2. How-to Instructions
There may come a time when you experience a sudden yen to build your own snowmobile trailer, kayak, or electric vehicle; more cleanly slice a mango; make rope from plastic shopping bags; create an animatronic lion mask; or any of a thousand other things. Instructables is a Web site dedicated to helping you do just this—in fact, its tag line is "The World's Biggest Show & Tell." The site allows people to post step-by-step instructions (with photos) of how they painted their bicycle frame, or added Bluetooth to the innards of their iPod, or upgraded their computer, or built a potting shed, and these are just a few examples. The end result is a compendium of wonderful instructions to do or build or make an amazing variety of things.

3. Online Graph Paper
Once in a great while I will find myself in need of graph paper, which I almost never have on hand. Or if I do have it on hand, it's the wrong type. Then I discovered this lovely Web site with downloadable graph paper of every imaginable sort. You can even specify the number of squares, size of squares, color of the ruled lines, and what size paper to generate. The files produced are PDFs.

New to Bookshelves

System on Chip Test Architectures: Nanometer Design for Testability

Editors: Laung-Terng Wang, Charles E. Stroud, and Nur A. Touba
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, an imprint of Elsevier
ISBN: 978-0-12-373973-5
Page count: 856

This hardcover book is aimed squarely at undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, and those involved in creating system-on-chip (SoC) designs. Because SoCs are so complex and may integrate such a variety of digital and analog circuits, it's important to design them so that they can be more readily tested. The book reviews current standards used for testing SoCs as well as the inherent design and test challenges involved, and also presents sample SoC designs.

There are 17 chapters: Introduction; Digital Test Architectures; Fault-Tolerant Design; System/Network-on-Chip Test Architectures; SIP (system in package) Test Architectures; Delay Testing; Low-Power Testing; Coping with Physical Failures, Soft Errors, and Reliability Issues; Design for Manufacturability and Yield; Design for Debug and Diagnosis; Software-Based Self-Testing; Field Programmable Gate Array Testing; MEMS Testing; High-Speed I/O Interfaces; Analog and Mixed-Signal Test Architectures; RF Testing; and Testing Aspects of Nanotechnology Trends.

Each chapter begins by introducing the topic, explaining the various methods and industry practices, and summarizing the discussion in its concluding remarks. This is followed by exercises and a list of references.