Open Recall: Yahoo patent threats, large Arduinos, open source tables and faster ext4 booting

Open Recall is a new space on The H for those things which are too small to package as news but are worth the linkage. Open Recall collates the interesting stories which didn't quite make the cut.

• Yahoo warns Facebook about open source use – Facebook has amended its IPO filings with information on Yahoo's legal threats towards the company. Yahoo alleges that Facebook is infringing on sixteen of its patents by using open source technologies. The technologies in question are used by Facebook in its data centres as part of the Open Compute project and in the operation of its web site.
  

• The comically large Arduino – John Edgar Park has built a fully functional Arduino board that is about six times bigger than the original microcontroller. He calls his project the "Arduino Grande" and says he has created it for this year's Maker Faire. The device was designed with 3D modelling software and created using a laser cutter.

• Open source driver for Microsoft's Surface – Florian Echtler has developed an open source driver for Microsoft Surface 2.0 which uses libusb. The Surface is essentially a touch screen the size of a table with an integrated computer running Windows 7. Echtler's driver now enables enthusiasts to boot Linux on the device.

• Accelerate the boot process on ext4 – The tool e4rat (Ext4 - Reducing Access Times) speeds up the boot process and application startup times. To do this, e4rat physically reallocates files on the disk and sequentially orders them to improve disk access times. The tool uses the Linux kernel's internal ext4 tools to achieve this and works with kernels from version 2.6.31 onwards.

(fab)