logoalt Hacker News

jcalvinowens • yesterday at 4:24 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

If you just want to see patterns, and don't actually need to see the values, you can go a step further and simply visualize the data as a bitmap, e.g.

    dd if=/dev/urandom bs=$[256*256] count=1 | display -size 256x256 -depth 8 GRAY:-
You can do the same thing with audio, which makes different sorts of patterns obvious, e.g.

    dd if=/dev/urandom bs=$[256*256] count=1 | aplay -c 1

Replies

EvanAnderson • yesterday at 7:33 PM

I made little CLI tool back in the MS-DOS days to dump binaries into VGA mode 0x13. It allowed me to vary the width of "line" wrapping. It was a killer tool for seeing data in binaries.

felooboolooomba • yesterday at 4:42 PM

> dd if=/dev/urandom bs=$[256*256] count=1 | aplay -c 1

This plays sounds, sounds like "Liberate Mae?"