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
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..
This was followed up by Labelflash in 2007(2).
XBox is making similar moves but isn't committing 100% to the bit yet.
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.
I wonder if the disk can still hold data at the same time.