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Time to preserve those floppy disks

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Re: Time to preserve those floppy disks

#4
> this document was handed back to the court system, and Maryland has now exonerated not one but two individuals from wrongful accusation … These men did time in jail, their permanent records impacted.

Writing tip: this should be the first or second sentence in the article to draw people in. Instead, it’s at the end.

Re: Time to preserve those floppy disks

#5

> this document was handed back to the court system, and Maryland has now exonerated not one but two individuals from wrongful accusation … These men did time in jail, their permanent records impacted. Writing tip: this should be the first or second sentence in the article to draw people in. Instead, it’s at the end.

Disagree, that's the spoiler. You want a hook instead. Talk about the potential impact of the data recovery, but don't give away the outcome.

Re: Time to preserve those floppy disks

#6
One of my first (toy) websites was a silly floppy disk size calculator. You could enter an amount of songs/movies/files/etc and it would tell you how many disks it would take: https://howmanyfloppydisks.com/

It was very grounding to understand how disk capacity has grown over time.

Re: Time to preserve those floppy disks

#7

One of my first (toy) websites was a silly floppy disk size calculator. You could enter an amount of songs/movies/files/etc and it would tell you how many disks it would take: https://howmanyfloppydisks.com/ It was very grounding to understand how disk capacity has grown over time.

> It was very grounding to understand how disk capacity has grown over time.

And yet the funny thing is, all the documents that are absolutely critical to my personal life would fit on a floppy no problem. That said I'd never have risked them to a floppy even when you could get them new. I never had good luck with floppies lasting any length of time at all.

I think my family's first computer had a 1GB hard drive in it (at most), now I can get an SD card with 1000 times that. It's amazing and truthfully I don't understand how it's possible.

Re: Time to preserve those floppy disks

#8
One of the links in this article leads down a heck of a rabbit hole for those of you who love ultra-tiny keyboards: Plover, the open-source stenography engine, which uses what is essentially a 15% chording keyboard and a very dense shortcut expansion dictionary to let you type at ~200-300 wpm vs. the 40-120 wpm of QWERTY.

https://www.openstenoproject.org/plover/

Yes, there are people who use it for programming, too.

Not my thing at all, but maybe it's yours.

Re: Time to preserve those floppy disks

#9

One of my first (toy) websites was a silly floppy disk size calculator. You could enter an amount of songs/movies/files/etc and it would tell you how many disks it would take: https://howmanyfloppydisks.com/ It was very grounding to understand how disk capacity has grown over time.

> It was very grounding to understand how disk capacity has grown over time. And yet the funny thing is, all the documents that are absolutely critical to my personal life would fit on a floppy no problem. That said I'd never have risked them to a floppy even when you could get them new. I never had good luck with floppies lasting any length of time at all. I think my family's first computer had a 1GB hard drive in i…

Someone once told me that data is measured in gigabytes, but valuable data in bytes. He wasn’t wrong.

Re: Time to preserve those floppy disks

#10
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was very grounding to understand how disk capacity has grown over time. And yet the funny thing is, all the documents that are absolutely critical to my personal life would fit on a floppy no problem. That said I'd never have risked them to a floppy even when you could get them new. I never had good luck with floppies lasting any length of time at all. I think my family's first computer had a 1GB hard drive in i…

Someone once told me that data is measured in gigabytes, but valuable data in bytes. He wasn’t wrong.

I've never heard that saying, but it's a good one. That's been my exact experience.
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