This is long overdue, so here goes:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1,SHA512
I'm transitioning my GPG key from an old 1024D key to a new 4096R key.
The old key will continue to be valid for some time, but I prefer
all new correspondance to be encrypted to the new key, and will be making
all signatures going forward with the new key.
This transition document is signed with both keys to validate the transition.
If you have signed my old key, I would appreciate signatures on my new
key as well, provided that your signing policy permits that without
re-authenticating me.
Old key:
pub   1024D/0x5DD5685778D621B4 2000-03-07
      Key fingerprint = 0F3C 34D1 E4A3 8FC6 435C  01BA 5DD5 6857 78D6 21B4
New key:
pub   4096R/0x1D661A372FED8F94 2013-12-30
      Key fingerprint = 9A17 578F 8646 055C E19D  E309 1D66 1A37 2FED 8F94
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1
iEYEARECAAYFAlSwEaIACgkQXdVoV3jWIbQW5QCgoFHVU/D4fKSbvmGv3nNy3MAW
S2UAn075ztmxQ8Y9/22crbUug1sEjfh5iQIcBAEBCgAGBQJUsBGiAAoJEB1mGjcv
7Y+U9PgP/29jPvrNcdWsLI8YK9U6+JzS+TMXNyfp6CQXc8O/+zJwqvvxNpqY3rLM
5otRLIEJ2EVdiF8sCWTDGusS9NkMePzumR0AFAR0iltIkekO5O0HbHhK0sXJQv0s
EipDpFRO9k4/CBpJEy6Pkkxwd3ndtmwrL1/oKeVmM4E62PJd9ofMpQb/gMUsrA8u
F8xoOXY8Os82Rrd759PypSxNecjd6SYaVJTHgFbZ0QIMJkdKaufifzARdw+v5jwg
8Q11BhpYxvUSugZgiciKA6RjRK5bfRnT8VQPFd0zneilsIW13zz/jub9df/vtM5L
vY/6jHvXczYXSG8EGpHJQCD3KtQJPWZ0Nz9rAm4emEPmR2qav6KGARatYAm0RBqZ
Y81YUEuiWzGli6DH1m9SQe8bqM/J94vQAAX9VqUn2gz0Z0Ey25kVQE7NOGsbbGVS
vD/E74FSk1At9/RGpstrfEjsDKPRman2xk/oZe+08sRB22CJl40N4tZV9AkCJNom
HHGZKp+VEKaCEiLUIRjKTHt2HTThg39zmxl+OnoTSFYvloxrDJyi9SxZgCAmBhbD
7kLkaSDmdUj6CmoilGU+gd2zmQl2D+RHinYZBxOUf1vi1MDLWNcLIMgrz4mRXgzE
YKkG0newf9UbyJw42sXe2ukNQBIqBcL/DmAhG7V+r0RD7MQnMEYy
=09bN
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

The new key is available from keyservers, e.g. pgp.mit.edu or others. In other news: Yes, I've not been blogging much recently, will try to do updates more often. In the mean time, you can also refer to my Twitter account for random stuff or the new sigrok Twitter account for sigrok-related posts.

There a many, many, e-book reader devices available these days, and they're quickly becoming pretty affordable. The currently cheapest device in Germany (that I know of) is the TrekStor eBook Reader 3.0, model number EBR30-a, at 59.- Euros via Weltbild or Hugendubel. The device has an 800x480 7" TFT (yep, no e-ink), 2100mAh battery, it can display PDFs, EPUB, and TXT files (and Adobe DRM crap, which I don't really care about), it has an accelerometer which allows for landscape/portrait switching, it can play MP3, OGG, WAV, and WMA audio files (headphone jack), it can display pictures (BMP, GIF, JPG, even PNG, though that's not mentioned in the vendor's specs), and it has 2GB internal storage for books/music/pictures. Uploading of (non-DRM) content is done by a simple file copy, it enumerates as a standard USB mass storage device with FAT filesystem. It's a relatively nice reader for the price, I've read a few PDFs (datasheets, presentations) on it in the subway/train while listening to music from the device and it's quite OK for my purposes. So much for the review part. However, I didn't really buy it for reading books on it, I was more interested in taking it apart, of course ;-) My hope was that it would turn out to be a really cheap device running Linux/U-Boot which would be perfect for playing around with embedded Linux stuff. Unfortunately, I wasn't so lucky (it seems). I've posted a few photos of the device and its hardware components on my flickr account and over at randomprojects.org, together with all the information I was able to find out so far. Here's a quick summary:

