The challenge took me a few weeks to make because "calibrating" a disk (determining the geometry of the pregroove) is incredibly sensitive.
After the CTF I tried really hard to make a repeatable calibration process with the intent of building something releasable. I even ended up measuring the details on every CD-RW and CD-R I could buy on Amazon.
But despite trying very hard, I never did make calibration patterns that were reliable enough that I felt like other people would be willing to go through the process.
It seems someone else has succeeded where I failed. Great to see!
> In 2012, a LightScribe optical drive was successfully used by Maher El-Kady, a graduate of UCLA, to turn a specially prepared graphite oxide layer coated onto a DVD into graphene.[10] El-Kady and Richard Kaner, his lab professor, used an unmodified LightScribe drive. The disc was prepared by coating the disc with an aqueous solution of graphite oxide and allowing it to dry. Areas of the coating illuminated by the LightScribe laser were turned into graphene. Various shapes can be drawn, which allowed the scientist duo essentially to laser-print an ultracapacitor on graphene using consumer-grade technology.
Now you are telling me we could potentially have “the DVD is the computer”. Imagine printing not just a capacitor but a whole PCB and soldered components, putting the innards of like a Raspberry Pi on top of a specially crafted DVD that has said single-board on one side and a readable DVD surface on the opposite side! :D
the intent was to add artwork to the discs, but if you put a copper-plated board in there, printed on a circuit board, and etched away the area left behind, you'd be almost there :)
drilling holes and thru plating is my least favorite step tho
But even if you were fine with that, it came out too light under actual lighting conditions, even after you burned it twice, which defeats the use case of making it look professionally labeled. For home use, a Sharpie beat it in every way.
The disc shown on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LightScribe looks normal.
if there is a such thing as a potion or anything like it i'll horde it and never use for fear of needing it in the future, well past the last boss or the credits..
I've mostly healed from that affliction, at least for buyable consumables, now it is just math, if I buy X potions I won't have to go back to rest and heal, so it's more efficient to grind while spending a bit of gold earned on regen
For some odd reason, the specific game that comes to mind for this was Horizon:Zero Dawn PS4/5.
Conversely, I'm playing Half-Life:Blueshift right now, and I didn't try to save anything, now I've hit a couple of points where I'm out of ammo or health and can't progress without loading an older save.
I had one fun experience in Black Mesa (HL fan-remake) where I was knocked off of the edge of a "cliff" by a large enemy (no spoilers) and it auto-saved mid-air, so it reloaded me falling forever >_<.
I played HL1 on the PS2 recently with a memory card that was really limited in space so I was only managing a single save for most of the playthrough until I soft locked myself in a room I couldn't leave using my ONLY save and had to start at least carrying a second backup save to prevent that happening again.
Half Life 2 felt like it almost made fun of me at times for building that hoarding mentality, always dumping health and ammo on me when I had already been preserving it as much as possible right before. Meanwhile the few things I would run out of it would never give any more of for entire sections.
I get very little time to game these days, which has the benefit that I have saves usually spaced no more than about an hour apart. Sometimes a couple of hours on the weekends. There were a couple of points in HL1 where I had to go back to a previous save because I was in a bad situation, I'm playing on PC so there was no real limit on the number of saves I can keep.
I've not started HL2 yet (this time around, and it's been 20 something years since I last played it) so I can't remember what that was like.
I'm going to finish Blueshift, then go on to HL2, but I'd really like some texture and quality updates; HL2 is a real downgrade from Black Mesa. I tried it in VR but was feeling nauseous within a few minutes.
All of this is to lead up to Alyx on my Steam Frame which is just sitting there waiting until I replay these so I can remember what happened.
> Half Life 2 felt like it almost made fun of me at times for building that hoarding mentality, always dumping health and ammo on me when I had already been preserving it as much as possible right before. Meanwhile the few things I would run out of it would never give any more of for entire sections
I'll bear this in mind. I think HL1 was a little too obvious; you suddenly get a cache of rocket ammo, you know what's coming.
Also even if your paper doesn't have the holes, you could use a punch to add them, assuming you have space on the side without writing.
This was followed up by Labelflash in 2007(2).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DiscT@2
And I suppose the other repo that does this already
https://www.geektieguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Copyof...
I can find a bunch of small businesses pressing CDs and DVDs but they rarely provide a Bluray option. I have a feeling that even after Bluray patents expire, DVDs will still outlast Blurays :-P.
Back around 2007 during the red vs blue HD laser format war, the spelling was hammered into me as the incorrect spelling was tirelessly brought to one's attention. Since we're going down memory lane on shiny discs, I couldn't resist bringing this one back too
XBox is making similar moves but isn't committing 100% to the bit yet.
One would think that some sort of common EDI would have come around by now.
Would be a really interesting challenge to find the point where maximally useful data meets a maximally good image. The data goes through layers of encoding to become data on disc, so it wouldn't be easy, but we already have a one-way translation here in this tool.
[1] e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/141hg9x/co...
A fellow xth grader did a science project on this, and I’ll never forget it.
The plastic is purely for protection and rigidity, the "label" is the actual functional part of the disc.
I wonder if the disk can still hold data at the same time.