Archive for 2015

Holiday Wishes

Submitted by PurpleAlien on Mon, 12/21/2015 - 01:36

Tags: Other

Xmas 2015

 
Happy Holidays and Best Wishes for 2016!
 
 

Mushroom Season

Submitted by PurpleAlien on Mon, 08/17/2015 - 02:30

Tags: Fiinland, Other

Mushroom season is in full swing and I've taken some time to go find Chanterelle mushrooms. These tend to be the easiest to deal with, and taste really good too. They can be a bit difficult to find (and get picked very fast). The outdoors.fi website has more information on mushrooms (and berries), and don't forget to check out the two links at the bottom of that page for more information on the different varieties. As always, don't go out picking without proper knowledge on the topic...

The best part of my search was that I found a decent quantity on my own plot of land this year. My recipe: fry in butter, add some pepper and salt and serve with a nice grilled steak, preferably grilled on charcoal made on the spot from a combination of pine and spruce wood.

 

Flashing STM32L15X EEPROM with STLink under Linux

Submitted by PurpleAlien on Thu, 07/30/2015 - 02:57

Tags: Embedded, Linux, Programming

For a while now I've been evaluating some 32-bit micro controllers for a future product. One of them was the STM32L15x series. There are some handy development boards available such as the Nucleo boards. Since we need to have the ability to program processors from Linux for our small production line, tool support is one of the checkboxes that need to be ticked.

For the STM32 series, flashing the microcontroller can be done through GDB, OpenOCD, and the STLink tool. One issue that arose however was the need to program the EEPROM available on the STM32L series. This requirement comes from need to generate and program different EEPROM content on a per board basis at the production line. Doing that requires a few tweaks that are documented below...

Solutions

 

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Solar Eclipse

Submitted by PurpleAlien on Fri, 03/20/2015 - 16:24

Tags: Other

A solar eclipse occurred on March 20th 2015. The weather was great without clouds, so that made for perfect viewing. I'm guessing we were at about 80 percent magnitude. It was also pretty special since the eclipse happened at the same time as the spring equinox. The below videos are a quick attempt of capturing the event at 63.1000° N, 21.6167° E (Vaasa, Finland). The videos are all at 30x real time. 

Eclipse

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SuperFish - The Saga Continues

Submitted by PurpleAlien on Fri, 02/20/2015 - 01:24

Tags: Security

By now, some (most?) of you will have heard of Lenovo's blunder of shipping its PC's and laptops with a particular nasty bit of malware dubbed SuperFish. A quick recap. Lenovo thought it was a good idea to pre-install some malware on unsuspecting people's new computer which would inject advertisements into the browser. As if this isn't bad enough, researchers found that SuperFish would actually issue its own SSL certificates - effectively setting up a man-in-the-middle attack so that encrypted traffic could be analyzed. You can read a more in-depth article on the BBC website. 

The story doesn't end here though...

SuperFish!

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