Newsletter # 17 - Running Raspbian OS on QUEMU to learn ARM assembly Jan 20 2020

Hello,

I hope you had a good weekend and are ready for the new week. How is January going for you? It feels like it's going quite fast, but also excited about what the new year will bring.

Have you had time to view the General Magic documentary I recommended last week? If you haven't, it's ok. You can listen to the podcast that covers the story in The history of computing podcast's - General Magic was almost magical.

As you know, I enjoy podcasts, so here is another podcast recommendation for you. I used to listen to The Syscast podcast, but the author stopped producing podcasts in 2017. I like to support people that are starting to post content out (like me). Anyways, the podcast is back with an episode on CPUS. The Syscast podcast covered system admin topics. If you are interested, have a listen and let me know if you like it. Also, if you have any other podcast recommendations for me, I'll appreciate it.

The episode on CPUs ties up nicely with this weeks post. This week we are going to create an ARM VM using the QEMU emulator. I've been playing around with ARM assembly, and it is useful to have an ARM computer to work with. But while travelling is not comfortable to be carrying additional hardware, so creating a lab with a VM comes in handy. Here is the link if you want to follow:

https://rderik.com/blog/running-raspbian-os-on-quemu-to-learn-arm-assembly/

In future posts related to ARM assembly, I'll probably point to this post as the bases if you need an ARM architecture to work with. Let me know if you find it useful. Your feedback is welcomed.

And finally, one last recommendation before I leave for the week. I've been reading True Names by Vernor Vinge, such an interesting read. In this edition of the book, the first part of the book is a collection of essays that cover topics related to "cyberspace". True Names is thought as the first story to define cyberspace. The essays are from various interesting and well-known people in the Internet/cyberspace, and the topics range from optimistic, to dystopian. We should pay more attention to our world. I love the Internet, and all the good things it brings so I also would like it to stay free and accessible for the benefit of all. If you have a chance, read the book, and tell me what you think.

Ok, that's me for this week. Have a good one.

Derik

Tip of the week

This week tip of the week is a recommendation. Have you ever wanted to search for some command you typed in your history, but you can't remember exactly how it went? It happens to me all the time. Wouldn't it be nice to have a fuzzy finder, that you type an approximation fo the command and you get the results that match? Well, here it is:

https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

It is not only a bash history fuzzy finder. It is a tool that can be adapted to many other data sets.

You can pipe any data to it, and it'll provide you with a fuzzy finder for that data set. For example:

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$ cat /usr/share/dict/words | fzf

You can find a list of works in the file /usr/share/dict/words which is also useful to know and do a fuzzy search on it.

Give it a go. You'll find it useful.


** If you want to check what else I'm currently doing, be sure to follow me on twitter @rderik or subscribe to the newsletter. If you want to send me a direct message, you can send it to derik@rderik.com.