The 100 Most Boring People in America / / No Comments Who is the most unnotable person in your town?I asked ChatGPT to find me the most unnotable people in America’s biggest towns and cities. The results can be seen on my Unnotable People map. On this map the placename labels of the 100 largest towns and cities in the USA have been replaced with each town’s most insignificant person.Using ChatGPT to find each town’s most unnotable person means Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: America, Boring, most, people
How to Block a Range of IP Addresses / / No Comments As much as content creators want traffic to their website, there is such thing as the wrong type of traffic. Sometimes it’s content scrapers, sometimes it’s malicious bots; either way, it’s important to know how to block problematic IPs from your site. To block a range of IP addresses using an .htaccess file, you can use the * wildcard for pieces of the IP address: Order Allow,Deny Deny from 219.198.*.* Allow from all You can also use a regular expression: RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^219\.198\.\. RewriteRule ^ - [F] Don’t let known attackers and problematic bots bring your website to a halt! Be quick to check your site logs and ban addresses that... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Addresses, Block, range
The Electric Vehicle Driving Test / / No Comments Electric vehicles are becoming increasingly popular, as people look for ways to reduce their environmental impact. But what are the pros and cons of electric vehicles compared to gas cars? And are all electric vehicles created equal? The San Franicisco Chronicle has created an interesting route planning tool which can help drivers compare the likely travel time and cost of taking any car Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: driving, Electric, test, Vehicle
Adobe Firefly in Beta / / No Comments I’m currently at Adobe Summit and this morning at the keynote we announced the beta of Adobe Firefly. Firefly is a generative AI service, which by itself isn’t new, but Firefly has a strong commitment to being a more responsible AI service. You can read more about that and Adobe Sensei here if you would like. As an Adobe employee, I’m obviously biased, but the focus on having a responsible service that respects creators feels like a pretty important differentiator. While there are a lot of good uses for this, I decided to have some fun with it and see how well it would do something business-critical… with cats. For my test, I looked up a list of Dungeons and Dragons classes... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Adobe, Beta, Firefly
Spying on a Chinese Spy Balloon / / No Comments Thanks to some impressive detective work the New York Times has worked out the provenance of the notorious Chinese spy balloon which enraged many Americans back in February. In Tracking the Chinese Spy Balloon From Space you can follow the path the balloon took on an interactive map, as it journeyed from China, across the Pacific Ocean and across the United States during January and February of Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: balloon, Chinese, Spying
How to Control CSS Animations with JavaScript / / No Comments When it comes to animations on the web, developers need to measure the animation’s requirements with the right technology — CSS or JavaScript. Many animations are manageable with CSS but JavaScript will always provide more control. With document.getAnimations, however, you can use JavaScript to manage CSS animations! The document.getAnimations method returns an array of CSSAnimation objects. CSSAnimation provides a host of information about the animation: playState, timeline, effect, and events like onfinish. You can then modify those objects to adjust animations: // Make all CSS animations on the page twice as fast document.getAnimations().forEach((animation) ={ animation.playbackRate... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: animations, Control, JavaScript
JavaScript print Events / / No Comments Media queries provide a great way to programmatically change behavior depending on viewing state. We can target styles to device, pixel ratio, screen size, and even print. That said, it’s also nice to have JavaScript events that also allow us to change behavior. Did you know you’re provided events both before and after printing? I’ve always used @media print in stylesheets to control print display, but JavaScript provides beforeprint and afterprint events: function toggleImages(hide = false) { document.querySelectorAll('img').forEach(img ={ img.style.display = hide ? 'none' : ''; }); } // Hide images to save toner/ink during printing window.addEventListener('beforeprint',... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: events, JavaScript, print
What do you call an American with a Brain? / / No Comments Q: What do you call a person from Maine with a brain?A: A Maineiac.Q: What do you call a person from California with a brain?A: Lost!Q: What do you call a person from Arkansas with a brain?A: A Yo’allI asked the Stanford Alpaca AI what you would call a resident of each US ‘with a brain’. I was hoping for some good ‘dad joke’ type answers. For example I asked Alpaca “What do you call a Texan Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: American, Brain, call