Providing Global Relief / / No Comments Bert Spaan has taken Mapterhorn’s global terrain data to create an interactive global Relief map. What is particularly interesting about this new map is that, unlike traditional topographic maps with a fixed colour-to-elevation scale, the map’s colour spectrum adapts dynamically to the specific region or bounds currently in view. As you pan and zoom across different landscapes, the colour grading shifts to highlight local topographic variations, producing a striking and constantly changing view of the world’s mountains, valleys and plains. This works particularly well when switching between very different environments: the colour range changes to bring out the relief at the... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: global, Providing, Relief
A Simple Weather App in TypeScript / / No Comments Happy Sunday, my fellow nerds. If you’ve been keeping up with my posts (all 4 of you – thank you!) then you know I’ve been experimenting with TypeScript (and Vite) recently. This past week I decided to try building a real "app", and of course by app I mean something incredibly small, but a bit "real world"-ish to kind of get a feel for what the development process felt like. I decided on a fairly simple weather application. The application would prompt you for a location. That location gets geocoded to longitude and latitude values. With those values, I’d grab a simple weather forecast. After you add one, you can add another, and delete as well. Finally,... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: simple, TypeScript, Weather
Using AI to Annotate Vintage Maps / / No Comments Bosphore 1819 is an interactive version of a beautiful 1819 topographical map of the Bosphorus. The original Plan Topographique du Bosphore de Thrace ou Canal de Constantinople et de ses environs was surveyed by François Kauffer between 1776 and 1786, before being redrawn and expanded by Jean-Denis Barbié du Bocage and published in 1819. The original map is wonderfully detailed, but navigating it isn’t particularly easy – particularly if you can’t speak or read French. Hundreds of villages, palaces, fortifications, streams, capes and other landmarks are labelled using French spellings of Ottoman Turkish names. Bosphore 1819 turns all those labels into a database that can... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Annotate, maps, using, Vintage
Shine a Light / / No Comments There are plenty of maps that show you where the world’s lighthouses are. Lighthouses, live does something much more interesting: it shows you how they actually work. Instead of just showing each lighthouse as a static point on a map this map gives you a sense of what its light signal actually looks like at sea. Lighthouses, live plots charted coastal lights on a dark, night-time relief map and animates each one according to its real-world light characteristics. Some lights sweep continuously across the sea, while others flash in distinctive sequences, with the timing and colour of each beam taken from nautical charts. Impressively, terrain data is also used to block the light based on... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Light, Shine
A Simple Alpine.js Template with Vite and TypeScript / / No Comments This will be a quick one – but as I think more about TypeScript and how I’d like to learn (and play, and build silly demos), I naturally thought it may make sense to look at how I’d use Alpine.js with that stack. Alpine’s been my go to library for web apps that reach the level of complexity where I’d like some help with DOM manipulation and such. I don’t always use it, because (imho) the default stack should be as vanilla as possible (obviously I’m going a bit off ranch with these explorations into TypeScript and Vite) but Alpine is lightweight and simple and just a great little library in general. What follows isn’t necessarily a "template"... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Alpine.js, simple, Template, TypeScript, Vite
The US Deportation Map / / No Comments Since January 2025, the United States has deported at least 25,447 people to countries that are not their own. According to The Guardian those deported ‘include those who spent most of their lives in the US, parents detained on the school run, (and) the adult children of elderly relatives who depend on them for care.’ The Deportation Project Map lets you explore the Trump administration’s global network of deportations. Click on a country on the map and you can see the number of people who have been deported there alongside a breakdown of the nationalities of those who have been deported. The map is part of The Deportation Project, an international investigation involving 24... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Deportation
Links For You (9/20/26) / / No Comments Happy "Football is Back" season to those of you who celebrate. I’m currently watching my Saints take on the Ravens (who are also a favorite of mine) and hoping for our first win. The last few weeks have been incredibly busy (I feel like I always say that, sorry) with a trip for work that then morphed into a short vacation with my wife and I which included my first Blizzcon (which is freaking cool as hell) and our first visit to Disneyland. (We’ve been to Disney World a few times.) I think we both agreed that Disney World is cooler, but the crowds and – most importantly – the weather – was much better in California. RSS Lookup First up for the links today... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 9/20/26, links
GeoWhisperer – See How the World Has Changed / / No Comments Since 2012, the London Legacy Development Corporation has gradually transformed the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park from an essential local green space into a high-density residential hub driven by foreign investment. The before-and-after aerial imagery above provides a striking illustration of how the landscape of the Olympic ‘park’ is being built over. This before and after image was created in a matter of seconds by GeoWhisperer. GeoWhisperer is a new tool from Henk van Ess that attempts to take some of the guesswork out of comparing satellite imagery. Designed for OSINT researchers, journalists and visual mappers, it automatically searches historical satellite imagery and uses... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Changed, GeoWhisperer, World