ultramancool

All good and true. You just went fucking batshit, /dev/urandom is _much_ more secure and has much higher entropy than your syslog. Maybe this could be used as one source of entropy, but using it as the sole source is a terrible idea. Remember that the kernel already takes disk writes into account in its entropy gathering.

If you want dd to shut up, you need to redirect dd's stderr output like this: cat /dev/urandom | dd if=/dev/stdin bs=1 count=128 iflag=fullblock 2>/dev/null | base64 -i | base64