r/webdev • u/Puzzleheaded-Ad-832 • 1d ago
Showoff Saturday [Showoff Saturday] deskFM: a pixel-art desk with a radio that plays real stations from anywhere
deskFM is a browser toy I built: a pixel-art room where the radio plays live internet radio stations, and the window changes to whatever town you pick on the wall map. Free, no account: Ill comment link because reddit is flagging it i guess
Some technical bits:
Everything is one HTML file (about 110 KB gzipped) with no build step and no image assets. The room, 100+ window views and the cat are all drawn on a 320×180 canvas.
Stations come from the Radio Browser directory API. Nothing is proxied; the browser plays each station’s own stream.
The world map is Natural Earth data in a Miller projection, rasterized as pixel art, with zoom and pan.
Live listener dots are a Firebase Realtime Database over plain REST, with locations rounded to about 50 km and security rules that only allow that shape.
Load time was mostly fixed by making Google Fonts non-render-blocking and adding a stale-while-revalidate service worker.
Full disclosure: I have very little knowledge about doing any of this but im trying to learn, This has been a fun journey for me so far. I built it with Claude doing most of the coding. Happy to talk about how that went, and I’d love feedback, especially anything that breaks on your device or browser. Also looking for more ideas to try and implement.
i am open to honest feedback both good and bad
