it feels like overkill for real short code samples. I wondered if it would be possible to execute code directly in the slide itself such that I could show a one-liner in the slide, and then the result after. This is what I came up... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: code, dynamic, Executing, Presentation, Reveal.js
No Local News / / No Comments “There are 206 counties in the United States with no news outlets. There are 1,561 counties with only one. More than two newspapers a week are closing, and print frequency is shrinking. Some 7,000 newspaper jobs were eliminated in the past year, almost 2,000 of them in newsroom positions.” – The 2024 State of Local News ReportThe Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University has Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: local, News
Dressing Miku / / No Comments tldr: miku-earth is an interactive map of people’s drawings of the virtual idol Hatsune Miku dressed in the national costumes of countries and subcultures around the world.I like to imagine that Hatsune Miku is just the first step in a new era of virtual celebrities, paving the way for the likes of William Gibson’s Rei Toei to suddenly emerge as real virtual beings. Both Miku and Rei Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Dressing, Miku
Automatically Posting to Bluesky on New RSS Items / / No Comments Hey folks – just a quick warning. This post is kind of a mashup/update of two earlier posts. Back almost two years ago I talked about this process but used Twitter and Mastodon: "Automatically Posting to Mastodon and Twitter on New RSS Items". Earlier this year I first talked about using the Bluesky API, with a very appropriately named post: "Using the Bluesky API". As I said, this post is going to mash up bits from both, and include new things I’ve not covered before, but for those of you who have been around here for a while, some of this may be repetition. For this solution, I’m using Pipedream. I’ve blogged for years now and love it. Their free... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: automatically, Bluesky, items, Posting
Adding Translation with a Web Component and Chrome AI / / No Comments A few days ago, I blogged about using Chrome’s built-in generative AI features (which are still super duper too early to even consider for production) to add on-device translation capabilities to a web app. It got me thinking, what if we could do translation automatically via a web component? If for some reason it failed, that would be fine as the original text would still be there, but in cases where it could work, it would be automatic. Here’s what I built. First, I whipped up a quick HTML demo of the text I’d like translated: <translate-text>Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Adding, Chrome, Component, Translation
How Big is Your Country’s CO2 Footprint? / / No Comments Jo Wood, a professor of visual analytics, has released an impressive cartogram visualizing each country’s annual CO₂ emissions over the past 200 years. The map was created for the #30DayMapChallenge.Press ‘play’ on the Global C02 Emissions map to view an animated timeline of annual CO₂ emissions by country, from 1800 to 2022. This dynamic visualization offers fascinating insights into the Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Country's, Footprint
Scrambled Hex Maps / / No Comments Fresh from creating a mobile friendly update for Scrambled Maps, Tripgeo has now released an even trickier puzzle, called Scrambled Hex Maps. If you love puzzles that challenge your spatial reasoning and problem-solving skills, Scramble Hex Maps is a game you won’t want to miss! This engaging daily challenge invites players to rearrange scrambled hexagonal maps into their correct Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: maps, Scrambled