• Main CPU/SoC: FI E200 B6077BA 26P1
• RAM: MIRA P3S12D40ETP (512MBit / 64MByte DDR SDRAM, max. 200MHz)
• NAND flash: Samsung K9GAG08U0E (16GBit / 2GByte, x8, 3.3V)
• Battery management: KrossPower AXP199 A5004AB 36G
• RTC/clock/calender chip (I2C): H8563S
• Some accelerometer (to switch between landscape/portait mode), model unclear so far, maybe the chip labeled 605 132?

There are public datasheets for most of the hardware components (see randomprojects.org for links), but unfortunately the most important one (for the CPU) is not yet found/identified. I was told that the CPU/SoC is probably based on an ARM9 (ARM926EJ-S) core and the firmware running on it seems to be some uCos-based RTOS (not Linux, unfortunately). So far I was not able to find out the vendor name or website of the "FI E200" CPU/SoC (let alone any datasheets), any hints would be highly appreciated. I checked arm.com: Processor Licensees, but the only two companies whose name starts with "F" having licensed an ARM9 core are Fujitsu and Freescale, which doesn't fit, I think? I could (and probably will) check the PCB for RX/TX lines on an UART and/or JTAG pads (none are obviously labelled), and given that it's and ARM9 core there is a good chance that OpenOCD can be used and that a standard cross-gcc for ARM will work. However, that is all pretty pointless until it's clear which SoC exactly is used, and thus whether there is already Linux and/or U-Boot support for it and/or whether datasheets are available so that the respective code could be written. Without datasheets, this is going to be a pretty painful experience, not really worth investing much time, IMHO. If anyone knows more about the vendor/device and respective datasheets, please let me know. Thanks!

If you're following me on identi.ca you probably already know that I've been designing a small PCB for a USB-based SPI chip programmer named openbiosprog-spi. The main use-case of the device is to help you recover easily from a failed BIOS upgrade (either due to using an incorrect BIOS image, due to power outages during the flashing progress, or whatever). The device only supports SPI chips, as used in recent mainboards (in DIP-8 form factor, or via manual wiring possibly also soldered-in SO-8 variants). It can identify, read, erase, or write the chips. Of course the whole "toolchain" of software tools I used for creating the hardware is open-source, and the hardware itself (schematics and PCB layouts) are freely released under a Creative Commons license (i.e., it's an "Open Hardware" device). The user-space source code is part of flashrom (GPL, version 2), the schematics and PCB layouts are licensed under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license and were created using the open-source Kicad EDA suite (GPL, version 2).
The schematics, PCB layouts, and other material is available from gitorious:

  $ git clone git://gitorious.org/openbiosprog/openbiosprog-spi.git

You can also download the final Gerber files (ZIP) for viewing them, or sending them to a PCB manufacturer. Some more design notes:

• The device uses the FTDI FT2232H chip as basis for USB as well as for handling the actual SPI protocol in hardware (MPSSE engine of the FT2232H).
• Attaching the SPI chip:
  • There's a DIP-8 socket on the device so you can easily insert the SPI chip you want to read/erase/program.
  • Optionally, if you don't want a DIP-8 socket, you can solder in a pin-header with 8 pins, which allows you to connect the individual pins to the SPI chip via jumper wires or grippers/probes.
• The PCB board dimensions are 44mm x 20mm, and it's a 2-layer board using mostly 0603 SMD components.

