GoKawiil
Tech News
The UN General Assembly passed a resolution urging governments, schools and tech firms to adopt equal-area map projections like Equal Earth instead of the Mercator projection, which distorts continents' relative sizes. The measure passed 164-1, with only the United States opposed and six countries abstaining; it does not ban Mercator maps but recommends alternatives where accurate size comparisons matter.
Sky Map 2000, a browser-based star atlas and planetarium tool, calculates visible celestial objects based on a user's geographic coordinates, using either an integrated city catalogue, manual latitude/longitude entry, or device geolocation. The tool runs location lookups locally in-browser rather than sending queries to an external service, and saves a user's last chosen location only within that browser for future visits.
A new interactive site analyzes 50 European cities, from London to Athens, ranking neighborhoods on factors like dining, nightlife, healthcare access, transit and parks. Each city page includes a livability score, a walking guide, and a street-level map showing what amenities sit within a 10-minute walk of any given area.
A new free interactive map called Movie Scene Map lets users browse 15,535 real-world filming locations tied to 9,262 films and TV series, plus 2,153 video games, 407 anime and 366 manga placed according to their fictional settings. Users can click points on the map for photos and production details, or view dedicated pages for cities, countries and individual titles. The dataset is built from Wikidata filming-location statements, Wikimedia Commons photos and Wikipedia articles, with location data clearly labeled by source and confidence level.
Zig's main branch now supports pointer stability locks for std.ArrayList, a memory-safety mechanism previously introduced for Hash Map containers in 2024. Developers can call lockPointers() when holding pointers or slices into an ArrayList, then unlockPointers() once those references are no longer needed, preventing use-after-free bugs caused by reallocation. The feature originated from a pull request opened by contributor Leo Emar-Kar in 2025 and was documented by Robbie Lyman.
OpenStreetMap has announced that its annual State of the Map conference will be held in 2026 in Paris, with both in-person and online attendance options. The three-day event will feature talks, workshops and discussion sessions for mappers and users of the open mapping platform.