File Format Posters

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!]

28 thoughts on “File Format Posters

  1. 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.

    1. 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.

      1. 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.

        1. 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.

  2. 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.

        1. 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.

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