Saif Alshawabkeh

Look at me!
"yeh"

I Hate HDDs

Nothing is more cyberpunk than fiddling with an old 1TB hard disk drive at 1 AM trying to get it’s busted controller to communicate with your busted usb port

You’re probably thinking to yourself a permutation of what follows:

  • I should be asleep
    • I have class tomorrow.
      • Physics sucks man
  • Shouldn’t I be doing something else?
    • Like sleeping
    • You did cancel on a friend to go to bed early
  • It’s 1:30 AM.
    • The clock ticks.
  • I should be studying instead

Then you use a usb A to usb C adapter you permanently borrowed from the workshop and tilt your computer on the desk, desperate for a heartbeat. You touch the LED.

It glows.

Surprise and frustration flies everywhere as you scramble to copy multiple gigabytes to it as a blazing fast 30 MB/s. Maybe if it caused you such trouble, its not a good idea to backup important data on it.

But I mean I have nothing else so eh.

Maybe I should get my hands on an old computer and hook up a cheap drive to it. Run a webserver on it and hope no one cracks the SSH auth process and stores gigs of pizza on it.

Never the less, I have succeeded at reviving dead technology. A technology necromancer. Not quite a neuromancer yet, I’ll have to wait on Neuralink to go bankrupt and hand the tech to someone else, but a technomancer. Someone versed in the art of communicating with the ghost in the shell.

Can’t believe I’ll be homeless next month.

BREAKING NEWS: I found a place to live in. Never mind that, stop being so dramatic.

Speaking of cyberpunk, here’s a neat powershell command to stream youtube videos to vlc:

vlc $(ytdlp -f best/bestvideo+bestaudio -g $url)

This assumes you have yt-dl and vlc on path. This works by printing the combined video/audio stream URL to VLC stdin. There’s a nicer way using ffmpeg and redirecting streams with unix pipes, but that thing doesn’t work on windows as usual.

God bless GNU/Linux.

ENTER THE DOGBONE SPACE. God I need to write an epic fantasy novel about a dude getting beat up across dimensions and create a following to rival homestuck fans.