The Coffee Barista’s Maps / / No Comments Aside from maps, I would say my next biggest obsession is coffee. For the last couple of months, my favourite bean, Finca La Bolsa, has been out of season and unavailable from my local roasters. I’ve therefore been using the opportunity to experiment with beans from different regions, different taste profiles and different processing methods. For some reason, it has only just dawned on me that there might be some coffee maps I can use to help me discover new beans to add to my coffee repertoire. Map of Coffee Origins & Flavors Lightyear Coffee has produced a number of data visualizations based on data collected from coffee roasters. These include a Map of Coffee Origins &... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Barista's, coffee, maps
Weather Nerd? Check out My OSX Radar Widget / / No Comments I know I’m not alone in being a bit of a weather nerd. Along with four or five weather apps on my phone, I’ve got two physical devices in my office that show the weather and a weather widget on my Mac that shows the day’s forecast. That’s not enough. What I really wanted was a radar widget as well, so I built one: Ok, to be fair, I used Cursor to build it – but it really scratched an itch I’ve had for a while to constantly have one more thing to distract me. If you want a copy of this yourself (or want to make it better!), I’ve set up a GitHub repo here: https://github.com/cfjedimaster/precipradar. I’ve got both the source as well as a build... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: check, Nerd, Radar, Weather, Widget
15 Minute Towns Animated / / No Comments The 15-Minute City has become one of the most influential ideas in contemporary urban planning. Popularised by urbanist Carlos Moreno, the concept is beautifully simple: cities should be designed so that people can reach the things they need for everyday life – shops, healthcare, schools, green spaces, culture and leisure – within around 15 minutes of where they live, ideally on foot or by bicycle. The Essentials is an interactive map which asks exactly that question of New York City – and beautifully visualises the answer as an animated pathfinding map. Click anywhere on The Essentials and nine animated lines immediately shoot out from your chosen location, each searching... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Animated, Minute, Towns
(MAPS) Painting By Number / / No Comments Here’s a little thing I discovered about Chicago: the higher a street’s number, the further south it is from the city center. You can see this very clearly on North America’s Numbered Streets. This interactive map colors “all streets with a ‘#st’, ‘#nd’, ‘#rd’, or ‘#th’ in their name in North America, as drawn from OpenStreetMap.” Zoom in on a city on North America’s Numbered Streets and, if it uses a numerical street-naming convention, you’ll probably notice that the smallest numbered streets are near the center of the city, while the largest numbers stretch out into the suburbs. In most cities,... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: maps, Number, Painting
Like LEGO? Got a Mac? Get My Screensaver / / No Comments Good morning my fabulous readers. This will be a quick post as I just wanted to share something cool I built with Cursor over the past couple of days – a LEGO screensaver. I’m a huge fan of "show me something random from something I like" and have built multiple bots in that vein. I recently discovered Rebrickable’s LEGO datasets which contains a CSV file of LEGO sets. The data looks like so: set_num,name,year,theme_id,num_parts,img_url 0003977811-1,Ninjago: Book of Adventures,2022,761,1,https://cdn.rebrickable.com/media/sets/0003977811-1.jpg 001-1,Gears,1965,756,43,https://cdn.rebrickable.com/media/sets/001-1.jpg 0011-2,Town Mini-Figures,1979,67,12,https://cdn.rebrickable.com/media/sets/0011-2.jpg... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Lego, like, Screensaver
Links For You (8/23/26) / / No Comments Greetings, programs. Once again, I’m a bit behind on these posts, but I just got back from two weeks of travel and I’m so happy to be home for a while. My last trip was pretty stressful. On the way out, our plane blew a tire (or tires) which required an emergency landing in Dallas (which is where we were scheduled to stop anyway). Everything ended up fine, but as I said, stressful. Then coming home we were minutes from our destination when the pilot had to turn around due to storms. You can actually see exactly where in the route where they said NOPE: For this, and other reasons, I’m damn happy I’ve got a therapy session tomorrow. So, let’s get to the links. And... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 8/23/26, links
Bending Maps, Inception Style / / No Comments One of the most memorable scenes in Inception sees Leonardo DiCaprio’s character walking through Paris as the city appears to fold in on itself, with entire streets rising from the ground and bending over the characters below. The surreal effect makes the city seem like a three-dimensional model that can be manipulated like a sheet of paper. Orbify is exploring whether something inspired by this visual trick could have a practical use in car navigation. Orbify’s patent-pending image-processing system takes a 3D map model and warps it onto a curved surface. Instead of having to choose between a conventional top-down map and a perspective view of the road ahead, both can be displayed... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Bending, Inception, maps, Style
Using the Cursor SDK to Build a Project Documenter / / No Comments I’ve shared a few posts recently talking about how I’m using Cursor to learn and employ agentic development. Primarily that work has all been done via our Agent view, but this is just one of the surfaces you can use with the platform. I had a chance recently to try out the SDK and I thought I’d share a little demo I built with it. First – some explanation would be helpful. You can use Cursor with the desktop application, on the web, via CLI, on iOS, even via API. But the SDK lets you use the platform from your code. There’s an SDK for TypeScript, Python, and a bridge that embeds a TypeScript server and lets you use any language. Honestly I’ve never seen that... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Build, Cursor, Documenter, project, using