Saturday, June 27, 2015

Allow me to wax philosophical for a moment... On yesterday

(warning, this is not a typical nerd post!)

Children are not born knowing hate.   They are born into a language-less world knowing only love, friendship and cooperation.  Their young minds and bodies need the cooperation of parents to survive and grow.  They don’t know division, bias or hate.  Over time these concepts are absorbed, hopefully not intentionally, but they sneak in.  The idea that people deserve judgement.  That knowing a single fact about a person means you do not need to know anything else.  Sometimes these ideas, ingrained in adults, become reinforced by societal structures.  But we adults make the rules, and we can change them.  

Yesterday, another one of those societal structures was corrected.   That arc of justice was bent just a little more toward that childish ideal world without bias or division.  It’s a long arc, and there is a lot more bend left to go, but it moved.  We all felt it.   

Today, I am proud of my fellow adults.  

Children of today will likely know nothing of rotary telephones or the horrors of dialup internet.  They belong in museums too.  It is exciting to think that, now, maybe, if we just stay out of their way, they will also never know limits to who they can love. 

Sunday, January 18, 2015

The Novena Motherboard / And a post because I was told I should...

Much to my (@sysmatt) delight, my Novena motherboard was waiting on my doorstep when I got home friday night.  Bunnie Huang and (@bunniestudios) Sean Cross's (@xobs) open source motherboard.

At first glance it's simply beautiful.  I knew the dimensions ahead from the mechanical drawings, but it is still surprising how small it is for what is packed into it.  There is a lot of art and engineering that goes into laying out a board of this complexity.


And when was the last time you got anything (that wasn't test gear, and even that is rare today!) that included schematics?  On paper no less!


After making the customary backup copy of the included 4gb SD card, we plug in the very nice 18v 3.4a power brick... (Novena branded, nice touch) and we get linux kernel boot goodness.  I feel at home.  




I think it is pretty safe to say the Novena project is the first of its kind.  There have been many linux devboards over the years, but this one seems special.  It is targeted and tuned for a very specific hacking/fuzzing/etc audience, but also generic enough to be useful for a very broad hobbyist community.  The inclusion of the FPGA just blows the doors off the possibilities.  

That is all for now, Expect more posts a about Novena, and watch my @sysmatt twitter for micro updates!

Enough gushing, time to dig in.
-Matt