hx

Even if you're not a developer or a "hacker," sooner or later you'll need to use a hex editor. This is primarily because a hex editor is a bridge between the worlds of code, binary, and content, allowing you to open and view a file regardless of its format or whether the file is corrupt or complete or not. The file could be an executable binary, or it could be a LibreOffice document corrupted whilst saving. Either way, a hex editor will gladly ignore the context of a file and happily display its contents. Because the context has been lost, that display usually defaults to hexadecimal values, or base 16, representing the raw binary contents of a file. Thanks to your computers' binary logic, this single hex value is a "nibble" of data, usually grouped into pairs to form a "byte." Bytes are also turned into ASCII text, so you can read raw data if necessary, and those bytes in turn are grouped into columns containing 64 bits per column. This makes finding a specific location or offset much easier, whether that's in your computer's raw memory or within a file.

As a new project, hx is the beginnings of just such a hex editor that runs from the command line. It's tiny and compiles almost instantly thanks to a single dependency on the ordinary C POSIX libraries. This is exactly what you need because you often use hex editors for trawling through large dump files, virtual devices, or executables, and you need great memory management and performance. Its editor is vim-like, where you can switch between normal mode and command mode. Navigation keys are also the same as vim, and you should be able to start editing without referring to the excellent man page if you're already familiar with vim. This means you can search, update, edit, insert, and replace right from the command line, working with binary just as you can with text.

Project Website

https://github.com/krpors/hx

Hex editors can reveal all kinds of information about binaries and system memory.

Audio visualizer

Oscilloscope 1.0.7

The first audio I saw visualized on a computer screen was via a cheap digital audio sampler on the Commodore Amiga running Aegis Audiomaster II. Audiomaster had a function that would monitor the (stereo, 8-bit) live input on the sampler and use the audio signal just like source voltages for a software oscilloscope. Most of us think of an oscilloscope as a small, square CRT screen housed within a large brick-like box, typically found within a laboratory. The CRT would display the measured values from a couple of inputs mapped across the x and y axes in bright green, and while Audiomaster's oscilloscope also tracked the x and y (left and right inputs) in green, it couldn't be used to reverse engineer circuits. But you could see the effects of frequency modulation on a low-frequency sine wave, and the results were fascinating.

Over the years, there haven't been many purely software oscilloscopes. When they are developed, they're usually designed to go with hardware that's better equipped for high-frequency changes in voltage rather than changes in audio. But audio oscilloscopes also have a long tradition and are still used by modular synthesis geeks and audio engineers, and this software, called Oscilloscope, is the best one I've seen for years. What's brilliant about Oscilloscope is that it faithfully recreates the 1970s characteristics of those CRT oscilloscopes, particularly with the way it renders the waveforms and the persistence of the screen. And because Oscilloscope is designed for audio, it supports high sample rates (e.g., 19,200), it will load audio files for playback, and recent versions will monitor audio input, too. With some clever audio routing, you can also use it to visualize real-time software synthesis and other software audio sources. Give it a try.

Project Website

https://asdfg.me/osci/

Oscilloscope music both sounds great and does clever things with an oscilloscope.