(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
Surfing the Jet Stream / / No Comments Anyone who has ever flown from America to Europe has probably noticed that the outward flight usually takes considerably less time than the return journey. The reason is the jet stream – fast-moving winds high in the atmosphere that generally blow from west to east. Flying east, aircraft can get a significant push from these winds, while flying west means battling against them. The same phenomenon affects flights to Hawaii, and Flight Map from HawaiiTravelers lets you explore exactly how much extra time the winds appear to add to the journey. Flight Map uses an azimuthal equidistant projection centred on Honolulu to plot straight-line flight paths from Hawaii’s capital to 68 other... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: stream, Surfing
Where Area Equals People / / No Comments What would the world look like if countries were resized according to the number of people living in them? You can explore that question in Gapmover, an map that shows how the relative size of countries has changed from 1800 and is projected to change through to 2100. Unlike a conventional map, this animated population cartogram continually distorts the shapes and sizes of countries so that their area reflects their share of the world’s population. As you drag through the timeline, countries swell and shrink, offering a striking visualisation of the changing balance of population around the globe. The effect can be quite surprising. China, for example, is the world’s most populous... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Area, Equals, people
Where does the North Begin? / / No Comments One of the perennial questions in UK politics and geography is “where is the border between the North and South?” I can now definitively answer that question thanks to MapSplit. Giuseppe Sollazzo’s MapSplit interactive map allows you to map any UK-specific dataset and then “draw a movable straight line across the UK” to view a statistic for each side. This means I was able to upload all the Greggs outlets in the UK onto Giuseppe’s map and instantly discover the dividing line across the country where there are an equal number of Greggs north and south of the line. Ending, forever, the debate about the border between the North and South. MapSplit is a wonderfully simple idea, but... more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Begin, north