iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 04/10/2026

they’re making fun of our battered Aggie syndrome :( @sickoscommittee.org

Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 04/10/2026

we’re apparently at the point in college football where I’d rather derive a jacobian matrix than watch my favorite team lose (I am listening; we’re winning but it’s painful)

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 27/09/2026

Some lightning on tonight’s long run, which was more entertaining than the aggie’s radio call while we were getting demolished.

A distant thunderstorm cluster at night time, with lightning illuminating two separate updrafts. The picture is taken from a hill, with a field of wind turbines between me and the storm

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 22/09/2026

everyone posting the new RadarScope update with the CarPlay support… I did it in 2021 via CarBridge (jailbreak tweak) on a screen that had backported CarPlay through the reversing camera input 😎 This worked better than you might expect, but still not great.

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 01/09/2026

well I was warned about this, and my side project my have some life left in it yet. but I for one will be sad to see the end of NOAAPort/SBN. www.weather.gov/media/notifi...

My feedback on the end of NOAAPort/SBN survey:

I am an atmospheric science graduate student and I'm currently planning a side project involving trying to downlink NOAAPort data, and hopefully, eventually post process the data into products for a personal web site.

I've acquired a 12 foot diameter reflector and I am currently designing a solution for mounting it in the limited available outdoor space that I have. I've also acquired a novra downconverter box (from ebay) and a software defined radio capable of digitizing its output. I have learned a lot along the way so far, about communications, radio, mechanical engineering, etc.

I'm fully aware that I could use the internet to download NOAA data and post-process it and achieve the result of having a website, but I wanted to do it "the old fashioned way" for educational purposes and I'd say that's been success so far.

I'm aware NOAAPort/SBN's primary objective is to be an operational product dissemination, and not an educational tool, and that I'm probably one of maybe a dozen interested parties. I was even aware that NOAAPort/SBN might be cancelled before I could complete my project. But I'll be sad to see it go.

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 01/09/2026

I had this up on my side monitor today and at least on band 10, there was some signal to dry air getting wrapped in (Pensacola-new orleans-Franklin-center of then PTC 5) Wasn’t so obvious on the mid level or upper level channels, but there did seem to be some response in the convective bands

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 17/08/2026

Unfortunately, you can also just get a non-compliant LLM to do that, so this exists. I don’t see a way to prevent tools like this from existing, with open model weights (which is a good thing!) already being “out of Pandora’s box”

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 17/08/2026

Unsurprisingly, users on The Other Site are melting down over Anthropic’s new watermark on LLM (large language model) output

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 29/06/2026

"If the AI cannot explain its reasoning in a way you understand, that is a transparency problem ... report it following your organization's procedures so they can investigate whether the system needs retraining, needs reconfiguration, or its use for this type of decision should be reconsidered."

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 12/06/2026

We did some science last night! (Phased-Array Polarimetry for Electrification and Lightning)

the OU advanced radar research center’s “Horus” mobile phased array S-band radar is in a grassy field. a thunderstorm anvil stretches about halfway over the sky. A small horseshoe vortex is visible in front of the anvil

Three instruments (a differential wavelength radiometer, a highspeed camera, and a global shutter camera) on tripods pointed at an approaching frontal boundary at sunset.

Long exposure photo of a CG lightning flash. Mammatus clouds are visible above the camera.

Long exposure photo of a CG lightning flash, with two channels coming to ground. Mammatus clouds are visible above the camera.

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 08/06/2026

“Surprisingly”, limiting upstream weather balloon launches makes field campaigns really hard to plan

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 07/06/2026

tagging @kelcyno.bsky.social because I want to chat about this before we all part ways tomorrow… I was convinced this was just a weird lens artifact (and maybe it is?), but these 3 frames where the channel seems to separate and then move back towards the glowy thing raise some questions

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 27/05/2026

Last week I finally got a "real" camera (thx @chrisatx.bsky.social for the recs) and the very next day I had a chance to test it... this is a composite of a few frames of video to get rid of rolling shutter effects. good enough for a desktop wallpaper?

A supercell at sunset with a CG lightning channel coming down from the cloud.

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 25/05/2026

One down, nine to go

the instrument cluster of a Toyota Tacoma, the odometer reads 100,000 mi

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 26/04/2026

excuse me? I wrote the code for this commit using nano. I then used @vscode.dev to publish this commit, because I couldn't be bothered to find my personal access token wanted to use the github extension for login. NONE OF THE CODE WAS WRITTEN BY COPILOT. IT INJECTED THIS INTO THE COMMIT MESSAGE.