Basic usage example of the device on Linux (or other OSes supported by flashrom):

  $ flashrom -p ft2232_spi:type=2232H,port=A -r backup.bin (reads the current chip contents into a file)

Over at the main projects page of openbiosprog-spi at http://randomprojects.org/wiki/Openbiosprog-spi I have put up a lot more photos and information such as the bill of materials, the Kicad settings I used for creating the PCBs, the Gerber files and the Excellon drill files and so on. The first few prototype boards I ordered at PCB-POOL.COM (but you can use any other PCB manufacturer of course), the bill of materials (BOM) lists the Mouser and CSD electronics part numbers and prices, but you can also buy the stuff elsewhere, of course (Digikey, Farnell, whatever). I already hand-soldered one or two prototypes and tested the device. Both hardware and software worked fine basically, you just need a small one-liner patch to fix an issue in flashrom, but that should be merged upstream soonish. In order to make it easy for interested users to get the PCBs I'll probably make them available in the BatchPCB Market Place soonish, so you can easily order them from there (you do still need to solder the components though). Note: I'm not making any money off of this, this is a pure hobby project. All in all I have to say that this was a really fun little project, and a useful one too. This was my first hardware project using Kicad (I used gEDA/PCB, also an open-source EDA toolsuite, for another small project) and I must say it worked very nicely. I didn't even have to read any manual really, it was all pretty intuitive. Please consider not using Eagle (or other closed-source PCB software) for your next Open Hardware project, there are at least two viable open-source options (Kicad, gEDA/PCB) which both work just fine.

After a long time of ignoring (or at least not using) micro-blogging services such as Twitter, I recently tried the Free-Software based identi.ca service, and I'm beginning to like it. The choice of service was pretty obvious while Twitter uses proprietary software and has custom Terms of Service, identi.ca is based on software under the GNU Affero General Public License, and the contents are CC-BY 3.0 licensed. The code behind identi.ca is called Laconica (recently renamed to StatusNet) and is hosted at gitorious:

 $ git clone git://gitorious.org/laconica/mainline.git

My account details are available under http://identi.ca/uwehermann, where I'm posting smaller announcements and notes about random technical stuff I'm working on (slightly more regularly than in this blog). Sometimes I use the web interface for posting, but using the Jabber integration available at identi.ca is even more convenient. You can both be notified of new posts ("dents") in real time via Jabber, as well as post your own dents from within your Jabber client, which is nice. identi.ca seems to become more popular every day, which will hopefully make the proprietary Twitter pretty much irrelevant sooner or later.

When trying to port coreboot (previously LinuxBIOS) to a new mainboard you're often confronted with a big problem: the BIOS/ROM chip on the respective motherboard is soldered onto the board (i.e., not in a socket). This means that you cannot easily (hot-)swap the chip during development or for recovery purposes. So you basically have exactly one try to flash the ROM chip with a fully working/booting coreboot image. If that goes wrong your board is bricked. This makes it pretty much impossible to develop a coreboot port for such boards (and soldered-on ROM chips are becoming more and more common, unfortunately). However, I've recently tried to replace the soldered-on (PLCC) ROM chip on one of my boards with a socket. What sounds pretty scary at first, especially given that I have almost non-existant soldering skills, turned out to be really not that hard. Also, it can be done with relatively cheap and readily available equipment. I have written a short HOWTO for desoldering chips and soldering on sockets in the coreboot wiki, and also finished a video showing most of the process, which I hope will be helpful for others:

• archive.org: Ogg Theora, small (32 MB), Ogg Theora, big (154 MB)
• Youtube (FLV, small, 13 MB). Direct download:
  

    $ youtube-dl -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30x4oxyczH4'
  

• blip.tv: FLV, small (20 MB)

The video is CC-BY-SA 3.0, music is taken from ccmixter.org and is CC-NC 3.0 licensed. Video editing was done using Kino (which uses ffmpeg2theora for Ogg Theora export). I also tried to upload the video to Vimeo, but first they told me to install the Flash 10 abomination (and there's no way I will do that). After browsing the help/forum pages a bit I found a traditional, non-flash upload form, but that then tells me that I cannot upload Ogg Theora videos. WTF? The Ogg Theora video support feature request has been open for more that a year. Until that issue is fixed I'll just use other video services, thanks...

