iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

The daily solargraph is the continuation of my digital solargraphy project. You can watch every day's capture as a little video, or scrub through manually. The new capture is added every night around 10pm PDT. eagereyes.org/app/daily-so...

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You realize this is a scam, right? They're trying to make you install some sort of spyware.

The beauty of digital solargraphy is that you have so many ways of using what you capture. See how the clouds impact the trail! Marvel at the sky changing through the day! Enjoy the Seattle weather (You can even see rain on the sensor on a couple of days)!

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The Bits Are Rotting in the State of Data Journalism – eagereyes

It's weirdly sad/funny that all the half-broken Washington Post news graphics I linked from this blog post in 2016 are now entirely unreachable, while the NY Times Flash-based example I described as "you're now just staring at a big hole" works again. eagereyes.org/blog/2016/th...

eagereyes.org

News articles are an incredibly important source of historical information. Online media and interactive pieces are much more at risk of breaking or disappearing, at least in theory. Well, it's not ju...

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I still need to clean up about 300 of the latter, but Claude fixed (or built scripts to fix) the other ~800 links. I would never have done that by hand, obviously. Also, updated almost 2,500 links from HTTP to HTTPS and checked that they still work.

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Good use of LLMs though, I had Claude build some scripts, and then Fable orchestrated 25 Haiku agents to classify uses of links into incidental (could break removed automatically) and "load-bearing" (hey, it's Claude after all!).

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I think it's really sad that universities don't feel the need to keep former professors' websites up. These aren't just little vanity websites, they often host important research data and papers. Going through my old conference reports, about half the links to projects and materials are now dead.

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Robert Kosara @eagereyes.org · 29/06/2026

Spending some time to clean up old links in blog posts and comments. A lot of things have gone away, pretty sad to see. So long Charticulator, Circos, iCharts, kartograph, Kuler, a bunch of yearly EuroVis and VIS workshop sites (BELIV!), and a whole lot of people's academic websites.

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These are all the last "bright" image of the day overlaid with the sun trail. They're in addition to the "dark" images that correctly capture the sun, and I initially just wanted them to recalibrate the stitching if necessary. But they actually turned out to be really useful as backgrounds.

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Robert Kosara @eagereyes.org · 29/06/2026

Something fun you can do with digital solargraphs that you can't with paper, is look at each daily streak separately and admire the patterns. Here are four from the last few days in Seattle, the first on the solstice (6/21), and then 6/26-28.

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Also shoutout to CinemaStix, who never fails to amaze me and get me excited about movies again. Even though I also always hesitate before watching a movie, because something about the thumbnails and titles always feels like a setup for a big let-down. But always worth it.

How they got away with the most dangerous editing decision ever

It's kind of odd how The Twist clouds so much of my memory of The Sixth Sense. It was an incredibly well done movie, might be time to re-watch (27 years later 😬). youtu.be/ujH-6k218Kc

youtu.be

YouTube video by CinemaStix

Nice! I've seen them used in medical and nursing contexts, like to show people their baby's weight and size relative to the population, etc.

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Robert Kosara @eagereyes.org · 23/06/2026

This isn't so much a chart as a visual calculator (a nomograph or nomogram, as it says in the title). They were very common before computers/calculators, and encoded a fair amount of knowledge about their specific application areas and use cases.

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Beautiful! I just built a solargraph simulator based on real solar irradiation data, in case you want to try some with less effort 😅 eagereyes.org/app/solargraph

eagereyes.org

Solargraph Simulator – eagereyes

How a 6-month exposure shows the sun's path across the sky, from solstice to solstice

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Robert Kosara @eagereyes.org · 23/06/2026

Hah, I’ve got two solarcans at my house now and one at a friend’s place. Watch this space in December when we get to see the results!

Robert Kosara @eagereyes.org · 22/06/2026

ICYMI: I built a little app that lets you draw solargraphs as seen from a number of different places across the globe, including the South Pole.

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Reposted by Robert Kosara

Robert Kosara @eagereyes.org · 21/06/2026

I've built a solargraph simulator using solar irradiation data. Pick a place on Earth, animate the solargraph, draw just one point per hour for analemma view, or switch to panorama mode that projects the solargraph into a virtual sky you can navigate. eagereyes.org/app/solargraph

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Robert Kosara @eagereyes.org · 21/06/2026

Also, Happy Solstice! 😎

Robert Kosara @eagereyes.org · 21/06/2026

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Robert Kosara @eagereyes.org · 19/06/2026

I love that movie. I saw it as a kid and rewatched it a few years ago. Still pretty good, even if the acting is pretty bad in places. But kind of a fun time capsule of that 1970s psychedelic style of sci-fi.

