Jolt Country

So now I can transport my ebooks to and from work. I have all these stories that I wrote during my lunch breaks and now, just now, I have the ability to read and write to them at home. Yay.

Tendak USB floppy. A whopping thirteen bucks on Amazon.

I think I have a couple three floppies floating around in a drawer someplace...


THE
1.44 MEG
AARDVARK

I don't think I've used a floppy disk in twelve years. (Longer if you don't consider a zip disk a 'floppy'.) One day one of the roommates kids asked if I had something to copy some pictures off a camera he had borrowed. I had an old spare 1 gigabyte USB thumb drive that I gave him for free because it was so small it was worthless to me. Think about that. Files I routinely work with are so large a 1GB drive is too small to bother with. (Well, mostly as backup; I have 3,199 music videos I've downloaded from YouTube; a full backup is about 89 GB and the Programming directory (stuff I've downloaded from all over the web on lots of different things) is 359,227 files in 93,694 directories and uses 121 GB.)

AArdvark wrote: Thu Jan 11, 2018 5:54 pm So now I can transport my ebooks to and from work. I have all these stories that I wrote during my lunch breaks and now, just now, I have the ability to read and write to them at home. Yay.

Tendak USB floppy. A whopping thirteen bucks on Amazon.

I think I have a couple three floppies floating around in a drawer someplace...

Could you not just use a USB thumb drive? Or did you specifically want a floppy drive?

I have a stack of blank 3.5" floppies and can mail you some if you want.

Aardvark can you post a link to where you got the USB Floppy Drive? Unless that link is off of Rolling Stone Magazine?

The machine at work is Windows98. It has USB ports but no amount of bastardized drivers will let me actually use them. Floppy drive works fine and all I need to move around are plain text files and maybe some jpegs

so i bought this usb floppy drive to deal with it at home.

Flack, any floppies you want to mail me would be greatly appreciated. I have half a dozen but they keep getting smaller due to bad sectors.

THE
00000X00X0000XXXXX
00X0000X00XXXX0000
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AARDVARK

Hah! Well Windows 98 changes things. I have got USB sticks to work on Win 98 before, but it involved installing half a dozen different drivers and crossing fingers, stuff I wouldn't do to a production system. Floppy USB drive makes sense in that case.

I bought a hundred pack of 3.5" floppies years ago in case I needed them for a rainy day, but in the past 10 years it just hasn't rained that hard. ;) I'll see if I can't dig some out of the closet.

A couple notes on the floppy drive. You have to unplug and re-plug it in on occasion. Probably due to the old school formatting or something. Since I have a USB extension cord and the drive is plugged into that on top of my computer desk this is not a problem. Other than that it works flawlessly.
I did find out that after time the glue holding the magnetic medium can become unstuck to the metal drive wheel thingy on the bottom of the floppies. I will attempt to re-glue one of them, only to see what was on the floppy in the first place. The rest are pretty much beat, I think there's only 500K left on the oldest floppy due to bad sectors. Not like I needed to save those post processors or BTR drivers anyway.

THE
TAPE READER IS DEAD
AARDVARK

I have that in my Amazon cart and will be buying it the next time I buy something. I have lots of 3.5" floppy disks to image.

I forgot how much fun it is to use floppies. I have Norton's Disk Doctor and Diskfix in an old, old utility directory. I finally got to use them for real. The floppy I was using trashed all my files ( I have backups on my HD) and there was no way to recover them with any utility. It was only a couple ebooks so the loss was not dire, just annoying.

THE
REASON WE
MOVED AWAY FROM
THIS
AARDVARK

Wow, you guys are old.

AArdvark wrote: Thu Jan 18, 2018 5:29 pmIt was only a couple ebooks so the loss was not dire, just annoying.

Hope this makes you whole again:

1. Instrument of God, http://paul-robinson.us/instrument.pdf

2. The Gatekeeper: The Gate Contracts, http://paul-robinson.us/gatekeeper.pdf

Update: these floppy days are over. All my stories can now be saved in .rtf format, stuck on any old flash drive I have laying around and brought home.

Truth be told, I do miss the floppy solution just a little

AArdvark wrote: Wed Jun 08, 2022 5:39 pm Update: these floppy days are over. All my stories can now be saved in .rtf format, stuck on any old flash drive I have laying around and brought home.

Truth be told, I do miss the floppy solution just a little

I still like floppies occasionally as well. The C64 setup I have that Flack helped me get started with still uses floppies off an external 1571 5 1/4 drive.. I've yet to get any sort of "SD Card Reader" going yet due to using a FastLoad cart and floppies generally gets the job done at a reasonable pace. Not that I don't want one, but floppies still just work. Hell, magnetic hard drives work fine for many more games than some people think. PS4 models still have magnetic drives so basically any game that will load off it will load just fine off a magnetic drive on a PC without data i/o causing lag or even much larger load times. GTA5 Online for example the Steam version almost seems to join sessions slower than the PS4 version.. because the session networking is slow as shit due to bloated JSON objects. The load times on a PS4 slim with a magnetic drive compared to PC on SD is really about the same.