As you may know I maintain a Creative Commons licensed photoblog at my website. I'm also cross-posting some of the better photos to my flickr page. Even with my humble, and not really widely-known little photoblog, you can already see the Creative Commons license's effects on media sharing and remixing/reusing kick in. Quite a number of my photos have already been used by other people for various different purposes (blogs posts, articles, even album covers), including some of the "bigger" sites such as the Wall Street Journal Blog or Cult of Mac... Here's the list of places I know of where my photos are used. Please leave a comment if you spot more of them in the wild. I intend to keep this list updated as more of my photos appear elsewhere. (Oh, and I have no idea why people seem to be so obsessed with my "Sugar" photo...) Sugar

• Wallstreet Journal Blog: A Clue for Tumor Survival Lies in How Sweet It Is (blog post)
• Discover Magazine: Blood Sugar Surges May Be Responsible for Senior Moments (article)
• Dear Mark: Sugar Cravings (blog post)
• VentnorBlog: Today is World Diabetes Day (blog post)
• EcoSalon: What Does That Bargain Really Cost? What It Takes to Make 10 Everyday Items (blog post)
• Paradox 365: The sugar cubes (riddle)
• Married to Fitness: Sweeteners Are Everywhere: Look Out for Hidden Sugars! (blog post)
• Charting the Course To Better Health Care (blog post) dead link
• creativecommons.org: CC Q&A and the joy of being reused (blog post)

Clock

• Angel Ortega: Dispersoul 1 (album cover)

Autumn Leaf

• The music of J.D. Warrick: GOING, A. THE LEAVING (album cover)

Scissors

• 20somethingfinance: Is your 401k Match Being Cut? This May be your Hint to Find a New Job (article)

Soccer World Championship 2006

• Nicht nur in China versteht man kein Englisch... (blog post)
• ununun.de: Zu viel des Guten (blog post)

Organized

• Context is King: Organized (blog post)

Dandelion

• Herbal Healthcare: Dandelion (blog post)

Intel Celeron CPU

• Cult of Mac: Intel Unveils Lower-cost Mobile Core 2 Quad (article)

Smoke

• Carbon Trading: Australian Targets Loom (blog post)

Sun and trees

• Let's Read and Find Out!: The sky, the sun, the stars (blog post)

POSIX.1g

• Nyfiken Vital: Nya funktioner och tj nster i Nyfiken vital (blog post)

As you might know I publish some of my photos in my photoblog and on flickr under a Creative Commons license. A very cool example of the so-called remix culture "happened to me" recently — one of the photos I posted on flickr was used as album art for a music CD, namely J. D. Warrick's "Going, a. The Leaving". Btw., if you want to learn more about remix culture, Creative Commons etc. I can really recommend Larry Lessig's Wizards of OS 4 Keynote titled "The Read-Write Society" (OGG video: 144 MB, MP4 video: 224 MB).

Yes, I finally got a (free) flickr account and uploaded some of my favorite photos from my photoblog to my flickr page. This has several reasons:

• Increased exposure to the public + I hope for many ratings and comments from other flickr users.
• I wanted to get a flickr account anyways in order to be able to comment on other people's photos.
• As my photos are Creative Commons licensed they can be "remixed". See the flickr remix group for some nice examples. I'll probably create some remixes of other people's photos, too.

Note: My photoblog will not die, I will continue posting new stuff there. I'll just use the flickr page for some selected shots. There's an RSS feed for the flickr page, if you want track my photos.