This is Not Normal / / No Comments In the UK, the hottest June day on record has been broken three days in a row. And it’s not just the UK experiencing unprecedented levels of heat. France, Switzerland, Spain, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands have also recorded their highest-ever June temperatures in the past week.You can get a sense of the scale of the heat dome currently sitting over Europe with the European Heat Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Normal, this
Decoding VINs with an API / / No Comments Today’s post took a bit of a pivot. I decided to work on a demo idea I had created way back in March. As I worked on it, I ran into multiple roadblocks, and while that original idea for a demo may still see the light of the day, I figured I’d at least share something that did work. What’s a VIN? A VIN is a vehicle identification number. It’s a standard that dates back to 1954 and identifies a particular car by manufacturer, make, model, year, and a heck of a lot more. A VIN is 17 characters avoiding the letters O, I, U, and Q to avoid confusion with some numbers. You can break down a VIN into various components if you want – but would still need to know various lookup... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Decoding, VINs
Parsing Arbitrary Dates in Strings with Chrono and a Web Component / / No Comments Yesterday I had an idea for a possible experiment using Chrome’s built-in AI support – looking for "date" references in strings. So for example: "I will have my new job in 12 days". Could the AI model recognize "12 days" as a date and determine what the actual date is, assuming a reference date of now? I was about to start working on a simple POC when I thought… wait… is there already a JavaScript library for this? Of course there is. The aptly named Chrono library does just that. It can parse a string with one assumed date and return the date, so for example: import * as chrono from 'chrono-node'; chrono.parseDate('An appointment on Sep... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Arbitrary, Chrono, Component, Dates, Parsing, Strings
Bending the Chart to Fit the Road / / No Comments Mapping Collision Density Along the A1 More than 350 years ago, cartographer John Ogilby transformed the way travellers navigated Britain. His famous strip maps turned the nation’s principal highways into continuous journeys on the page, allowing travellers to follow routes such as the Great North Road stage by stage across the country. Today’s A1 follows much of that same historic Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Bending, Chart, road
Metro Music Maps / / No Comments Over a decade ago, Alexander Chen’s iconic MTA.me turned Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 New York subway map into a live, plucking string instrument. On this map every time an MTA train crosses the track of another line, it twangs like a musical string, transforming the frantic energy of New York’s transit grid into a delicate, real-time composition.The itch to turn transit data into music has recently Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: maps, Metro, Music
Links For You (6/21/26) / / No Comments Greetings and salutations, readers. It’s been a few weeks since I shared one of these, mostly due to the job search being somewhat exhausting, but I’ve got a backup of links so it’s time to get back in the habit. And of course, it’s Father’s Day and I want to wish all the dads out there (myself included) a very happy father’s day. This weekend I got to officiate my first wedding (for my brother-in-law and his fiance) so my plan today is to do… nothing. Enjoy your links! Mastodon and Translation with Chrome AI First up is a presentation by Thomas Steiner demonstrating Chrome built-in AI APIs doing language detection and translation for Mastodon. I’m... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 6/21/26, links
Building a Form Handling Service in Val Town / / No Comments Many years ago, I made the switch from building primarily app-server backed sites (using Node, ColdFusion, PHP, etc) to fully static sites using tools like Jekyll, Hugo, and Eleventy. For the most part, it was a great shift in how I build, but there were a few things I had to figure out in that new world – one of them was simple form handling. While I could have used serverless just fine, it felt like overkill. Luckily, there were a few services out there that catered to this need. You would simply use a unique action for your form and that service would handle collecting the form data, emailing it to you, and redirecting the user back to the site. A great example of this, and one I used... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: building, form, handling, service, Town
How Much Room Does a Mushroom Need? – About 110 Quadrillion Kilometres / / No Comments Beneath your feet is a vast network of fungi. Not merely “quite large” vast, but vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly vast. If every strand of these underground fungal networks were laid end-to-end, they would stretch from Earth to the Sun about a billion times.To put that into perspective, if you could travel at the speed of light, it would take you nearly 12 years to cover that distance. Yet Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: about, Kilometres, Much, Mushroom, Need, Quadrillion, Room