66 comments

[ 0.15 ms ] story [ 34.9 ms ] thread
Throwback to lightscribe which I haven't thought of in many years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LightScribe
Glad I read the article, this is fascinating:

> 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.

Sun used to say “the network is the computer”.

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

there was an inkjet printer that had a special tray for CD/DVDs

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

star graph looks very inorganic
That's what happens when your project randomly blows up through a translated tweet haha
Do they actually play?
I can't comment on this particular project, but I know that similar projects have allowed adding images to the unused portions of the disc. A given region of the disc cannot be both image and data, but the disc can contain an inner region of data and imagery in the outer unused portion.
It supports putting data files either at the inner or outer rim, but it's at the cost of image space. So yes it can play, but not much storage.
Sounds like a mixed mode disc where it defaults as an audio CD, but has the data portion available for data.
I bet someone will come up with breakthrough eventually that allows for both an image and a mostly readable CD.
Wow! Light Scribe on the data side!
Truly, China has overtaken the Western world in innovation.

I wonder if the disk can still hold data at the same time.

I've always wondered if this could be used to create 3d holograms.
Me too, but I don't think the resolution is good enough, even on blu-ray.
I used to have a label system called Neato, which provided round CD labels you could make on a printer, along with a tool to press them accurately onto the non-recording side of a CD-R. There were even transparent labels, so the resulting disk looked like a commercially produced disk.
I had one of these as well. It was pretty useful in the days when my HHD was 20GB and regularly filled up.
Later on, when CDRW were ubiquitous you could get CDs with inkjet compatible labels that you could print direct in an inkjet printer using the bypass path (straight path for rigid materials).
Do folks here know the data goes “into” the label through the clear plastic?

A fellow xth grader did a science project on this, and I’ll never forget it.

What do you mean by that? I don't think the laser writes data into the label usually. There is a reflective layer though, that will be damaged easily when scratching or peeling off the label.
I think they're suggesting that the "data holding" layer, is actually the label, not the plastic.

The plastic is purely for protection and rigidity, the "label" is the actual functional part of the disc.

Is anyone still making new optical drives?
Probably. Bluray still exists, still a popular medium for selling games on PS/Xbox and to certain extent movies to people who like to watch on their high-end equipment.
(comment deleted)
Sony is discontinuing all the BD disc players,as well as famously discontinuing disc games for the playstation.

XBox is making similar moves but isn't committing 100% to the bit yet.

Sony probably hasn't been the OEM for their drives in ages. Microsoft never was. I'm sure there are still one or two OEMs who build drives.
Absolutely. And discs as well. I had an x-ray recently and asked them to give me the image so I could take it to a different clinic, and they burned it onto a CD. So I suppose optical media is sort of irreplaceable for medical applications at least.
Like floppy disks were in Japan for a long time... and fax machines in other countries.
The thing is that sometimes you just need a cheap physical medium you can give away. Sure cloud is an alternative, but it's a bad one, since it costs money to keep online. A CD or a floppy is something you record and forget. And USB sticks are much more expensive and can be a security risk.
oh, how quickly we forget the infamous autorun debacle of the CD-ROM
Apparently faxing is the preferred medium of exchange in the medical field.

One would think that some sort of common EDI would have come around by now.

Lots of new USB DVD drives are available from brands I've never heard of. But the availability of Bluray drives is so low I suspect they're only new old stock.
You should look for Blu-ray drives instead of Bluray which does not exist /s

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

I'm almost certain the reason is licenses - DVDs licenses have long expired and back when they were in effect DVDs were the mainstream option, so lots of devices and machines around for them when licenses were needed and that gave momentum to DVDs. Blurays on the other hand still require licensing and they never became as mainstream as DVDs.

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.

[flagged]
Is it just me or do other find anime girls plastered all over a project kind of off-putting?
It's not you alone. I too find it off-putting and weird. I screams sexist gen-z man to me.
To me all this obsession with girls in high school uniforms screams straight pedophilia and I find it quite disturbing/disgusting to see this being so common in the tech world tbh.
I take it you've hardly ever interacted with queer people under the age of 40, then, because otaku culture is beloved by every demographic :)
Yeah. I find it really cringe.
Anime girls are practically universality accepted in Chinese programmer circles. Look at the members of the Deepseek Harness team in their repo lol
I made a CTF challenge for this year's BSidesSF CTF where players were given a CDDA audio file (just raw PCM samples) which when burned on a CD-RW would produce an image of the flag. (The idea was not for them to burn the audio, since they'd need to guess my exact CD-RW or else they wouldn't get an image readable enough to be useful. Instead they were supposed to invert the process in software and simulate what a burned disk would look like, in a way that let them adjust disk parameters rapidly until they had a readable image.)

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!

WTF is CTF?
A capture the flag challenge (CTF) is a common cybersecurity challenge in which you are tasked to hack/reverse engineer/pwn a system or something else which falls into the category of abusing a system for different gains. There are different sites online for you to get into hacking and CTFs are just one category.
This is exactly the sort of thing the 2020's are missing. Something tactile and artsy, reminiscent of the early 2000s! Well done to the author
(comment deleted)
This would be an absolute banger in 90s or early 2000!
I knew this was possible for years; I just couldn't find the programm.