Shell scripting is an often forgotten programming environment, relegated to simple automation tasks and little else. In fact, it’s possible to achieve much more complex tasks in the shell. As an example, here’s [calebccf] with an emulated 6502 system in a busybox ash shell script. What’s in the emulator? A simple 6502 system with RAM, […]
You can argue if bash is a good programming language or not, but you can’t argue that it is a programming language. However, there are a few oddities about it that make it different from most other languages you probably know. For one thing, variables are dynamically scoped. Second, you can easily change variables in […]
What do you do when you need to choose an OS at boot but aren’t physically near your machine? [Dakhnod]’s inventive solution is a mix of GRUB, Wake-on-LAN (WOL), and a lightweight ESP8266 running a simple HTTP server. In the past, [dakhnod] already enlightened us with another smart ESP hack. This one’s a clever combination […]
It is a common problem: I have a USB device on a computer out in the shop, and I want to use it from the comfort of my office. What to do? Well, you could remote desktop into the distant machine. But, honestly, I always find any remote desktop more than ssh clunky and somewhat […]
Disk space is allocated in clusters of a certain size. When a file is written to disk and the file size is smaller than the cluster(s) allocated for it, there is an unused portion of varying size between the end of the file’s data and the end of the allocated clusters. This unused space is […]
The days that PDFs were the granny-proof Swiss Army knives of document sharing are definitely over, according to [vk6]. He has managed to pull off the ultimate mind-bender: running Linux inside a PDF file. Yep, you read that right. A full Linux distro chugging along in a virtual machine all encapsulated within a document. Just […]
[Jim Colabro] is a little underwhelmed with the experience of low-level debugging of Linux applications using traditional debuggers such as GDB and LLDB. These programs have been around for a long time, developing alongside Linux and other UNIX-like OSs, and are still solidly in the CLI domain. Fed up with the lack of data structure […]
There’s plenty of surprises to be had when you become a parent, and one of the first is that it’s suddenly your job to record the frequency of your infant’s various bodily functions in exacting detail. How many times did the little tyke eat, how long did they sleep, and perhaps most critically, how many […]