Visual Analysis of Binary Files

This brings back memories! In 93 I wrote something similar (simpler) for MSDOS, to inspect and extract pieces of binary files, GFV (still downloadable from the Hornet archive somewhere in here https://www.hornet.org/cgi-bin/ha_search.cgi?opt_s=5:Iguana). You could set the stride and show 1/n bytes, so it was relatively easy to find textures from game files and memory dumps of running games.

Pretty neat. It tangentially reminds me of when we used to be able to hear HDDs clatter away, or waaaaay back when we used be able to hear EM interference from whatever was going on in a computer.

There was an episode of Cowboy Bebop, where a mechanic held a wrench against an engine cowling to see how much it vibrated (likely a real thing people do with real engines?) and, of course, the computer sounds in the Enterprise-D, along with blinkenlights.

All this seems like the same kind of "translate data into a form humans can perceive." I'm not sure what immediate value this utility has, but I like it.

Does the uniformity indicate that the files are space-inefficient, and would benefit from compression?

It looks neat but I have no idea how the clustering works or why uniform colors are assigned to large areas, e.g. the color blue in the pdf example.