Hacker News: wgrover

New comment by wgrover in "Random numbers, Persian code: A mysterious signal transfixes radio sleuths"

wgrover — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:22:12 +0000

Fans of the band Wilco will recognize one of the Conet Project's recordings as the source of the woman repeating "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" in the song "Poor Places" from the eponymous album. Wilco failed to license the sample and the resulting lawsuit gave the Conet Project a portion of Wilco's royalties on that track.

New comment by wgrover in "A ternary plot of citrus geneology"

wgrover — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 05:02:10 +0000

Yes! And every day the California Citrus State Historic Park is open for tours and tasting of various citrus varieties:

https://www.californiacitruspark.com

New comment by wgrover in "The Old Robots Web Site"

wgrover — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 23:43:45 +0000

And I remember going to Radio Shack at the mall as a kid and wanting that Armatron robot so badly! Being able to get these things now for pretty cheap and fixing them and playing with them with my kids has been such a treat.

New comment by wgrover in "The Old Robots Web Site"

wgrover — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 13:53:30 +0000

A parenting tip for those with geeky kids:

You can get some of these (like the smaller TOMY robots) for pretty cheap on eBay. They're usually broken, but the innards of these robots are so interesting, just taking them apart is a learning experience. TOMY was brilliant at making seemingly sophisticated toys that were actually run by a single DC motor; all the movements, sounds, sensing etc. were implemented using gears and cam shafts and other mechanisms. A great way to learn about simple machines, and a bonus if you (or your kid) can repair them and bring a 40-year-old robot back to life.

New comment by wgrover in "Frame of preference A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004"

wgrover — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 04:29:53 +0000

In the site's defense, it is emulating like ten different operating systems as you scroll.

New comment by wgrover in "The Barbican"

wgrover — Mon, 12 May 2025 17:17:48 +0000

Here's a cross-section through the theatre portion of the Barbican showing the complexity of the engineering:

https://www.reddit.com/r/architecture/comments/5w9ep7/cross_...

New comment by wgrover in "The Smallest Thing in Go"

wgrover — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 04:15:55 +0000

I'm guessing the title was meant to be a nod toward the meaning of the English word iota, "an extremely small amount".

New comment by wgrover in "Can you get root with only a cigarette lighter?"

wgrover — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 14:41:18 +0000

Yup - the first few minutes of one of Technology Connections' videos on electromechanical pinball machines shows this mechanism in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3p_Cv32tEo

New comment by wgrover in "So thieves broke into your storage unit again"

wgrover — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 19:17:15 +0000

Your post reminded me of Mark Twain’s very funny short story “The McWilliamses And The Burglar Alarm”:

https://americanliterature.com/author/mark-twain/short-story...

New comment by wgrover in "Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer"

wgrover — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 19:40:40 +0000

Here's a Python script I wrote that generates storage bin labels and prints them using a cheap 2" by 3" label printer:

https://github.com/wgrover/jamie

The name 'jamie' is in honor of Mythbuster Jamie Hyneman's meticulously labeled storage bins at M5 Industries.

The code uses a brute-force search to fit the specified text on the label using the largest possible font size.

New comment by wgrover in "Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email"

wgrover — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 19:19:41 +0000

I miss Pine too. I could read/file/delete scores of plaintext emails in seconds using single keystrokes.

Every email client I've used since Pine has been better at dealing with all the stuff we've bolted on to email (HTML, attachments, calendar invites...) but none of them have been as efficient at the core tasks of email as Pine was.

New comment by wgrover in "Make your electronics tamper-evident"

wgrover — Sun, 04 Aug 2024 01:40:51 +0000

Thanks for the suggestion - I looked into music recognition algorithms early on but struggled to adapt them for image use. But I'll revisit them.

New comment by wgrover in "Make your electronics tamper-evident"

wgrover — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 21:16:51 +0000

Thanks! There are related structures in electronic circuits called physical unclonable functions (PUFs) that find uses in cryptography - you might find them interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_unclonable_function

New comment by wgrover in "Make your electronics tamper-evident"

wgrover — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 20:33:36 +0000

Here's some work I did a couple years ago using some of these principles to fight counterfeit medicines: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-11234-4

A side note: I think there's an unmet need for algorithms that can convert photos of these random patterns into text (or something similar) that can be stored in a database and searched quickly for matching patterns. I've tried image similarity algorithms like the ones used by e.g. Google Reverse Image Search, but they seem poorly suited for this task. I ended up writing my own crude algorithm in the paper above that converts a pattern into a set of strings, and it works OK, but surely there are better ways to do this.

New comment by wgrover in "Light characteristic"

wgrover — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 20:10:33 +0000

You might also find moiré-effect navigation beacons interesting, like the one that Tom Scott visits here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d99_h30swtM

New comment by wgrover in "Bitten by the black box of iCloud"

wgrover — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 00:29:26 +0000

Can anyone recommend a backup strategy for iCloud? Specifically, my Macs' hard drives aren't big enough for any one computer to store everything locally, so some documents end up living only in iCloud which is clearly asking for trouble. My ideal solution would be to regularly mirror iCloud's contents on my NAS (which is big enough to store everything locally) but I've never seen anyone implement something like that.

New comment by wgrover in "John McCarthy’s collection of numerical facts for use in elisp programs"

wgrover — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 17:00:20 +0000

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/future/mars.pdf

New comment by wgrover in "Dining like Darwin: When scientists swallow their subjects (2015)"

wgrover — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 19:25:12 +0000

I had the same thought. BTW, the movie is titled "The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!" in the UK (same as the book it's based on). The studio changed the title for Americans [1], perhaps assuming we'd be less interested in a movie with scientists, shudder...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates!_In_an_Adventure_w...

New comment by wgrover in "Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?"

wgrover — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 19:45:17 +0000

https://groverlab.org/hnbfpr

Random musings of a professor of Bioengineering at the University of California, Riverside. A few highlights:

- https://groverlab.org/hnbfpr/2017-12-10-csu.html - My investigation into a fictitious California university and its link to predatory academic journals.

- https://groverlab.org/hnbfpr/2019-08-19-gene-roddenberry-ucr... - Looking into filming locations for Gene Roddenberry's TV show pilot "Genesis II" that was filmed at UC Riverside in 1972.

- https://groverlab.org/hnbfpr/2019-08-06-stereo-records.html - How stereo phonograph records work.

New comment by wgrover in "Curta"

wgrover — Sun, 05 Feb 2023 18:27:04 +0000

https://www.simplify3d.com/3d-printing-the-curta-calculator-...

And a fun video of Adam Savage playing with Marcus Wu's 3D-printed Curta: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9uRckJLqLk