Bradford Embedded

Most of my computers use a random key with cryptsetup and LUKS2 to encrypt their swap partitions.

I use xscreensaver to lock my screen after a timeout or by key command from within the awesome window manager.

I have multiple of the exact same FTDI USB to serial interface cables attached to my PC and I wanted to name them physically and within Linux.

For Christmas I got a new to me iPhone 8.

Sometimes on embedded Linux systems the system will always want time to move forward but the cost of adding a battery backed real time clock is unacceptable.

I’ve now had my LG G5 Android phone for about 5 months and I’m generally happy with it but there’s a few things I’d like to change from a hardware perspective in order to improve it.

About a month ago I bought my first Android phone.

I have an ArchiTech Hachiko development board which has a Renesas RZ/A1 ARM SoC on it.

So far in my career I’ve always been a generalist.

These are my engineering and computing related goals for 2017.

About a month ago, LWN ran an article about the NTP pool system.

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T420s.

Sometimes you might want to deploy a file, like a tarball, with an embedded public/private key signature so that a recipient can validate that the file came from the source they think it came from.

EDIT: bup backups to a remote location don’t exactly work as you’d expect (I learned this the hard way) so take these steps with a grain of salt I recently learned about the bup backup tool!

I’ve previously written about not buying another desktop computer but instead simply getting a nice portable laptop and monitor setup and then using Amazon’s cloud computers for computation.

The whole concept of using a pile of big disks as a RAID in order to get lots of storage and some redundancy has always intrigued me.

I’ve been trying to learn more about building Debian packages and I’ve been learning how to design printed circuit boards.

I often dabble with cross compilers and building little embedded systems.

Lots of Linux development kits these days come with FTDI chips soldered down and a nice little USB port which the main default UART terminal is piped through.

Sometimes, when working with RF, there will come a situation where one device being used has a balanced input or output but the device which it needs to electrically connect to has a singled-ended or unbalanced input or output.

I’m co-mentoring a Google Summer of Code project this year which is focused on the MMC and SD subsystems specifically for TI’s AM335x but more generally for all device types which interface to MMC and SD cards.

Chroots are very useful for keeping software that does stupid things from affecting your main system (like TI’s CCSv5) or for running old software safely without needing a virtual machine, so long as you can do so with the existing kernel.

I learned about Lean engineering at Xerox.

I’ve owned a Yubikey NEO for a while now and I use it every day, both as a PGP smart card and as just a Yubikey for LastPass.

This week the CLFS embedded book switched from uClibc to musl for its C library.

Most people who use source control still seem to work on things by themselves, both at companies and in little open source projects.

The Internet of Things gets in the news these days, which is nice.

Base16 conversion from printable characters to binary data, and back again, is important for one project I work on.

I still don’t really know what I want in terms of a job, a company, or coworkers.

When something disappointing happens, there’s 2 ways to deal with it that I’ve seen.

I want to be close to the metal.

Yesterday I installed NetBSD in a virtual machine on my laptop.

I haven’t written in a while.

When hiring, pick the candidate based on talent, capabilities, and potential, not based on where they physically are located.

I wrote about how laptops aren’t desktops last month.

Fred Wilson wrote this morning about One Click Apply where some online job application sites now have “one click” apply buttons.

You probably don’t want to buy an SLR camera.

Are you the guy who has an answer to every question?

I read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

In high school, my friends and I held a few LAN parties.

Seth Godin commented on AVC in response to In Defense of Free mentioning Twitter, and that if they had a Twitter Pro account for $2 / month, that it could generate upwards of $240 million per year for 10 million subscribers.

OUYA is a proposed gaming console being funded by a KickStarter campaign.

I started drinking coffee regularly about a year ago, when my daughter was born.

Microsoft is coming out with Windows 8 soon.

Apple made the front page of the physical USA Today paper on Saturday.

Peter Gibbons: What if we’re still doin’ this when we’re 50?

Sometimes I have a hard time getting around procrastination.

At work, Kodak (our landlord) requires us to have a water filter in our little kitchen area (don’t ask why).

I like to talk to myself.

I have an IBM Model M (PS/2) at home and a Leopold FC500R with Cherry brown switches at work.