A Floppy Disk is Technically a Letter

It turns out that, in the UK, a floppy disk is technically a letter that you can send with Royal Mail with just a first class stamp stuck to the front. So that's how I'm going to use up all my old stamps before they become invalid and are replaced with the barcode stamps.

[@IIAOPSW]

Never underestimate the throughput of a floppy disk in the royal mail.

[@Bobbias]

I like the write once read never 1 liner at the end. (Though to be fair, Ruby is one of the languages I've never dabbled in)

[@5omebody]

i mean... in this case it's "read never" only because it lacks formatting ... but yeah ruby _does_ like its abbreviated naming. to be fair, it's only to be expected from a language largely inspired by perl...

[@TheLukemcdaniel]

In the US, our "forever" stamps cover the first ounce. That's it. No other restriction, so we can do this too. In fact, a 5.25" floppy roughly weighs ~12 grams/~.72 oz. An 8" floppy weighs about 2oz(at least I think. I've only found one "source" and it's google's additional info). So, i guess you could send it with 2 stamps.

[@viquezug3936]

You got your conversion wrong

[@DrorF]

Now give us an explanation of how that command works 😁

[@globalincident694]

It's in Ruby. The puts ("put string") command sends its argument to the output, which I'm assuming in this case is being piped to a file elsewhere. The argument is on the next line, so this is technically a two line program. The data on the floppy is in the variable recov, which is split into lines, then the map command is called with the strip function to remove the newline character from each line. The map function is called again, and uses split to split each line after every space character, and then uses an index to remove the space character from each result. At this point we have an array of lines, with each line an array of 4 digit hex codes; the flatten function concatenates the lines, converting this to just a single array of 4 digit hex codes. After this point, we use the map and flatten functions again to split each 4 digit hex code into two 2 digit hex codes (the last hex code in the array had only 2 digits to start with, so no need to do anything to that.) Then finally we map each pair of digits onto a character (specified as a byte), join every character together into a string, then decode the result from base 64 to produce a zip file. Unzipping and further steps are completed manually by the human, outside of the code.

Next do an Enigma ciphertext with enough data and redundancy to be decoded unambiguously. For example, the entire script of Bee Movie.

[@SweetEiche]

i got curious and checked the regulations in my home country (Germany) sadly they're much more restrictive, with a minimum width/height, as well as the requirement that letters be at least 1.4x as wide as they're tall you could Maybe still send a floppy if you put it in an envelope, but that's no fun

[@JungleLibrary]

Use the stamps as legal tender! Haha

[@miguelguthridge]

Oh that is spectacular

[@enfys02]

Haha, brill stuff :)

[@NithinJune]

very cool