Links For You (3/8/25) / / No Comments Happy afternoon, programs. I just got back one of my kid’s soccer games (unlike last season, the weather is pleasant and not scorching hot) and I’ve got a Saturday now that is 100% open! Which means I’ll get a lot done! (Or, more likely, play video games.) So that I can more quickly get to all the important chores and cleaning I’m not going to do, let’s get to the links. Code Listings via API First up is a two-fer kinda. Showcode is an excellent web app to create screenshots from code. It supports numerous languages, numerous display options, and so forth, and creates really good output. As an example: While it’s a great webapp, they also have a cool API... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 3/8/25, links
The Dot Map of America / / No Comments One of my all-time favorite interactive maps was created by Dustin Cable at the University of Virginia. Unfortunately, the Racial Dot Map of America was removed in 2022. This map used data from the 2010 Census to place a colored dot on a map for every American – all 308,745,538 of them. As the name suggests, the color of each dot was determined by race.The UVA map, based on 2010 Census Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: America
Code Break this Thursday – Ray Finally Learns React / / No Comments Ok, so if you attended my last Code Break session you know I was hinting that I was really excited for my next one. For years now I’ve wanted to give React a fair shake and actually try to build something with it. Finally I’m making time to do so. This Thursday at 12PM CST, my next session will be: I Don’t like React. Let’s Learn React! To be clear, it isn’t that I dislike React, it’s just that every time I’ve looked at the code, it just didn’t gel with me. I know it’s incredibly popular, but I always felt like if I needed to build a proper "web app", I’d just use Vue (despite my feelings about Vue 3, feel free to ask me in... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Break, code, Finally, Learns, React, this, Thursday
Rebuilding the Berlin Wall / / No Comments choropleth election map showing the CDU dominant in the west and the AfD winning in the east In my round-up of 2025 German Election Maps, I commented on the “stark contrast between the results in former East Germany and the rest of the country.” It was immediately apparent to most observers of last week’s German election that there was a clear voting split along the old East-West German border. Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Berlin, Rebuilding, Wall
Parsing Uploaded Resumes into Form Fields with Google Gemini / / No Comments As I’ve recently become somewhat familiar with job application sites (sigh, thanks Adobe), I’ve noticed an interesting feature some sites use. After selecting your resume to upload, they will parse the resume and either offer to, or automatically, fill in some of the form fields of the application for you. I thought it would be interesting to try this myself making use of Google’s Gemini APIs. Here’s what I discovered. The Test Script As always, I began with a script that would take a hard-coded resume and attempt to parse it. For the most part, this is basic "upload a file and ask the AI to talk about", but in my case, I wanted a very particular set of data... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Fields, form, Gemini, Google, into, Parsing, Resumes, Uploaded
Quick Demo of Chrome’s Summarization GenAI (Upcoming) API / / No Comments I’ve blogged a few times recently about Google’s AI on Chrome initiative to bring AI features to the browser itself. Yesterday, my Code Break episode was specifically on this topic: Play Video In that session, I talk specifically about the Summarizer API, which does… wait for it… summarization. (It also covers the Writer and Rewriter API which I covered… woah, way back in September of last year: "Using Chrome AI to Rewrite Text") One interesting aspect of the API is that it offers multiple types of summarization: key points (the default) tl;dr teaser headline You can also request three different lengths: short medium (default) long According... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Chrome's, Demo, GenAI, Quick, Summarization, Upcoming
What is Your Climate Vulnerability? / / No Comments As climate change continues to reshape the environment, understanding the risks and vulnerabilities specific to different communities is more important than ever. The U.S. Climate Vulnerability Index offers a new interactive mapping tool to help users visualize climate-related vulnerabilities across the country and to show which areas face the greatest challenges from the impacts of climate Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Climate, Vulnerability
Using AI in the Browser for Typo Rewriting / / No Comments Last week I gave a presentation on Chrome’s new built-in AI support (I’ll link the video at the end) and it’s gotten me inspired to consider new and different ways these APIs can be used to enhance the user experience. These APIs still aren’t quite ready for production use, and it’s absolutely possible we may never see these in Safari or Firefox, but the possibility of using them to enhance an application where available is exciting. For today, I want to share an interesting use case that occurred to me a few weeks ago. One of the APIs being built is a translation API (along with a language detection) API as well. In general the idea here is to go from one language... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: browser, Rewriting, Typo, using