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Breadboard Template

In preparation for the Arduino Class I'm teaching this month at AS220 Labs, I made this breadboard template in Inkscape to make it easier to layout circuits for the presentations.

I figure this will be useful to others, so you can grab the SVG here. Enjoy!

Posted by John on June 13, 2009

Building Statically Linked Binaries with make on Linux/Unix

Posting this mostly as a reminder to myself for the next time I have to do this.

For those who don't know, a statically linked binary is an executable that does not require any support libraries. All the required support libraries get included in the binary itself. This results in a binary that will run on any system of the right CPU type (i386, x86_64, ppc, etc.) The downside of this is that the resulting binary is going to be quite large. If you're doing forensics on a system, it's always handy to have a set of system utilities (ls, ps, sh, chown, chmod, netstat, vi, cp, rm, mkdir, rmdir, etc) that you have built yourself as statically linked binaries so you can trust them in case a system is root kitted.

Normally, when you download a tarball of source code, you'll do the standard "configure; make; make install" to build it. If you want a statically linked binary, replace the plain "make" with:

make SHARED=0 CC='gcc -static'

Posted by John on June 10, 2009

Sage Flower Jelly

Besides being a computer geek, I'm also a bit of a foodie. I was doing a little yardwork today, planting some plants, weeding, and cleaning up our overgrown herb garden. After trimming all the blooms off the chives, I started in to do the same on the sage, as that had gone and bloomed. Thinking to myself that sage was tasty and edible and that its flower must be as well, I tasted one of the sage flowers. I was overtaken by this delicious subtle blueberryish flavor. I then proceeded to trim back all the sage blooms and took them inside. I plucked one off and gave it to my wife to try. She thought it was tasty too, so we spent the afternoon making jelly out of them. What you see above is a portion of the process.

Posted by John on May 31, 2009