I’m playing with ratterplatter again: It’s a toy that watches disk I/O and emulates the noise of a real hard disk. (Linux only.) It uses sound samples from one of my older disks.

I tried a different approach at estimating the disk activity and I think I finally got it right (after almost 10 years … 🤦).

Demo, booting a Windows 2000 VM: https://movq.de/v/1400544cc6/2kboot-ratterplatter-2.mp4

(For this purpose alone, I put a couple of mini speakers into my PC case, so that the noise comes from the right place: https://movq.de/v/a3b2dc0932/speakers.jpg)

The results aren’t too bad, but this thing can’t be super accurate due to the huge I/O caches that we have these days. For the video, I dropped the caches before booting Windows, otherwise you would have heard almost nothing.

FWIW, if you don’t know it yet, this is the equivalent for proper keyboard sound: https://github.com/zevv/bucklespring

(#hot22xa) @movq@www.uninformativ.de Sorry for being completely offtopic, but that’s a really cute bird! :-)

(#hot22xa) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org The bird in the wallpaper? That’s a photo from a trip to a local zoo. 😃 This little guy was sitting in one of the bushes and didn’t mind people getting rather close. Full version and more from that day.

(#hot22xa) @movq@www.uninformativ.de Awwwwww! Thank you, that is now in my collection. :-) The other ones aren’t bad either, very nice!