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⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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july 23, 2021
wow, it's the 23rd already! time really does fly...
we're still selling things and reducing the amount of things around the house. the house itself is now officially sold, so congratz to my mom!!
i rediscovered a walkman my sister gave me when i was little and some rw cds! they're the 700 megabyte kind, which the folks on the openbsd channel called "new tech", scoffing. lol.
tbh though i love hearing stories of how electronics were before my generation. it sounds both magical and incredibly frustrating. maybe i'm the only one who finds it magical.
it took me a little time to learn to use the cds. i thought it would be as simple as finding a computer with a cd drive (so, only the dustiest computers in the basement) and running brasero, but it took a lot. more. effort >.<
in reality, my struggle was a combination of bad hardware and not knowing how to interpret the signs. however it was super fun anyways to look at my old machines!
(note to self: i like that. i should reuse it.)
i had four computers with optical drives!
the first one i tried using is actually not so old. it's a thinkpad t430 - the first laptop i bought myself! i love that computer so much. i don't use it a lot now, having two x1 carbons that are sadly lightyears ahead in specs *blinks* but it has a super cute espeon sticker i printed at a hackerspace when i bought it that's glittery and pink and perfect.
i'd also swapped out the optical drive for an extra sata port, which was reaally useful because i could easily mount "internal" 2.5 drives on the fly (or just keep one in for large files). luckily, i kept the original optical drive in an anti-static ziploc bag. except when i tried using it, it just wouldn't do anything >.< i tried placing disks inside and no os would recognize it. it wouldn't boot off of it either ;-;
the next laptop was the first my mom had bought me because i was eager to learn programming. i know. i was eleven and already lost. i did learn python though and create myself some friends to talk to (hi jiji.py if you're reading this!). that laptop, it's covered in stickers! i didn't have much sense of style back then though. i found some tor and i2p stickers, an ubuntu sticker, a google sticker (what)... clearly i was a typical middle schooler.
oh, that laptop works... i think. the screen doesn't turn on. i put a nomadbsd usb key in and i think i can hear it pause on the boot menu before continuing, so it must be working? too bad i don't have a vga cable or monitor to check... i'm pretty sad about that. i would have liked to play a little bit on it before moving. it was my first so it's kind of special, right?
the next laptop has windows on it. it was my last "windows machine" which did what most other windows do: collect dust. it also makes this awful sound when it runs! i know from investigating that it's not the fan, so i'm really puzzled. anyways, that one booted nomadbsd! i actually never used nomadbsd before and it had a lot of trouble finding my screen and graphics card... finally i found a loader variable to tell it it needed to use the first device (o~o) thanks freebsd wiki! but after that, i never got it to detect my cds... and /then/ it stopped booting after a `pkg upgrade` so i threw my hands in the air
the fourth laptop was interesting - from what i can tell it only wants to boot uefi; no legacy support!! it wouldn't detect my nomadbsd usb so i installed void linux on it instead. so here's the deal with this one: after loading the cd into the drive, i have to close the drive and then push it in even further and hold for some time until the drive starts spinning. it won't detect it otherwise but it does end up working!
the clock is broken and it reminds me so by telling me every website's tls cert exists in the future. it also named my first cd 01-01-2009~1 which was cute!
i didn't know about data cds so i tried copying two playlists straight from youtube as a test but 90 minutes of that were converting to over 800 megabytes? ya. i was surprised lol. wav files are /big/ (oωo)ゞ
creating a data conposition (i think this means it writes a real filesystem to the cd) worked the first time and i thought it my struggles were over (v人v) btw the openbsd channel says my walkman is amazing because it can read cd-rw and parse a filesystem. at that point i had two files, each a compilation of many songs that i really wanted to break up. i pulled my hair back and tied my pirate bandana, and downloaded each track with youtube-dl. tbf, i don't think these artcore tracks are sold on cds or spotify, and spotify definitely wouldn't play on my walkman anyway, so i don't feel too bad c:
the problem was, every time i'd burn them to a cd, my walkman would show a "no file" error. in the end, i did two things at the same time so idk which one fixed it. i opted for a classic audio composition (back-to-back nameless wavs data), removing tracks i didn't like anyways and adding a few extra, making sure i wouldn't cross the 80 minute limit. i realized partway through that youtube-dl had apparently fallen asleep on the job before calling ffmpeg and left me some mp4 and webm files here and there. i converted those myself but didn't try the data cd again. seriously i'm tired of holding in that cd drive so it gets detected, and burning takes a while!!
the plus side is that i now have a cd that should work with non-fancy walkmans too, since it's a regular audio cd now without a fancy filesystem. somehow i like that actually. i fell asleep listening to it in the afternoon hugging my whale plushie ♫ ♡