The New Geologic Map of the United States / / No Comments The United States Geological Survey has released a new geologic map of the United States that lets you click anywhere in the country to see the rocks, sediments, and geologic units under your feet, along with their age and material type.The Cooperative National Geological Map was created by combining around 100 state and regional maps into one seamless, nationwide view of U.S. geology. Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Geologic, States, United
Building a Web Based Comic Book Reader / / No Comments Ok, so I know I’ve been spending way too much time lately talking about comic books, but I’ve been reading them for roughly 80% of my life now so they’re just a natural part of my life. Now, my best friend Todd Sharp told me this crazy lie that he’s never read a comic book before, but surely that’s a lie. Surely. Earlier this week, I took a look at parsing electronic comic books and sending them to GenAI as a way to get summaries of stories. That was a fun experiment and it actually worked quite well. I thought I’d take a stab at trying a similar approach with Chrome’s Built-in AI support as well when I discovered that… wait… I don’t... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: based, book, building, Comic, Reader
Play GeoGuessr Against an AI / / No Comments GeoGPT is now one of my favorite geo-guessing games. GeoGPT follows the usual GeoGuessr inspired format: you’re dropped into a random street-level image, and your task is to figure out where in the world you are. But here’s the twist – rather than competing against other humans, you’re up against an AI, which makes its own guesses alongside yours. The closest guess to the true location wins Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Against, GeoGuessr, Play
Connecting Comic Books to Generative AI / / No Comments I’ve blogged quite a few times about electronic comic books (most recently earlier this month when I demonstrated a comic book reader built in BoxLang). I’ve been reading comics pretty much my entire life and enjoy building development projects that work with the various file types associated with comics. As a reminder, these typically fall into two categories: cbr – A RAR file of scanned images cbz – A zip file of scanned images This week I was wondering – given that GenAI tools are pretty good at understanding images – how well could a GenAI system take a set of images, in order, and understand the context of the story behind them. I decided to give it... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Books, Comic, Connecting, Generative
Letters Found on the Moon / / No Comments This isn’t a tale about Lunar correspondence, but of letters shaped from the craters and shadows of the Moon. Alphabet Moon uses imagery of Lunar contours and ridges to shape a typeface out of unfamiliar terrain. Each letter is drawn not with ink but with the valleys, peaks, and scars of the lunar surface, transforming geological history into the letters of the alphabet.Enter your name – or any Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Found, Letters, Moon
Links For You (8/24/25) / / No Comments So yeah… not a great two weeks or so since my last Links post. If you missed the announcement, my time at Foxit was unceremoniously cut short which came as a complete shock. This may end up being the year I spend more time without a full time job than with. To be honest, I’m a really, really bad place right now, but, trying to maintain, and trying my best to once again find a job in the worst market I’ve seen in my career. One way or the other I’ll get through this again, but I’m really, really tired of this. Let me pretend to think positive for a moment and maybe in the next Links post I’ll have better news. Maybe. Ok, enough complaining, let’s get to... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 8/24/25, links
Unit Formatting with Intl in JavaScript / / No Comments It’s been a little while since I last blogged about my favorite web platform feature, Intl. I think it was maybe two or so years ago when I was prepping for my first conference talk on the topic and using that as an opportunity to dig much deeper into the spec then I had before and wow, I was unprepared for how flexible, and powerful, this functionality is in the browser. I blogged about localized relative timings back in March of 2024 (ah, I remember March 2024, I had a job then), and discussed how to dynamically handle different quantities of time differences. More recently, I blogged about dynamic time durations and how best to select the right duration for the formatter object. In both... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Formatting, Intl, JavaScript, Unit
Using AI to Search Maps / / No Comments The magnificent David Rumsey Map Collection now has an AI Search Assistant that can help you find maps, learn more about individual maps, and even query specific elements within maps.The David Rumsey Map Collection is one of the largest online collections of maps, and its new AI Search Assistant is a fantastic resource. It not only helps you search and discover maps in the collection Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: maps, search, using