How to tell if your system is big endian or little endian

I was on MDN when I noticed that Chrome’s V8 (at least) was little-endian, meaning that a hexadecimal number you’d write as 0xCAFEBABE is actually stored as BE BA FE CA if you read the bytes off memory. It made me wonder how you could most easily determine if your system is little or big […]

A better better calculator with bc

GNU/bc is a command-line calculator for linux. It does variables [a-z0-9_]+ and +-*/^ and basic math, all through the terminal, and while it’s somewhat useful by default, it can be made to be a lot better. Reading man bc, you see that the program reads an environmental variable, BC_ENV_ARGS, which refers to a list of […]