I've recently used Atmel's ATMega32u4 and I liked it a lot. 32 kilobytes of flash, USB transceiver and bootloader support are the most important features of this rather inexpensive device, which make it very easy to use for prototyping USB devices.
A nice addition is that the device comes preflashed with Atmel's DFU bootloader, which makes it possible to program the device over USB without connecting SPI or JTAG. It doesn't support any debugging, but it's good enough for simple projects.
I've been working on a project recently, where I assumed JTAG or SPI wouldn't be necessary and decided to rely on the stock bootloader. The problem is, I needed to change the contents of the flash memory in run-time. This is possible with the bootloader's ABI, but as it turned out, not that easy.
Continue reading Using Atmel's DFU Bootloader ABI on ATMega32U4 in avr-gcc →
I read a lot of PDFs. In fact most of my time at the computer I spend reading PDFs. I read documentation, datasheets and lots of school stuff, so this definitely requires a good choice of a PDF reader.
Because I'm also a user of XMonad, just opening a PDF reader and reading a document is not what satisfies me. I need a sensible way to organize opened documents and a quick way of opening just downloaded files.
For the last couple of years I've been succesfully using xpdf - the reader which remained my favourite for a pretty long time. Unfortunately, recently gentoo dropped support for it, because of its bugginess and stalled development (or no development at all:D), so after some time of providing my own ebuilds, when it failed to start after a poppler upgrade, I decided to search for something else.
Continue reading My way of handling PDFs in XMonad →
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