Thought this was neat:

A Whirlwind Tutorial on Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux

The author uses assembly and ELF-hacking to make a binary as small as possible while still doing something useful (returning a value). Goes step-by-step through each hack.

Just how many binary blobs are there in the kernel...!? I finally enabled "deblob" for my gentoo kernel sources, and it took the build five minutes to remove all the kernel blobs! Must have been hundreds of them. I think I saw my Ethernet driver scroll by... hopefully I have networking in my next boot. (*gulp*)

Finally broke down and bought my first printer, a Brother HL-2270DW. It has only been a few days, but I'm pretty happy with my purchase. It's everything I wanted: an inexpensive, Ethernet capable, Linux-compatible laser printer (I hate inkjet). It provides LPD/LPR service over the network, so you don't even have to download the proprietary drivers to use it: just use the CUPS Web interface to add an LPD printer (Generic PCL) and point it to the correct IP address.

If it is plugged...

I have beta source code available for another small utility I coded, called Archive Diff. It is a convenient tool intended to let you quickly see the differences between the files in two archives, without going to the trouble of unwrapping the archives yourself or running the proper diff commands. The target users are those who like to install software from source code but also like to know exactly what source code has been changed between the two versions (i.e., without trusting the ChangeLog or...

I've personally opened hundreds (thousands?) of compressed archives -- tar, zip, and otherwise -- without even thinking of the possibility security ramifications of this action. However, extracting files (insecurely) from any archive has potentially two very dangerous effects:

1. overwriting a file that should not be overwritten
2. placing a file in a location you did not expect

These of course are most deadly in combination. The bsdtar manual page has a helpful...