I wonder what “limited lifetime warranty” means.
Kind of hard to give right answers to something that time has rendered utterly useless. I guess you could sell it as an antique
Saw a post on mastodon in the last day or so that someone dug up a network card for the old 486 they had been working on getting back to life. Might be a use case there, as well as in aviation and medicine - fields that move exceptionally slowly and tend to have expensive equipment with long lifetimes.
Use them
Shuffle them like playing cards
Print your business cards on them.
Thank them for the retro-themed coaster set
Ok, this is a sidetrack but hear me out. Floppy disks would make awful coasters. A coaster has to be somewhat absorbent to avoid spilling condensation water on the table. This is why cork is the most popular material for coasters. The best coasters are a cloth top over a cork shape with a plastic rim and a felt bottom. This ensures total protection to the table and gives enough freedom to be creative with shapes, prints, colors and figures. The novelty printed plastic disks are the worst coasters possible, and floppy disks will only drip all over the table defeating the purpose of a coaster.
What a Buzz Killington.
I know, I agree. It’s just, I’m tired of people using bad coasters then complaining when they stick to the bottom of their glass spilling condensation water all over their lap and shirt. This is the reason that happens. That said, I would totally love to have good floppy disk look alike coasters. But being given an actual one as a coaster won’t amuse me, it would make me groan.
Laser-cut wooden floppies
“Omg, you 3D-printed a save icon!”
I think we finally threw out the last of our diskettes about a decade ago - most were too corrupted to recover anything useful. I guess I could 3D print one now …
I actually bought some online about a year ago because I’m doing some retro stuff. I even got a usb floppy drive.
I probably still have a USB floppy drive in the Bin of Peripherals. Haven’t really actively worked with floppies since 2012 though.
Click on them to save your files.
Just carry one around with you and whenever something important happens or you are about to do something risky, pull it out, press it with your finger and loudly say “Save”.
Edit: Bonus points for carrying a huge cardboard mouse pointer to click with.
Edit 2: I really should read all the replies before starting to type.
Hitting the save right before the murder spree.
Big open world RPG protagonist vibes
link them together through the data and read-only slots to make a countdown chain.
Nerdcore bling
Press them to make a real world save point.
Use them to make a bootleg copy of Duke Nukem to share with your friends. That’s what we used to do with them lol
World’s best swap drive.
Tape the other hole and format them in DD (0,72MB) format.
Be wild! Copy that floppy!
Fill a silicone cube with deepset epoxy, toss that bad boy in. Fill a 2" thick and 6’ tall PVC pipe with epoxy. Let it all dry then affix the epoxy rod to that cube and make a wizard’s staff
- Pick some friends that you like
- Download “I Am Never Going To Give You Up” by Rick Roll
- Put the song on the disk in very low quality .mp3
- Give the disks away as “fun, retro” drink coasters
- Watch as they use the coasters, unaware that you Rick Rollered them
Poor Mr. Astley, forever known as Mr. Roll
He had his run during the 80s. He’s enjoying a second wind with the Rick roll.
It made me wanna listen to the rest of his music once I actually fully heard Never Gonna Give You Up
I fuckin LOVE this!!! It’s absurd in the extreme and yet, so fuckin cool!
I humbly bow to your greatness of creativity.
Thanks! I was intending for it to be more of a shitpost, but I guess I’m not very good at those, it turns out
Nah it’s awesome. Like you can then tell them “Hah you’ve been rickrolled” haha.
just in case someone sticks it in a working drive, add a file to the floppy named
autorun.inf
and add the following to it with a text editor:
[autorun] open=Microsoft.Media.Player.exe icon=icon.icowhile i doubt it will actually work, if it does, it would be quite hilarious in my opinion. there’s probably, hopefully, safeguards that prevent such a thing from working and i likely have the syntax wrong, i haven’t used windows in years.
I don’t think autorun worked with floppy disks, only with CDs and USB units.
I don’t think the OS was sophisticated enough to tell the difference… A drive letter is a drive letter…
this…is a great idea!
Especially since I have friends who will go to some effort to find out what’s on the disk out of curiosity.They make really good coasters, will recommend.
Make sure to name the file inconspicuously but temptingly, relating to the old days, like Bill Gates confession.mp3 or DJ Mike Llama - Llama Whippin’ Intro.mp3
Lol whoops, I meant to give a wrong answer, my bad
Make sure to use this version of the song
We use old floppies as coasters!
I have people all the time ask “these are so cute, where did you get them?”. RadioShack. 25 years ago.
Rick rollercoastered.
Epoxy them into coasters and sell them as save icon coasters.
