Tracking Santa for Christmas

🎅 Santa’s Big Adventure: Follow Him Around the World! 🌍It’s Christmas Eve – the most magical night of the year – and guess what? Santa is already zooming around the world, delivering gifts to kids just like YOU! 🎁 This year, why not join in the fun by following Santa’s incredible journey around the world? 🎄✨ 🦌 NORAD Santa Tracker: Powered by Rudolph’s NoseDo you know how NORAD tracks Maps Mania… more →
Posted in: Interactive Maps

How Christmas Lights Up America

According to NASA, Christmas lights up the winter. Using nighttime satellite imagery of American cities, NASA discovered that nighttime lights in American cities shine 20 to 50 percent brighter during the Christmas season than at other times of the year. In Even from Space, Holidays Shine Brightly NASA explains that nighttime lights start getting brighter on the day after Thanksgiving. You Maps Mania… more →
Posted in: Interactive Maps

The Twelve (Generative) Days of Christmas – 2025 Edition

For the past two years I’ve done a fun little expirement – using GenAI to create illustrations from the Twelve Days of Christmas song. You can check out the 2023 and 2024 editions to see how things have progressed. In previous years, I mostly just kept things simple – passing only the day’s gift as the prompt: partridge in a pear tree two turtle doves three French hens four calling birds five golden rings six geese a-laying seven swans a-swimming eight maids a-milking nine ladies dancing ten lords a-leaping eleven pipers piping twelve drummers drumming Which is absolutely not ideal at all, but part of the fun was seeing how the various tools handled it. This year I decided... more →
Posted in: JavaScript

How to Guarantee a White Christmas

If you’re determined to experience a white Christmas, I suggest booking a trip to Zermatt, Switzerland. According to White Christmas Forecast 2025, residents there have a 100% chance of snow on Christmas Day. (Disclaimer: I’m not in charge of the weather and previous snowfalls do not guarantee future flurries).Last week I linked to NOAA’s Probability of a White Christmas map. This Maps Mania… more →
Posted in: Interactive Maps

The Twelve (Generative) Days of Christmas – 2024 Edition

Last year I did a fun little experiment where I asked a few different generative models to generateimages based on the classic Twelve Days of Christmas song. For those unfamiliar, the song is about a series of gifts given over twelve days: partridge in a pear treetwo turtle dovesthree French hensfour calling birdsfive golden ringssix geese a-layingseven swans a-swimmingeight maids a-milkingnine ladies dancingten lords a-leapingeleven pipers pipingtwelve drummers drumming To be clear, this was done for fun, nothing more. Also, the prompts were literally just the lyrics, nothing more (with some exceptions, see the details below). In a ‘real world’ example if you wanted to generate images... more →
Posted in: JavaScript

Christmas Code Break – Next Tuesday

Hello friends. The next, and final (for the year!) Code Break will be Tuesday, December 17th, one week from today. I’ve got some surprises in store and would love to use this last session to answer questions from my audience. If you’ve got a question you would like me (and others – oh wait, that’s part of the surprise!) to answer, leave me a comment below and I’ll try to get to it. I hope to see you there! RSVP here: https://cfe.dev/talkshows/codebreak-12172024/ Raymond Camden… more →
Posted in: JavaScript

The Twelve (Generative) Days of Christmas

I tend to have a lot of silly ideas. Not useful ideas. Not good ideas. Silly ideas. Randomly yesterday I was thinking about the Twelve Days of Christmas song. If you aren’t familiar with it, it starts off with a gift for one day, then repeats and adds a second day, and so on and so on. The gifts are: partridge in a pear treetwo turtle dovesthree French hensfour calling birdsfive gold ringssix geese a-layingseven swans a-swimmingeight maids a-milkingnine ladies dancingten lords a-leapingeleven pipers pipingtwelve drummers drumming I thought – what if I took each of these phrases and dropped them into an AI image generator? I did, and the results were… kinda fun. Before I show... more →
Posted in: JavaScript
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