The Sunny Coffee Map / / No Comments There are lots of maps that can help you find a good cafe in Paris. But Sunny Coffee answers a much more important question: which café terraces are actually in the sun right now? Created by developer Paul Baron, Sunny Coffee is an interactive map that shows which Paris café terraces are currently sunny – and which are sitting in the shade. The map combines Paris open data, 3D Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: coffee, Sunny
Looking for My Next Role – Hire Me / / No Comments Yep, I get to write this post again… Well, today I find myself in the same position I’ve been a few times over the past few years. Webflow went through a company-wide restructuring today and as part of that re-org, my role (and many others) were eliminated. So once again – I’m asking my faithful readers to help me find my next role. You can find my resume if you need the latest edition and feel free to contact me with any opportunities you may have! Raymond Camden… more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Hire, Looking, Next, Role
Metro Melodies / / No Comments I’ve developed a slight obsession with Tokyo’s train station melodies. Known as Hassha Melodies (literally ‘departure melodies’), these carefully composed seven-second jingles are designed to guide commuters onto departing trains on the city’s vast, sprawling transit network.Before their introduction, Japanese stations used harsh electric buzzers to signal departures. In the late 1980s, new Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Melodies, Metro
What was that song, the one with the words? / / No Comments My wife and I are both big music lovers, and I’m happy to have influenced her listening habits a bit and have loved what she’s introduced me to. Given we both love music, we’ve also been known to sing along at times. (You can take a guess as to how well that goes.) She normally gets the lyrics right. I’m normally a bit more… loose in terms of how well I remember the lyrics. I was thinking about this and was curious how well AI could be used to identity lyrics and match them to a song, especially when the lyrics may not be exactly right. I spent some time hacking on it and here’s what I built. Strike One I meant to type take one, accidentally wrote strike one,... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: song, Words
The Big Baguette Index / / No Comments The United States has The Economist’s Big Mac Index to measure purchasing power through burgers, but France now has a more culturally appropriate metric. Enter the Baguette Index, a data project that tracks and analyzes the price of the baguette de tradition to map the true cost of living across l’Hexagone.How the Data Was GatheredTo map out the geographic variations in the cost of France’s most Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Baguette, Index
My First AI Skill for My Blog / / No Comments I’ve been a professional writer now for thirty plus years, and honestly, it’s one of the things I’m most proud about. When generative AI first exploded on the scene, a lot of people used it to help them write, and frankly, that wasn’t for me. I’m not the best writer, but I damn well know how to write and damn well know my own voice. That being said, I’ve been really interested in how GenAI can help with the process. I first wrote about this over two years ago: Using Generative AI as Your Content Assistant. In that post I talked about using GenAI for two very specific tasks: Helping with my titles Writing the description (which is part of the metadata for a... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: blog, first, skill
Dang good Office parsing on the web with officeParser / / No Comments A few weeks ago I wrote about using Chrome’s built-in AI support to summarize documents – "Summarizing Docs with Built-in AI". This was a followup on an earlier post that was PDF only and made use of an excellent library, officeParser, to work with Microsoft Office files. This library worked well, but had one issue that made it a bit harder to use. Parsing a doc itself was super easy: const getAST = async (file, config) => (await OfficeParser.parseOffice(file, config)); But the issue I ran into was taking that result and turning it into something meaningful for Chrome’s model to analyze. PDFs supported a toText() method but for other formats I had to do a bit of... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Dang, GOOD, office, officeParser, Parsing
PubCrawlr – the Global Pub Crawl Generator / / No Comments If you want to plan your next wild night out then you need my new global pub crawl generator – PubCrawlr.The map lets you click anywhere in the world to instantly generate a walking pub crawl between nearby bars. You can also search for any city, neighborhood, or address using the built-in location search box.After selecting a location the app:Finds nearby barsOptimizes the walking orderDraws Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Crawl, Generator, global, PubCrawlr