Send me a message in a panel…

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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 →
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METs Do the Time Warp Again

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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 →
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Trump II: The Debt Star Strikes Back

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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 →
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Keyboard Free Maps

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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 →
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Using Val Town and Gemini for Sports Ball Stuff

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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 →
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The Interstellar Travel Planner

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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 →
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Animated video backgrounds via a Web Component and ColorThief

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Earlier this year, the epic ColorThief library had a pretty significant update. I blogged about a simple demo I built with it but I was fascinated by one particular demo on their site. The "observe" function in ColorThief lets you monitor a video source and grab the colors at a particular frame. Their demo uses this to create a lovely shadow background of the video. I believe some TVs have this feature as well, and honestly I’d worry that would get annoying, but the ColorThief demo was pretty cool, so I thought I’d try to build it with a web component. The idea would be – take any basic video element and wrap it like so: <video-bgshadow> <video controls width="250">... more →
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Historical GeoGuesssr

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WenWare is a fun, time-travel twist on GeoGuessr. The hook? You aren’t just guessing your location – you’re guessing the date.The game drops you into AI-generated panoramas of famous historical events, asking you to identify both the “where” and the “when.”Sounds simple enough, right? In practice, however, the game’s success feels tied to the modern era. While the Modern period features Maps Mania… more →
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