Captain Aggravated

I always somehow thought the distinction of “burning” a USB thumb drive was adding an MBR or setting something that ordinary file writes don’t do.

How hard would it be to build a machine like this with modern tech available to the maker community? Knowing that that old style HP ink cartridge is readily available because it’s found its way into a lot of stuff over the years.

Sort of, yes, but I’ve seen it mis-represented a lot.

I have seen headlines like “man stores PNG file on bird!” which categorically did not happen, the image was analog.

A common tool that is used in amateur radio practice is called a Waterfall Display. It works a little bit like the visualizer in Windows Media Player if you remember those, you get a window that shows a section of radio (or audio) spectrum. A signal (or sound) at a particular frequency will make that spot on the graph glow, the louder the signal, the brighter that spot will glow. The entire chart continuously scrolls to represent the passage of time, so you end up with kind of a graph of what signals are being made over a brief amount of time.

If you made a signal that swept up in frequency over time, it would be seen as a diagonal line on the waterfall. Using that concept, you can make all kinds of weird signals to draw pictures in the waterfall. Youtuber Ringway Manchester shows off several examples of this that he recorded that were played as part of the Ukraine/Russia conflict. this video. Here it was done out of jamming military communication frequencies, propaganda and trolling. See also UVB-76 for a tangentially related rabbit hole to fall down. If you play these sounds out of a radio’s speaker, they just sound like a strange warbling noise.

Play that strange noise to a bird that is good at mimicking, like a mockingbird or starling, and it’ll mimic that sound. Point a microphone hooked up to a waterfall display at the mimicking bird, and the bird will draw the image on the waterfall display when it sings.

It is lossless.

I’m not sure that’s the right word for uncompressed digital audio, because it’s lossless compared to what? Presumably an analog recording or the original input signal? Because Shannon-Nyquist, with CD audio you can’t get anything higher than what? 16kHz out of it, but within that limitation you can reproduce any arbitrary waveform within a speaker’s ability to produce given the laws of physics regarding inductance and inertia.

MP3 does use a lossy compression, but you can maintain listenable quality while cramming about 10 times as much audio into a given space. You can get just over an hour of Red Book audio on a CD, and about 11 hours of mp3s, give or take. You might get lower audio bandwidth or various kinds of artifacts but it’ll still sound pretty good, it’s way more practical to store and transmit over the internet. We didn’t Napster no .wav files.

FLAC and similar formats use lossless compression, kind of like a .zip file. If you rip a CD to FLAC, and you were to then burn a CD from that FLAC, the data on the new CD would be identical to the old one. So you get as-perfect-as-we-can-do digital audio, but only 5 or 6 hours worth would fit on a CD. Someone somewhere on this earth has filled a compact disc with FLAC files, I’m sure.

Reminds me a little of CD digital audio. The original Red Book audio standard hasn’t really been improved upon because it’s uncompressed audio which covers basically all of the range of human hearing within the capabilities of any speaker we could build. It’s uncompressed because in the early 80’s when the tech hit the market, it was completely unfeasible to include the CPU and RAM needed to decompress audio in real time.

Shrimp has more color receptors because he doesn’t have enough neurons to run trichromacy, so he sees in EGA.