Mr. Gris publishes personal projects such as map tools, a Minesweeper solver bot and a navigation app, plus travel writing and essays.
HN commenters link his map projects Oilslick and Mercator Extreme, his Minesweeper bot, his Birdseye carputer project and his Labrador road trip report.
Reminds me of that trip report of a road trip through Canada I stumbled across a while ago (start here if you have some time to spare for some reading: https://mrgris.com/travel/blog/labrador/), which also included a visit to Estcourt (https://mrgris.com/travel/blog/labrador/3/), which has one of those slightly unusual border situations with most of the village in Canada and only a couple of houses in the US (and then nothing but miles and miles of forest until the rest of Maine – so the border post only serves the logging traffic and those few houses).
The US border guards at that occasion where highly suspicious and questioned them for three quarters of an hour, whereas the Canadian official was indeed quite lovely and commented about his US colleagues that "ah yes, they have a… different frame of mind."
A walk down memory lane for sure... I loved my Eee PC 901 and still have it. I used it to build a 'carputer' / navigation system before I had a smartphone. http://mrgris.com/projects/birdseye/
I remember becoming disillusioned that the netbook branding pivoted to "cheap" rather than "compact". The 9" series was quickly abandoned, with much more expensive 10" models becoming standard. An "almost laptop"-sized laptop for "almost laptop" prices wasn't really compelling. The 901 was adorably small and only cost $400 iirc.
It looks especially cool if you switch the overlay to "Google Satellite". You can see the different scale levels a bit better.
https://mrgris.com/projects/merc-extreme/#a473b325@55.86116,-4.25017
EDIT: you can also click the "folded map icon" button and you see the coordinates transformed back into normal ones and shown on a map with X and Y corresponding to radius and azimuth from the centre. Extremely cool!
I like this idea, and they're not in the paper. (The paper shows a globe rotated so the paths are straight, but not a flat mercator projected map).
It should be possible to make one with this tool: http://mrgris.com/projects/merc-extreme/
There's a minesweeper solver which works out all the probabilities of uncertain squares. http://mrgris.com/projects/minesweepr/demo/player/
The creator wrote an explanation here: http://mrgris.com/projects/minesweepr/
The bot at https://mrgris.com/projects/minesweepr/ does these calculations, and has a winrate of 37.8% on expert. I don't know what a more naive bot would achieve.