Miscellaneous Inspiration

I thought it would be cool to share a list of things that are inspiring to me. I haven’t done much with any of these things, but I’d like to.

I have no idea what I’d use the above for, but they seem cool to me. Bindings exist in many high level languages.

BIOS BITS is a weird set of tools that let you tweak your BIOS settings with Python before booting a traditional OS. Again: no idea what I could use this for but it seems pretty neat.

Linux Insides is a book in progress about the internals of Linux. I suspect it is more up to date than some other similar works and the small amount I have read I have found approachable and interesting.

PoC||GTFO is a beautifully crafted zine. Usually the PDFs are chimera in that they can be treated as zip files, isos, android apps, and other weird formats.

Instrumentation beyond strace aka Linux Perf. I use strace all the time; I’d like to know how to use the lower-level options for when strace would be too much of a performance hit or would not have the information available.

ngrep is sortav like a higher level tcpdump. I use tcpdump probably twice a year but having seen a coworker use ngrep the way I use strace (often) I am inspired to do the same.

Hands on Game Programming came with a recent Humble Bundle; I had no idea I was getting something so awesome. This is the kind of programming book I love; focused examples that let you grow with the industry.

In a similar vein, I’ve written about Pico-8 before but I am still enamored. And at some point I may dive even deeper and try out LÖVE, which is a framework for making 2D games in Lua.

Another inspiring “game thing” is the stupidly named (in the banal python tradition and childish emulation tradition) pyNES which lets you write games for the venerable Nintendo Entertainment System in Python.

A long time ago I bought the Create your own programming language book. I am not as excited about this as the other things, because I know how much of a hassle it is, but I’d like to go through it nonetheless. As a side note, I had a link somewhere to a free book that went through creating a fully bootable operating system, but I can’t find it, or it would be here.

Finally, despite having done less than a hundred lines of C professionally, I’d still like to level up. The free Modern C (pdf) book by Jens Gustedt intrigues me and I’d like to read it.

Whew! I hope you all enjoyed that! I probably wouldn’t have actually gone through with writing this except that I was literally up late with a fever and of course all my brain would do is think about this. Have a great weekend and do something inspiring!

Posted Fri, Mar 3, 2017

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