In the tradition of Laurence Tratt I’ve decided to start tracking useful links per month instead of saving them in Firefox forever.

The Legend of Princess Kaguya

• https://www.romhacking.net/translations/6614/

NES adventure which tells the old Japanese folk tale of The Bamboo Cutter. Got a translation in 2009 but also got a new one in July 2022. Looks good for a NES game, similar interface to the ICOM/MacVentures (Deja Vu, Shadowgate, Uninvited).

inotify command script

• A simple shell script that uses inotify in Linux to run shell commands whenever files matching a pattern are changed.

On spotty internet my VPN half-drops-out, keeping the tunnel and connection up but changing /etc/resolv.conf back to the non-VPN nameservers. So I am running this script on desktop login:

#!/bin/bash
inotifywait -q --format '%f' -m -r -e close_write /etc/ | grep --line-buffered -E "^resolv.conf$" | xargs -I{} -r sh -c 'notify-send --expire-time=3600000 "resolv.conf changed" "$(date)\n\n$(grep nameserver /etc/resolv.conf)"'

nullprogram (Chris Wellons) Blog

• https://nullprogram.com/

This was good enough for me to start following in Feedly. Examples:

• A Tutorial on Portable Makefiles (2017)
• strcpy: a niche function you don’t need (2021)
• Improving on QBasic’s Random Number Generator - I’ve also done some hacking on QBasic’s RNG for Alphaman
• Function Pointers are Special (2010)

A random number you already have: The stack address

• https://darkcoding.net/software/a-random-number-you-already-have/

Due to ASLR on modern OSes. Keep the lowest 32 bits of a 64-bit stack address:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdint.h>
#include <inttypes.h>

int main(void)
{
        int32_t i = 0;
        int32_t r = (intptr_t) &i & 0xFFFFFFFF;
        printf("r = %" PRId32 "\n", r);

        return 0;
}

ncursesw and Unicode

• http://dillingers.com/blog/2014/08/10/ncursesw-and-unicode/

I was idly thinking to make something compile both in DOS with Codepage 437 and Linux with Unicode. PDCurses on DOS does support the wide functions with PDC_WIDE.

Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard (2019)

• https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-ergonomic-keyboard-review

Update to the Sculpt seems even better than before, is wired (good), and a third cheaper (AU$100 vs AU$150). I’ll get this next.

Artistic Style (astyle)

• http://astyle.sourceforge.net/

A Free, Fast, and Small Automatic Formatter for C, C++, C++/CLI, Objective‑C, C#, and Java Source Code.

astyle --style=linux --indent=tab --suffix=none --pad-comma *.c *.h

Linux framebuffer palette switching

• https://devurandom.xyz/blog/linux_framebuffer_palette.html

This works with Solarized Dark too.

Robert Elder’s blog

• https://blog.robertelder.org/

Another I started following. Article examples:

• Should I use Signed or Unsigned Ints In C?
• Should I use Signed or Unsigned Ints In C? (Part 2)
• The Most Confusing Grep Mistakes I’ve Ever Made

POSIX Basic Regular Expressions (BRE)

• https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap09.html

From Elder above, this is the crappy regex that happens if you don’t use grep -E to use Extended Regex. (which you should be using because egrep is deprecated)

Altynbek Isabekov’s blog

Some nice low-level/C/radare posts:

• A Radare2-based Analysis of Pointers to an Array in C
• Stack alignment when mixing assembly and C code - I hit this problem at work too
• “Signed Integer” behavior of “char” data type in C
• Examining Data in GDB
• Writing a Minimalistic “Hello, World!” program with Position Independent Code in assembly language

Unstripping Stripped Binaries

• https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/symbols.html

This guy earlier got UNIX versions of WordPerfect and Lotus-123 working on Linux too.