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 25/04/2026

41 out of the 365 days of last year had weather conditions good enough* for the roof at Daikin Park to be open. *I fudged "threat of rain or severe weather" as "no rain within the previous hour" which is probably close but not perfect.

A calendar highlighting dates in differing colors, representing the number of hours on each day the outrageous conditions required for opening the roof at Daikin Park in Houston are met. There are not many days highlighted.

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 10/04/2026

Yeah this keeps getting better

The Orion spacecraft, to the left, with earth in the foreground. The earth is half illuminated, with clouds swirling and a land mass visible.

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 31/03/2026

I hate that I made this.

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 22/03/2026

My parents heard it, Fulshear area. Also GLM!

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 04/03/2026

Buying a $3600 monitor “for color accuracy in medical imagery” and then using the jet colormap to view that imagery should be a crime

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 01/03/2026

Yeah, this one is much better. 🤠🤠🤠

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 01/03/2026

Another absolutely bonkers day for the power grid in Texas. I really don’t like ERCOT’s visualization of battery charging as it makes it look like wind power dropped off when the batteries started charging—not so! Maintained ~12GW throughout day. Solar is of course the star of the show here

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 10/02/2026

yet another update on this, going to office.com now takes me to an error page, so maybe they've realized no one likes their chatbot when they just want their f'ing emails

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 27/01/2026

Presented my work on CCN and ECAPE effects on sea breeze convection this morning at #AMS2026! Publication soon (hopefully) stay tuned!

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 24/01/2026

well we’re off to a “great” start

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 12/01/2026

Have we thought about quantifying inversions vs “how far away can ground clutter be seen”?

A screenshot of the RadarScope app centered on Lubbock, Texas, with “hotspots” of ground clutter present to very far ranges

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 01/01/2026

good news! I have finally organized all* of my openSCAD projects used to design things and published them on github bad news! * = last week I wiped my laptop to upgrade fedora 42 -> 43 and switch KDE -> cosmic. I didn't need to wipe, I just felt like it. I failed to back up any of my projects!

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 12/12/2025

If you’re going to buy an RTL-SDR blog receiver, I HIGHLY recommend getting a $3 USB extension cable from Amazon (or preferably, your local electronics store if that’s an option). I’ve had to re-solder the USB connector on my older V3 like 4 times now because of the weight distribution

A raspberry pi computer in a fan case with a black “RTL SDR blog” USB stick. The SDR is connected to the pi via gray USB to USB extension cable, so that the SDR is laying next to the pi instead of precariously hanging off of it

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 08/12/2025

The right mover would die shortly afterwards :(

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 03/12/2025

Quite the canting angle with some light graupel falling out of this cloud here in Lubbock. Unfortunately it is too small (probably sublimated a lot before it got here) for my camera to pick up

A cumulus cloud, brightly lit by the setting sun, behind some scattered, dimmer low clouds. The sky directly above me is blue.

A radar image showing widespread light precipitation around my location with moderate precipitation to my north, in the direction of the cloud I took a picture of

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 24/11/2025

top 10 TDWR loop from that environment

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 07/09/2025

Am I an idiot or is this a stupidly bad turing test

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 01/08/2025

Passed my @ttu.edu Atmospheric Science M.S. defense today! Excited to continue on to a PhD with my advisor, @deeplycloudy.bsky.social, looking at lightning with phased array radars

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 15/07/2025

I am trying to find the center of the ridge can anyone please tell me where it is I cannot find it

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 13/07/2025

I’m assuming most of the longitudinal differences are due to orography, why does the Gulf of Water have differences? Ellipsoid quirks?

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 10/07/2025

Update, this just happened today. I would describe this as unnecessary warning fatigue.

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 07/07/2025

Fortunately it didn’t take long for Apple to bless us Texans with a separate switch for “public safety alerts”, but presumably turning off Blue Alerts from 8 hours away also includes turning off Boil Water Notices for your neighborhood. Google is only marginally better…

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 06/07/2025

Excellent. I see no issues with this whatsoever.

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 06/07/2025

Apple is much much worse. You get one switch for “emergency alerts” and one switch for “try to prune some of them”

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 30/06/2025

from the site, sorry x.com/nsj/status/1...

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 28/06/2025

I use it for radar spectrum width! (Essentially, how much turbulence is in the air)

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 23/06/2025

If I had been asked to participate I would’ve considered it…

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 18/06/2025

update!!! the chatbot loads fine though, its just the email that's broken.

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Sam Gardner @wx4stg.com · 16/06/2025

Yes. This is an SDR receiver small enough to fit four of them on an rpi 4. I couldn’t believe it either. There’s no bias tee output, but this is great for snooping on radiosondes and other ham radio experiments requiring multiple frequencies at once

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