Welcome to the 25th issue of TMPDIR, a weekly newsletter covering Embedded Linux, IoT systems, and technology in general. Subscribe to future issues at https://tinyletter.com/tmpdir and pass it on to anyone else you think might be interested. Please send any tips or feedback to info@tmpdir.org.

Linux

A good article covering Device Tree overlays. It appears the device tree overlay mechanism is getting cleaned up and formalized some to better support the BeagleBone Black and BeagleBone AI, which have a common pinout.

IoT

Lately in the Simple IoT project, I've been working through some node life-cycle management issues. These are tricky as there can be conflicting goals. The ADR approach continues to serve me well with the clarity of thought that comes through writing things out in a structured way.

Other

Putting Ideas into Words. Paul Graham describes a common experience – we discover a lot when we write. This is one reason I try to dedicate an hour every morning to writing. Real writing (something more than responding to an email) is hard, thus we tend to avoid it. Establishing a writing habit is probably the only way for most of us to make this happen. Even this newsletter, while helpful to me for examining my thinking, is not at the same level as a paper or blog post. -- cb

fq - a tool, language and decoders for working with binary data.

Do we need a new static site generator for project documentation? Over and over, I find myself needing a static site generator to extract documentation from a Git repo, and put up a static site. There are dozens of static site generators available, but almost all of them suffer a fatal flaw that they you can’t have images next to the Markdown files in the source files. Most require them to be in a separate “public” directory with other static assets. This ends up resulting in most projects have separate documentation repositories from the source repositories. Join the discussion.

Quote for the week

Since new developments are the products of a creative mind, we must therefore stimulate and encourage that type of mind in every way possible. -- George Washington Carver

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Thanks for reading!

Khem and Cliff