What's landing
Every row is an edit to a Wikipedia article, seconds old. From is the language edition, Bytes is how much the article grew or shrank, and Remarks says what kind of edit it was: a new page, a revert, a bot, an editor without an account, or a minor fix. Ordinary edits have simply landed. Click a row to open the change on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia takes far more edits than a board can show, so this is a sample. Once the board has settled, it waits a few seconds, then brings in the newest arrival and pushes the rest down a row, the way a real board does. Point at the board and it holds still until you let go.
How the flaps work
Each character is a drum of printed flaps, in a fixed order: a blank, the alphabet, the digits, then punctuation. To change from D to B, a cell can't skip ahead; it flips through every flap from E round to B. That's why some cells settle at once and others clatter on for seconds, and why the whole board ripples instead of updating in one go.
Every flip is two half-flaps. The top half falls from upright to flat, still showing the old character, and the bottom half carries on from flat to hanging, showing the new one, with a small bounce at the stop. There is no canvas and no animation library: each cell is four <span> halves, turned with rotateX() in one shared requestAnimationFrame loop. Accents, Cyrillic, and kanji aren't printed on the drum, so their cells rattle through a few random flaps and then show the character anyway. Right-to-left and shaped scripts, such as Arabic and Hindi, come apart one character to a cell, so the board skips their titles. The sound is made on the spot with Web Audio: a burst of noise a few milliseconds long, filtered to a hard plastic tick, layered more thickly as more flaps land at once.
Popping out
Pop out uses the Document Picture-in-Picture API to move the live board, not a copy, into a small window that stays on top of your other apps. The page copies its styles across, hands the board's animation loop and timers to the new window so it keeps moving after you switch tabs, and takes the board back when you close the window.
Where the edits come from
Wikimedia publishes every change to its wikis as a public stream of server-sent events, which the page reads with an EventSource. If the stream goes quiet, the page polls each wiki's recent-changes API instead, and the footer says so. Reverts are a guess from the edit summary, which is free text, so some slip through.
Edit data from Wikimedia EventStreams and the MediaWiki API. Set in Roboto Condensed, SIL Open Font License, served from this site.