Shadows, mapped in advance
Hey 👋 — with a total solar eclipse sweeping through in a few days, today's lead item is basically a planetarium you can drag with your mouse. Round that out with a QR code that moonlights as a photograph, a typography experiment that says almost nothing (on purpose), and a studio site built on a grid that knows how to bend.
Open-source interactive map for the Aug 12 total solar eclipse
Ahead of Wednesday's total solar eclipse, this open-source map lets you scrub the path of totality minute by minute, toggling layers like the Besselian elements that define the shadow's math, a live umbra projection, and even cloud cover forecasts overlaid on OpenStreetMap. It's the kind of tool that turns an abstract "path of totality" into something you can zoom into your own backyard. Drop a pin anywhere and it'll tell you exactly when the sky goes dark, and for how long (via HN discussion).
Dithered QR codes
A clever hack: run Floyd-Steinberg-style error diffusion twice — once to scatter a QR's data modules into something photo-like, once to dither the actual image underneath — and you get a code that scans clean while doubling as a legible little portrait. There's a free generator if you want to turn your own photos into scannable static (via HN discussion).
Type
Joohyun Park's page announces itself with a single word and lets the rest unfold in the browser — less a statement than an invitation to poke at it yourself (via Waxy).
Designing a flexible digital archive for Chems.Studio's creative practice
A solid case study on holding a site together with one three-column grid while letting its rhythm shift across the homepage, archive, and project pages, with Swup.js smoothing the transitions between them (via Codrops).
Quick hits
- Gentoo bugzilla closed due AI bot scraper overload — open-source infra buckling under the very bots meant to learn from it.
- Hardware backdoors in some x86 CPUs — a reminder that "trust the hardware" was always aspirational.
- My server is a phone now — the old phone in your drawer has more uptime potential than you think.
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