Is it just me, or has Keynote has become terrible to use lately. Copying text blocks changes the font.... Copy source code... pasting a table?!?!
On a side note, the flame thrower video – and this one with the smoke machine – were one of the funniest things I've ever filmed for a talk. Not part of the final cut, but several times during filming cars drove by, slowing down trying to assess what was happening... 😅
The code for this is open and available at https://github.com/NielsLeenheer/WebDmxController
Want to know more? I have an upcoming talk about this – no promises on a live demo of the flamethrower – at @btconf later this month.
Tickets are still available:
🎟️ https://beyondtellerrand.com/events/dusseldorf-2026
You can also connect MIDI controllers and gamepads which set classes when you push a button. So you can trigger the flamethrower from a button.
Connect a heart rate monitor too. So imagine a CSS animation that controls the speed of the fireballs... timed to your heart beat. Thermal runaway.
CSS Flamethrower 🔥
We definitely need dedicated CSS specification for this. The flamethrower is connected with DMX and WebUSB. All DMX devices including lamps and stage FX devices get a DOM element with an id. You can use CSS to set colours or... throw flames.
Over the last week I've fixed some cssDOOM issues and improved the gameplay to better match the original game. And the best part – because it is just a website, you don't have to download any updates.
Best browser to run this is still latest Firefox, with Safari a good second.
And on Friday there is The Web You Want event at the CMD in Amsterdam. I will be giving a proper talk about how I used CSS to draw a clock on an oscilloscope... No wait, about how I used WebAudio and blew up my oscilloscope. It's a free event, so join us! There may be lasers.
Next week is @smashingconf week. I've never been before and can't wait to be there as an attendee.
On Monday there is the Jam Session, where I will be giving a 10 minute run-through of cssDoom. No slides, just me playing DOOM and showing how I build it.
RE: https://mastodon.social/@btconf/116362469509964678
I am so honoured to be part of #btconf this year. This conference has been such a huge inspiration to me over the years. Been working on this talk for at least a year and expect chaotic energy with lots of weird and wonderful web experiments.
Hot on the heels of iA Notebook winning the 2026 iF Design Gold Award, we took the opportunity to share some behind-the-scenes footage of how iA Notebook is made.
https://ia.net/topics/paper-alchemy-the-making-of-ia-notebook
Smoke machine powered by CSS!
Fully based on web platform tech, such as WebUSB for the DMX connection and CSS for controlling everything.
My projects can sometimes get a little bit out of hand. Want to know more? Come see my talk at @btconf
Sometimes I feel like I have too many projects. I move from one to the other and old projects get ignored because I am working on something new and shiny.
But that chaos also helps me be creative and challenge me to improve my skills. But today I'm feeling like a mad professor. In a good way.
The core is just CSS – which acts as a state machine. Inputs set classes and custom properties. The output is just sampled computed styles from the DOM. Animations are defined in CSS. Buttons are setting classes with values or animations. The laser is tracing SVG elements.
I love the web.
This is one of the projects I've been obsessed with for the last year or so and it brings so much together. From heart rate monitors and Joy-Con gyroscopes to lasers and even flamethrowers.
BTW, the music is Dream Life by Ren & The Skinner Brothers – from my favourite album of last year.
Putting the final touches on audio input for the DMX/Laser controller project. It analyses the audio and sets a class every time it detects a beat. That allows animations to start, or lights to change colour or the laser to draw patterns.
Crazy that all of this is build using web technology.
Great! My clock now randomly thinks it is a VCR. And nobody knows how to set the time on a VCR so it just blinks 12:00.
Also it sometimes it forgets to reset after midnight so it goes from 23:59 to 24:00 to 25:00 and on.
And yes. I am using a round display for a square digital clock…
Don’t believe it? This is the actual code that gets rendered, sampled and send to the laser projector.
iA
• iA Inc
Madness and Imagination
We all have plenty of reason to get mad about how messed up things are around us. But only a tiny few are mad enough to do something about it.
Bram.us
• Bramus!
Introducing view-transitions-toolkit, a collection of utility functions to more easily work with View Transitions.
Over the past years, I’ve published a bunch of View Transitions contents: articles, talks, demos, etc. I’ve also done a bunch of more experimental things with them, such as optimizing the keyframes or driving a View Transition by scroll.
What I noticed while doing all those experiments is that I repeated a lot of the code … and they were scattered a bit all over the place as well. So I bundled that all up in a package: view-transitions-toolkit.