I wonder what “limited lifetime warranty” means.
Buy a USB floppy drive for each one and then create a RAID 0 disk array. It’ll be super quick and gloriously noisy.
For anyone not familiar… That would give you 14.4 MB (1.44 MB formatted x 10) of capacity. The rated speeds for a floppy drive is 1000 kilobits per second. So if you did a Raid-0 (striped), let’s just say that gives you 10,000 kilobits per second. We convert transfer speeds to storage speeds (8 bits to 1 byte)… Means 1.25MB/s. So best case, it takes you about 11.5 seconds to do a full transfer of the 14.4MB. it actually be much slower because this is best case scenario.
So you’re saying we just need a few (hundred) dozen more disks and drives? Look out Seagate, you’ve got a zombie competitor coming.
But when that noise is used in the right hands …
Use them
Put them in a mdadm raid array
crunchy but old snack
Go play a very public and dramatic round of disc golf
Thank them for the retro-themed coaster set
Ok, this is a sidetrack but hear me out. Floppy disks would make awful coasters. A coaster has to be somewhat absorbent to avoid spilling condensation water on the table. This is why cork is the most popular material for coasters. The best coasters are a cloth top over a cork shape with a plastic rim and a felt bottom. This ensures total protection to the table and gives enough freedom to be creative with shapes, prints, colors and figures. The novelty printed plastic disks are the worst coasters possible, and floppy disks will only drip all over the table defeating the purpose of a coaster.
Laser-cut wooden floppies
What a Buzz Killington.
I know, I agree. It’s just, I’m tired of people using bad coasters then complaining when they stick to the bottom of their glass spilling condensation water all over their lap and shirt. This is the reason that happens. That said, I would totally love to have good floppy disk look alike coasters. But being given an actual one as a coaster won’t amuse me, it would make me groan.
“Omg, you 3D-printed a save icon!”
I think we finally threw out the last of our diskettes about a decade ago - most were too corrupted to recover anything useful. I guess I could 3D print one now …
I actually bought some online about a year ago because I’m doing some retro stuff. I even got a usb floppy drive.
I probably still have a USB floppy drive in the Bin of Peripherals. Haven’t really actively worked with floppies since 2012 though.
- Pick some friends that you like
- Download “I Am Never Going To Give You Up” by Rick Roll
- Put the song on the disk in very low quality .mp3
- Give the disks away as “fun, retro” drink coasters
- Watch as they use the coasters, unaware that you Rick Rollered them
just in case someone sticks it in a working drive, add a file to the floppy named
autorun.inf
and add the following to it with a text editor:
[autorun] open=Microsoft.Media.Player.exe icon=icon.icowhile i doubt it will actually work, if it does, it would be quite hilarious in my opinion. there’s probably, hopefully, safeguards that prevent such a thing from working and i likely have the syntax wrong, i haven’t used windows in years.
I don’t think autorun worked with floppy disks, only with CDs and USB units.
I don’t think the OS was sophisticated enough to tell the difference… A drive letter is a drive letter…
There are USB headers, PCI(-E) slots, SATA and some older ones. To get storage devices working on each one you will need a different driver.
Windows disabled autorun for USB sticks before win10.
Also if you list the devices on Linux they will show up as sd(a, b, c…) for SSDs, hd(a, b, c…) for HDDs and nvmen(0,1,2…) for NVMe drives. So yes the OS must be able to differentiate.
Windows assigning letters is just weird IMO.
Also to my knowledge the floppy would show up as disk A on Windows.
Have I just experienced youngsplaining?
I fuckin LOVE this!!! It’s absurd in the extreme and yet, so fuckin cool!
I humbly bow to your greatness of creativity.
Thanks! I was intending for it to be more of a shitpost, but I guess I’m not very good at those, it turns out
Nah it’s awesome. Like you can then tell them “Hah you’ve been rickrolled” haha.
Make sure to use this version of the song
this…is a great idea!
Especially since I have friends who will go to some effort to find out what’s on the disk out of curiosity.They make really good coasters, will recommend.
Lol whoops, I meant to give a wrong answer, my bad
Make sure to name the file inconspicuously but temptingly, relating to the old days, like Bill Gates confession.mp3 or DJ Mike Llama - Llama Whippin’ Intro.mp3
Poor Mr. Astley, forever known as Mr. Roll
He had his run during the 80s. He’s enjoying a second wind with the Rick roll.
It made me wanna listen to the rest of his music once I actually fully heard Never Gonna Give You Up
Find a way to convert them into triangle shaped disks
Those work with the Sabre Pyramid.
They also work with a Phalanx XR-12
Ew. Hexagons are the bestagons
Ha! That was a good one.
(I’ll be surprised if anyone gets the reference I made lol)
could make a nice, nutritious breakfast
link them together through the data and read-only slots to make a countdown chain.
Nerdcore bling
Press them to make a real world save point.
Shuffle them like playing cards
Label in sharpie as “Bitcoin password” and superglue to the sidewalk in a busy area. Watch people try to pick up.
Alternatively, you could write
- “Someone help me I’m trapped in here!”
- “Nuclear attack scenarios”
- “You put this disk here to save your life, do not ignore”
This is the right answer. You failed hard.
This is 98% the right answer, but you drop them somewhere that keeps them intact, and believable enough so that people take them, and spend the rest of the weekend going to thrift stores trying to find an external floppy drive, and the next month trying to figure out how to get their iPhone to mount it.
This but put your own floppy drives up on local listing sites for ridiculous prices. Lmao it’s almost too evil.
That’s more like a scam than a prank
¿Por que no los dos?
Yeeessssss…
Cover the paper label with packing tape (cheap mans laminate).
Use quick set epoxy for a better bond.Stuck to the fridge using a hard drive magnet!
Fuck being incorrect. Buy an old AKAI sampler and make music from floppy disks libraries, I still do with my S-1100. Wrong answer would be to ritually burn them…don’t.
Glue two on top of your flip flops. You now unlocked the floppy flip flops
If they have pics of John Kerry, they can be flip flopping floppy flip flops
