Who Deserves a Monument Anyway? / / No Comments Distribution of Confederate monumentsThanks to Geochicas and the Mapping Diversity project there has been quite a lot of data analysis undertaken over the last few years into the lack of diversity in the street names of cities around the world. According to Mapping Diversity in the 32 cities which they have analyzed “More than 90% of the streets named after individuals are dedicated to white Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Anyway, Deserves, Monument
Street View Surveillance / / No Comments The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Spot the Surveillance game is a virtual reality game which requires players to identify surveillance equipment in a panoramic image of a San Francisco street scene. Panning around this 360 degree view players are required to detect the every day surveillance equipment which is now routinely used on America’s streets, such as body-worn cameras, automated Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Street, surveillance, View
Testing Multiple Variations of Generative AI Prompts / / No Comments In nearly all of my recent explorations of Generative AI, I’ve come to realize how important prompts are. That hasn’t necessarily translated me into writing better prompts all the time, but being aware of the problem is at least one step towards correcting it, right? One of the things that I thought would help me personally would be to have a tool to quickly compare and contrast different prompts. Obviously, I could just open up multiple tabs in a browser, but I really wanted something more direct and simplified for my purposes. With that in mind, let me share what I’ve built. Prompt Tester # Prompt Tester is my incredibly imaginatively named tool to… um… test prompts.... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Generative, multiple, Prompts, Testing, Variations
Four Seasons in One Map / / No Comments Chronolog is an interactive map of timelapse photographs designed to help monitor the environment. It is a citizen science project which encourages organizations and individuals to engage with nature while recording and monitoring the changing environment.The Chronolog map allows you to explore timelapse photos of nature which have been captured around the USA (and one or two in other countries Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Four, Seasons
Adding a Guestbook to Your Jamstack Site (Yes, Seriously) / / No Comments Don’t do this. I’m serious. Or do it, I certainly don’t listen to reason when it comes to building demos. I’ve been in web development for a very, very long time, and I’ve seen many trends come and go. Guestbooks were a way for folks to leave a comment on your site as a whole. I haven’t seen one in ages, but some still linger. In fact, Ana Rodrigues has an absolutely lovely guestbook driven by Webmentions. And if you really want to, you can still download a Perl CGI guestbook over at Matt’s Script Archive. I haven’t written Perl in decades, but I absolutely loved it back in the 90s. That being said, I had a free hour yesterday, was bored, and decided,... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Adding, Guestbook, Jamstack, Seriously, Site
The Chain Restaurants of America / / No Comments Map of McDonald’s outlets in the USAThe Georgia Institute of Technology’s Friendly Cities Lab has released a new interactive map which reveals which chain restaurants dominate which areas of the United States. The U.S. Chain and Independent Restaurants map shows the locations of over 700,000 restaurants across the country, organized by restaurant chain and by frequency. The map reveals that Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: America, chain, restaurants
Using Generative AI to Organize Video Game Screenshots / / No Comments Way back in January (remember January), I wrote a blog post describing how to use gen ai to improve image filenames. This worked by uploading the image to Google Gemini, asking for a short description, and using that description for a new filename. Recently I was thinking about that demo and was curious how well it would work for video games. As always, I did a few quick tests in Google AI Studio. I did some quick Googling for various games and screenshots, and the results were pretty impressive. Here are three mostly modern examples: And here’s a first failure, identifying this as Final Fantasy 14, not 16. It did well for one really old game, although to be fair the name is in the picture: Although... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Game, Generative, Organize, Screenshots, using, video
Google Gemini 1.5 Announced (and more new features) / / No Comments In general I don’t tend to blog about stuff that isn’t quite out yet, but as I’ve got early access (and permission to share), and as it’s pretty darn cool, I thought I’d share. Plus, some of the new stuff is available to everyone, so you can try it out as well! Today, Google introduced its newest language model, Gemini 1.5. You can, and probably should, read the marketing/nicely polished intro by Google here, but I thought I’d share some highlights and examples here. I’ve had access to this for a grand total of four hours so please consider this my first initial impressions. As the title says, this is not yet released, but you can sign up for the waitlist... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Announced, features, Gemini, Google, More