A Guided Street View Tour of the World / / No Comments StreetWhip If you’ve ever lost an hour (or five) wandering the globe via Google Street View, you’re not alone. There’s something uniquely thrilling about virtually dropping into a faraway town and soaking in the details — the architecture, the people, the colors of everyday life. But what if you could do more than just look? What if you had a knowledgeable, curious local guide whispering in Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Guided, Street, tour, View, World
Using AI to Analyze Chart Images / / No Comments I’ve done a few posts where I’ve asked GenAI services to analyze and summarize data. Most recently, I blogged about Chrome’s built-in AI APIs and summarizing raw data into simple English. In each case where I’ve done work like this, I’ve had access to the raw data of what I want the API to analyze. But what if you don’t? What if all you have is a simple chart image? I did some testing with this and here’s what I found. My Source Data For my source data, I created a set of charts using Highcharts. This isn’t my preferred front-end charting library, but I noticed their demos had (usually) a quick CSV export. That made it easy to get both a sample... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Analyze, Chart, images, using
Kangaroos Don’t Vote – People Do / / No Comments If ever an election needed a cartogram map, it was the 2025 Australian federal election. If you were to view The Australian’s Electorate Map – 2025, you could be forgiven for thinking the Liberals had cruised to a landslide victory. This traditional cartogram election map is visually dominated by the blue of the Liberal Party. It also appears as if the Labor Party (shown using salmon pink) Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: don't, Kangaroos, people, Vote
Links For You (5/3/25) / / No Comments Happy Saturday, Happy Pre-May the 4th, and happy "I don’t have to beg for a job anymore". Yep, I’ve got a job. I’m going to be announcing where and what later this month when I start, but, finally, I can stop the hunt. Oh, and the crippling fear and despair being gone is an added bonus. So, happy day! Let’s get to the links. Tubes, tubes, tubes Last week I started off with a post from Todd Sharp so why not do it again? Todd wrote up his experience using Momento Topics API and Nixie Tubes. Nixie Tubs are beautiful steam punk looking tubes that can be connected to hardware and then changed programmatically. I did a bit of hardware hacking last year but the project... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 5/3/25, links
Code Break Back for May / / No Comments Hey folks, after a break last month (for reasons), I’m happy to announce that Code Break is back on schedule. I’m ditching any further exploration of React for now, but instead turning my attention to something I think is really fun – building desktop apps. This first session will focus on a JavaScript-based framework while my next one will cover using Python. My next session will not be on a Tuesday, but Monday, May 5th, at 12PM CST. You can RSVP/sign up/etc here: https://cfe.dev/talkshows/codebreak-05052025/ I hope to see you there! Raymond Camden… more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Back, Break, code
Mapping the Sudanese Civil War / / No Comments Two years into Sudan’s civil war, the country remains gripped by a humanitarian catastrophe and a relentless power struggle that has devastated lives and reshaped its landscape. What began on April 15, 2023, as a clash between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), has since escalated into a nationwide conflict. With over 14 million people displaced Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Civil, Mapping, Sudanese
19th Century Street View of Chicago / / No Comments Imagine stepping straight into the heart of history – and finding yourself surrounded by the wonders of 1893. The Chicago 00 Project makes it possible, weaving authentic vintage photographs of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago into a breathtaking, time-traveling Street View adventure!For example, click on the White City Court of Honor map marker, and you are transported into Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: 19th, Century, Chicago, Street, View
Creating a PDF Book from Markdown with BoxLang / / No Comments Recently I’ve done some blog posts on BoxLang involving Markdown and PDFs, and I was curious if I could put together something that really demonstrated a complete tool of some sort. With that in mind, I built a "book" system where you can author pages in Markdown and use a BoxLang CLI script to generate a resulting PDF. It’s more a POC than a real app, but it was pretty fun to build. Here’s what I did. Functionality At a high level, the book is created from a source of Markdown files. Each Markdown file can use front matter (data on top) to define variables that are evaluated at the time the book is created. You can also use a "global" data file to define... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: book, BoxLang, creating, from, Markdown