Links For You (1/25/25) / / No Comments Greetings, programs. I’m writing this from the deep, deep south where my kids were all off school this week because of… snow. I kid you not. On Tuesday we got around ten inches of snow, more than the area’s ever seen in recorded history I believe. I grew up in Saint Louis so I’ve seen snow before, but in the nearly twenty-five years I’ve been here there’s never been anything like it. The snow is pretty much gone already (I think the high today will be near 70), but I’m so happy the kids got a chance to play in the snow, just like I did, many many years ago. JavaScript Import Maps This is a pretty cool article. Victorio Lo demonstrates how to implement... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 1/25/25, links
An Extremely Distorted Map of the US Election / / No Comments Following the publication of its Extremely Detailed Map of the 2016 Election, the New York Times was widely criticized for visually misrepresenting the election results. Despite this backlash, the newspaper chose to repeat the error after the 2020 election – and has now done so again!The New York Times recently released its Extremely Detailed Map of the 2024 Election. According to the NYT, Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: 'extremely, Distorted, election
Let’s Build a Web App for Pinecone / / No Comments Yesterday I blogged about Pinecone’s excellent RAG as a service system for quickly building generative AI systems: "Checkout Pinecone for Serverless RAG". It was so easy, I decided to take a look into what it would take to build a "real" application around their service. With that in mind, I whipped up a quick Flask application to demo just that. I’m still very new to Flask, so take this with a grain of salt, and design isn’t my strong point, but who cares, let’s dig in! First off, a quick reminder of what I demonstrated yesterday. I used Pinecone’s Python SDK to: Create an "Assistant", which you can think of as a collection of documents. I... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Build, Lets, Pinecone
Roads, Railways, Runways & Rivers / / No Comments I have been inspired by OpenSkiStats’ Which Way do You Ski to create my own interactive map for visualizing the orientations of roads, railways, runways, and rivers in towns and cities around the world.In Which Way Do You Ski, OpenSkiStats created a series of “compass rose” visualizations that illustrate the strong poleward tendency of ski runs across the globe. These ski slope orientation Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Railways, Rivers, roads, Runways
GeoGuessr for History Buffs / / No Comments Can you guess the date and location of the historical event taking place in these two AI generated videos? If you can then you might just become the Time Portal champion of the world.Time Portal is a fun and innovative online game that challenges you to pinpoint the time and place of significant historical moments. If you’re a fan of history and love games like GeoGuessr, this one’s for you.At Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Buffs, GeoGuessr, History
Turn Your Weather into Poetry with GenAI / / No Comments I was struggling to get some real, productive work done (I just got back from a trip in Europe) and I thought I’d tackle something that’s been in my queue for a little while now. This is, yet again, one of my "bad ideas" that you should probably not ever use in production, but it was fun, it made me happy, and you get to see the kind of silliness I do when I’m trying to distract myself. The idea was simple – given a forecast, how well could generative AI transform it into something more fun, like poetry? As I usually do, I opened up Google’s AI Studio and tried it there first. I began with a system instruction: Given a forecast, rewrite it in poetry. Return... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: GenAI, into, Poetry, Turn, Weather
Global Ski Slope Orientations / / No Comments OpenSkiStats has analyzed ski trail maps to determine the direction of travel for ski trails worldwide. In Which Way do You Ski OpenSkiStats has used ski trail maps to determine the direction of travel of all ski trails in ski resorts around the globe. By gathering the coordinates of all trail segments, connecting these points, and treating each segment as a vector scaled by its Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: global, Orientations, Slope
Next CodeBreak – Let’s AI! / / No Comments Hey folks! One of the things I promised to do better with the Code Break show was scheduling. With that being said, I’m here to announce the next event and I’ve got about 4 already on the calendar after that. Hopefully this year I can get a bit more consistent with schedule. That being said, we’ll see. Life is crazy at times. 😉 Ok, with that out of the way, my next session is Tuesday, January 21, at 12PM CST. I’ll be talking about AI, specifically Generative AI, with a focus on Google Gemini, but also client-side stuff as well (with Chrome’s built-in support and Transformers.js). I imagine this topic will cover two or more sessions. We’ll see how much I... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: CodeBreak, Lets, Next