Robert Kosara @eagereyes.org · 18/06/2026

What if solargraph, but animated? Is it a solarlapse?

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Robert Kosara @eagereyes.org · 17/06/2026

Does it even come with that tiny knight's glove on the right, though? It'd better, if I have to pay $30 shipping on top of the $12K…

An open copy of Playfair's Statistical Atlas of the United Sates, showing the first pie chart, and held open with a tiny gizmo that looks like a metal glove worn by a knight.

Robert Kosara @eagereyes.org · 16/06/2026

You know stuff is getting real when I'm reactivating my email list

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Robert Kosara @eagereyes.org · 16/06/2026

I just sent out emails to everybody who was subscribed to my website back when it was on WordPress. If that's you, check your spam folder :) You'll have to confirm your subscription or it won't be activated. There's interesting new stuff coming, you don't want to miss it…

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Reposted by Robert Kosara

WSDOT @wsdot.wa.gov · 15/06/2026

WELCOME TO WASHINGTON, SOCCER FANS. Get acquainted with our state via this highly accurate and mostly-to-scale map.

A hot mess of colorful scribbles all over a map of Washington, featuring doodles of iconic Washington features like mountains, orcas, ferries, cherries, onions, and other produce. The map emphasizes the busyness of the Seattle area, I-5, I-90, US 2, and the U.S./Canada border during the World Cup games.

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Oh I know! But good point, thanks! I tried a few different cables, all of which I know should work (including the cables the cameras came with). That's a whole 'nother can of worms…

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In my case, it's for a pair of GoPro cameras. They power up just fine on a power brick, and on some USB hubs when there's no computer. But the point was to control them over USB, which is impossible unless I want to turn them on by hand each time power comes back (which I don't).

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I've tried three different USB hubs that all should provide enough power. One even lets you turn power off and on for each port programmatically (and it even works, seems pretty hit-or-miss in general). But the behavior is the same with all three.

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There's something about USB power I just don't understand. This is old-school 5V power, not power delivery. It seems that USB hubs provide more power when no host device is present than when there is a computer there. So devices might work without host, but fail to boot up when there is one.

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It did eventually make this though (in 4K too, but I scaled it down), so yay I guess. I'm still baffled that this is so janky and difficult to make, though.

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Yeah but that paper is a million years old. I figured this would be possible in 2026 without having to write code. Also, I'd rather have imagery than a map.

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JFC, the Google Earth "Pro" app for macOS is intel-only

A pop-up message telling me that support for Intel-based apps is ending after I opened Google Earth Pro

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It's supposed to be satellite imagery. But even that aside, the animation controls are pretty terrible (can't control position and zoom independently?). And the point-to-point preset produces some pretty bizarre key frames (this is that preset, not that it matters with the other issues).

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I'm trying to make some nice transitions from one place on the globe to another. Are there any good web apps or similar for this? I'm trying Google Earth Studio, but when I export, I get… this.

Image Playground in iPadOS 27 is vastly better than before

Friendly anthropomorphic pie chart breaking through a wall into a living room

Angry anthropomorphic pie chart breaking through a wall into an empty room

Robert Kosara @eagereyes.org · 12/06/2026

I've found LLMs really useful for kicking around ideas and getting different views on them. You have to spend a little time figuring out how to prompt, but they're really helpful when you do it right.

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Robert Kosara @eagereyes.org · 12/06/2026

New video in the works… currently in the "arguing with Claude about thumbnail layout and title options" phase

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Reposted by Robert Kosara

John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 03/06/2026

Unsurprisingly excellent piece from Ted Chiang about LLMs and particularly about Claude. Claude (or any other LLM) is not conscious or "intelligent" in the general understanding of the word, but if it were, then it would be, essentially, a slave. www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2...

theatlantic.com

No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious

Taken to its logical conclusion, this line of thinking is absurd—and damning.

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Robert Kosara @eagereyes.org · 04/06/2026

Haha yeah… well stay tuned, I've got some ideas

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Robert Kosara @eagereyes.org · 04/06/2026

There's also a lot that can go wrong, and it's hard to know if you've set it up the way you want, etc. Which makes the long wait extra annoying.