It’s not uncommon for hackers to have a particular delectation for unusual interior decoration. Maybe it’s a Nixie tube clock, or a vacuum fluorescent display reading out the latest tweets from a favorite chatbot. If this sounds like your living room already, perhaps you’d like some of these file format posters to adorn your walls.
The collection of images includes all kinds of formats — GIF, ZIP and WAV are all represented, but it even gets into some real esoterica — DOLphin format executables are here if you’re a total GameCube fanatic. Each poster breaks down the format into parts, such as the header, metadata and descriptor sections, and come in a variety of formats themselves — most available in SVG, PDF and PNG.
If we’re totally honest, these aren’t all designed for hanging on your wall as-is — we’d consider putting some work into to optimize the color palettes and layouts before putting these to print. But regardless, they’re an excellent visual representation of data structures that you might find particularly useful if you need to do some reverse engineering down the track.
If you still have wall space available after seeing this, here’s the electronic reference poster that should fill it.
[Thanks to JD for the tip!]
I’m very fond of those novelty rulers you can get on ebay which are etched and silk-screened PCBs with interesting designs.
Like this Adafruit one http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Adafruit-PCB-Ruler-15cm-6-inch-/161461270821?hash=item2597d77925:g:h7wAAOxy3NBShNIM
My favourites have high frequency designs such as http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/PCB-RULER-RF-MW-SPECIAL-EDITION-Double-sided-Gold-plated-FR4-/201618887592?hash=item2ef16c13a8:g:zWwAAOSwZ8ZXA8Sn
Since I never actually get to work with them.
The hi freq one is nice. They should have included a made-up one in their antenna section, because contrary to intuition the archimedean spiral is (disappointingly) for real.
I had a great deal of fun looking each element up online, some of them have fairly little about them online.
some of them just sound like magic like the parallel coupled lines. and filters in general.
Well you cease dealing with nice tidy piped electrons and are dealing with electromagnetic fields that occupy space around the conductor. The presence of which is more a suggestion of where you’d like them to go. Bit like laying out a slot car track or model train layout, if you have a shape contrary to what the vehicle wants to follow, it will go flying off.
Yeah, and you’re trying to make it fly off in a certain direction to then land on the track next to it.
I have the digikey ruler, which I’m quite fond of:
https://www.digikey.ca/product-detail/en/digi-key-electronics/PCB-RULER-12INCH/PCB-RULER-ND/5767550
If you are more mechanically inclined, Ave has some rulers with references for stuff like bolt size, welding rod size, gauge, and many other things for sale here. https://www.etsy.com/ca/shop/AvEwerkz?ref=l2-shopheader-name
Digi-Key sells a nice PCB ruler: https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/digi-key-electronics/PCB-RULER-12INCH/PCB-RULER-ND/5767550
That does look good.
Wish they made pcb slide rules.
DigiKey sent one of these to everyone in my company who ever placed an order as free swag. One of the nicer gimmes I’ve ever gotten.
nice
That’s amazing! Far better to understand the file formats than their own text specifications.
Warning: do NOT click on that github link. Either the images take too much RAM and/or there’s a malformed image there (possible virus?) but it has crashed my computer TWICE.
github: displaying the full-size image as a thumbnail is NOT the proper way to do things. It’s like this was designed by people who do not understand how computers work.
It rendered quickly and with no issues in every browser I tried. Perhaps there’s a problem on your end?
What’s your OS, CPU and RAM?
OS X 10, Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz and 16GB RAM here, using Safari 9.
Works fine on my smartphone (which is perhaps more powerful than your Core 2 Duo…?). Maybe try a different web browser? Among my colleagues, Safari is not known for its stability.
Remeber Crashsafari.com?
no problem, even with JS enabled, on a >10 years old PC with 2 GB RAM.
Damn, are people still on winXP with the legacy gdi.exe stack overflow problem that existed since windows 3 ???
No, people are on Apple devices with Safari now, as Steve123 demonstrated.
I found the PE102 poster to be quite helpful because it makes it clear what kind of address or offset is used. :)
It would be really nice if more hex editors labeled values like this.
very nice! more please!
How about a small amount his way for a zip of everything?
It says that you can buy prints, if you want to give him money, and otherwise it is a repository on Github…
No PCX format? Meh.
Just kidding. Nice idea!
What about MOD music?