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I find head easier for these, replace the first part of your commands with

head -c 1024 < /dev/urandom

The shell redirection < can be removed too, since head supports specifying files [from manual page HEAD(1)]:

head [OPTION]... [FILE]...

That just prints a bunch of garbage characters for me. I tested it on mac and Ubuntu xenial. Maybe it works differently elsewhere.

You still need to pipe through base64, i.e.

head -c 1024 /dev/urandom | base64