I have built the most inconvenient way of playing music! It is lo-fi awfulness and cyberpunk grungy. Thanks! I hate it! Ingredients Raspberry Pi USB floppy drive Audio Cable / Headphones USB Battery WHY?!?! As I discussed yesterday, it's possible to fit half an hour of speech on a single floppy disk. The best band in the world are The Beatles, and their shortest album is A Hard…
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An old 3.5 inch floppy disk holds 1.44 MB of data. According to my calculations, that's 1,424 KB blocks. For a total of 1,458,176 Bytes. Once formatted as FAT, you end up with 1,457,664 Bytes of storage. But how much audio can a floppy hold? (Here I mean wave based audio of human speech. It's trivial to fit more in using MIDI or speech synthesis.) I'm going to use "A Podcast Of Unnecessary…
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This rather generic USB Floppy Drive has just arrived for me to review. It's sold by Dainty / ChuangZhiJLB - but it has the same internals as every other floppy drive on the market. It worked instantly in Linux and MacOS. Shows up as a USB drive. Shove a disk in there and your OS should automagically mount it. Appears to draw about 500mW in power. The disk read and write speed is pretty good…
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The fine folks at Poweradd have sent me one of their gadgets to review. This is their 26800mAh USB-C power bank with Power Delivery. It's pretty similar to most normal portable batteries - but because it has USB-C-PD, it can charge MacBooks, Nintendo Switches, and other high-power devices! Let's take a look: In the box A big black battery. A weird hybrid cable. It is USB-A to Micro-USB…
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I am rubbish at video games. I don't have the twitch-reaction speed for shooters, I can never remember what all the buttons do, and I frequently get lost in open-world games. Basically, I'm the opposite of my wife, who will rattle through Dragon-Ages, Mass Effects, Spiders-Men and the like. Factorio is sort-of-like Sim City. Or Populous. You have an open, discoverable world, full of natural…
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This is annoying me. So I'm posting in the hope someone can tell me what obvious thing I am missing. I want to tap my phone against an NFC tag hidden in LP sleeve. Then I want my phone to automatically launch the Spotify app and for the app to display that album. This should be simple, but I can't get it to work. Get the album link Spotify gives me an option to copy the album link, or Spotify …
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A curio from the archives. Waaaaaay back in 2003, I was working at Vodafone on their graduate training scheme. One of their fancy new ideas was a crowd-sourced employee suggestion box for new business proposals. As an eager young grad I submitted dozens of ideas. Most of them were crap. But, as I looked back over them, this one struck me as being a lot less crap than others. Terence Eden is on…
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Last year, when doing some digital spring-cleaning, I realised that I had 800 different passwords. I tried going through them, removing long-dead websites, closing old accounts, and deleting anything incriminating. I now have 891 accounts. Arse. I also went through my 31 different 2FA accounts. Getting rid of old employers' email tokens, failed crypto wallet providers, Club Penguin etc. I…
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My name is Lee and I was born on the 8th January 2025 - the day the Panopticon was turned on. In 2053, Earth is a changed place. City states make their own laws and we’re all watched over by the ever present drones. I reckon the new Earth is a utopia. We’re still alive aren’t we? What more do people want? It’s been more than a decade since the Hot Summer. I remember when none of us thought we’…
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How well does SIP work on a modern Android phone, with no 3rd party apps? I'm trying to give up my mobile phone contract. As part of that, I'm switching my voice calls to VoIP providers. For family and friends, that usually means WhatsApp, Skype, Signal and other consumer apps. For work, Hangouts, Zoom, and Skype. But what about "normal" people who just want to dial a PSTN number? And what…
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The first thing I did when getting to the USA as a kid, was to find a payphone where I dutifully called 1-800-STARWARS. I'd grown up with American media. Phonewords - where your phone's dialpad spells out words - were ingrained in my psyche. But the UK never had anything like that. In 2003, a reverse-charges company tried to make it a thing. Here's how they tried to teach UK users how to…
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A friend and I were having a good old grouch-and-moan session over a couple of beers. We were being snide and petty about all the people who'd ticked us off that week. "And another thing!" I proclaimed, "Have you seen their Twitter bio? It's all 'Forbes 30-under-30' and 'Global Speaker' and 'Best Selling Author'! Bah! Why can their bio just say 'I like cheese!'?" My friend took a glug of beer.…
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