Drawing Custom Population Polygons / / No Comments Tom Forth’s Population around a Point is one of those wonderfully simple map tools that instantly invites exploration. Click anywhere on the map, choose a radius, and it estimates how many people live within that circle. Under the hood, it uses the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) population grid for 2024, querying population points stored in a massive SQLite database.Now Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: custom, Drawing, Polygons, Population
Is it hotter or colder this year? / / No Comments Where I live could generously be called "warm", but is usually closer to the surface of the sun, especially in late summer. That’s why when the weather is not oppressively hot, I try my best to enjoy it. We’re mid-May now and honestly, this spring has been… pleasant. Suspiciously pleasant but I’ll take what I can get. The last few weeks I’ve been telling myself that the weather must be a good bit cooler than last year, and I finally decided to do something about it. I worked with Claude and created a little web app that: Lets you enter a free form address and then use Geocoding to convert it to a proper longitude and latitude. This is a super simple geocoding... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: colder, hotter, this, year
Send me a message in a panel… / / No Comments On my birthday a few weeks ago, one of things I got was something I’ve wanted to play with for a while, the Divoom Pixoo64 pixel frame. This is pixel art frame you can hang on your wall and with an app, select art, clock faces, and more. It’s fun, although the app itself isn’t my favorite. But – what excites me is that it has an API you can use to change what’s shown on the frame. I actually built a demo of this with Webflow you can see below: Play Video I was thinking about how else I could play with the API and decided to do something a bit risky – build a tool that lets you (yes, you!) send me a message right to my device. How did I do it?... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: message, panel..., Send
METs Do the Time Warp Again / / No Comments NYC Commute POV takes the familiar geography of New York and stretches it into something far more emotionally accurate: a city shaped by time rather than distance.Inspired by classic transit cartograms, the map reimagines New York according to subway accessibility. Midtown Manhattan shrinks into a compact, hyper-connected core, while transit deserts balloon outward into distorted peripheries. Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Again, METs, time, Warp
Trump II: The Debt Star Strikes Back / / No Comments With US public debt officially eclipsing 100% of GDP for the first time since the 1940s, the Trump administration is pivoting toward “high-impact” funding. Nowhere is this more evident than at the Department of War. Yesterday, the search for “little green men” took a giant leap forward with the release of “files related to alien and extraterrestrial life.”The release marks the debut of the Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Back, debt, star, strikes, Trump
Keyboard Free Maps / / No Comments Map Gesture ControlsAlexFor most of us interactive maps are controlled with a mouse, a trackpad or touch gestures. However, some developers are exploring alternative ways to navigate maps without ever touching a keyboard or screen.Non-keyboard controls could prove especially useful for accessibility, allowing people with limited mobility to interact with maps more easily. Two recent Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: free, Keyboard, maps
Using Val Town and Gemini for Sports Ball Stuff / / No Comments This is trivial as heck as the kids say, but I really want to explore Val Town more this year and I thought of a great, and simple use for it. Both my wife and I are big Saints fans (this is their year, honest) and attend most of the games. If they’re not playing at home, we’re absolutely watching it on TV. We both really enjoy watching football, but honestly, not enough to watch ESPN and follow the news. I thought – why not simply get a summary of NFL news from the past week and build an automation of it? I had this running in less than ten minutes with Val Town. First, the code makes use of Google’s Node SDK for working with Gemini. I setup my environment variable first... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Ball, Gemini, Sports, Stuff, Town, using
The Interstellar Travel Planner / / No Comments Have you ever woken up aboard an interstellar spacecraft with no idea how long it will take to get home to Earth? Then you need the Interstellar Map.This impressive browser-based visualization combines a 3D map of nearby stars with a relativistic travel-time calculator, allowing you to explore the practical consequences of planned journeys across interstellar space. The map plots thousands of Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Interstellar, planner, travel