this on an e-reader would be lovely. perhaps limiting the adding / removal of the source list to once a week or month would add another layer of purposefulness to it. want!
I recently launched this poster design and customisation project. It's built entirely from home with just my wife and I working on it.
The idea came from us realising our official address might have the wrong townland. Townlands being the smallest official land division in the country, with fairly ancient origins.
Digging into official maps, old maps and ongoing efforts to digitally map and research the original underlying Irish language names of the now mostly anglicised place names, was a very fun rabbit hole to dive into.
I also realised I'd never seen a map of Ireland composed of just the townland boundaries: of which there are an atonishing (to me anyway) 61,112, give or take.
A lot of people in Ireland, particularly in the countryside, are quite passionate about their townland/s. They don't carry any social complexities like teams or flags, but they do offer colour and meaning in a sort of linguistic interface to the land and its occupants. For example, the meaningless sounding townland Brockra is derived from the Irish An Bhrocraigh, or the place of badgers.
By combinging data from OpenStreepMap, Loganim[0], townlands[1] and other sources, we built a dataset which we would use as the foundation for a poster design. We designed the poster and built the customisation engine in parallel, letting one influence the other.
We built the whole thing in 3 weeks including website, a preview request and approval system, email and print API integration. This wouldn't have been possible without AI development tools, Claude code in this case.
The Python-based poster builder modifies SVG template layers to a spec file, a style file and a place name sidecar file. It uses Inkscape headless to outline text and CairoSVG for rasterization. This runs on an old linux PC at home, the website is built with caard and the e-commerce stack is Cloudfare worker, Stripe and Supabase.
Sample posters and previews of custom posters are available on the website. Hope it's of interest to some!
congratulations on the work so far - looks interesting, will try it out. reminds me of Microsoft’s Courier tablet [0] concept from 2009, which I was naively obsessed with for a while.
It is! - except it's to hide the fly tower from the outside. The fly tower wasn't part of the original design. The first resident theatre company to be - the Royal Shakespeare company insisted upon one so the architects but came up with the genius idea of hiding it with a conservatory. I discovered this when working in the theatre space. I went exploring the fly tower (as you do) and opened a door at the top. I assumed I'd see some dark service corridor, but instead emerged into the warm, humid, nighttime air of a huge conservatory - it was easily the most magical architectural experience I've ever had.
I wasn't sure what you were discussing. Like, what is a fly tower? So I went down a barbican rabbit hole and found this part of a video, where one of the theatre fly techs describes the same thing as you!
The 'flys' are the enormous curtains and backdrops used in theatre productions. They are raised and lowered to set new scenes in a production. They need a large space to be raised into, above the stage--which is known as a fly tower.
just a thought on B - being an island in Europe, it’s common for people in Ireland to refer to the rest of Europe as ‘the continent’. It feels like Irish people see ourselves as definitely part of the EU but less so as a geographic part of Europe. Or something
This is the best version of this kind of thing, thanks! I like how a sound fades in over a second or two when you enable it, it might be nice if it also faded out when you disable it. Especially for when you're sound 'DJing' to find the right mix.
Thank you! I had wanted to do that but it's marginally trickier than fading in - I agree it would be a much nicer experience than a harsh cut-off though, I'll look into it
