Actually funny enough it was probably Linux ISOs

oh man. totally don’t remember. I wish they were more robust and lasted longer as there is tons I would do if it was less common for them to die when sitting around.

I burned SM64 to a cd the other day because I was testing the psx port (doesn’t work on real hardware yet). I use optical media all the time.

I want to burn some family photos on an M-Disc, I bought a bluray burner and some discs and they wait on the shelf now.

PS2 games.

Abstract: I burned a pair of audio CDs three days ago for listening to in my cars. Two (nearly) identical discs, one for each car. I have largely moved away from optical discs but am making an effort to re-embrace them.

Full text: So when I went to build my PC, I wanted a Fractal Meshify 2 Mini case. I built my cousin’s PC in one, I wanted one too, but they had apparently been discontinued. I wound up with a Pop Air Mini case instead, which in many ways isn’t as nice, but it does feature a pair of 5 1/4" bays hidden behind a magnetic panel at the front of the PSU basement.

One of my little projects was to install one of those multi-format card readers and an old optical drive there, and I got it done a few days ago. I have a USB optical drive, in fact a couple of them, but an internal one is just a nicer thing to deal with. It is my understanding that no one is actually manufacturing those external optical drives anymore; that the ones you see on Amazon with god knows what branding are old laptop drives of whatever spec stuffed into a new case with a USB controller. They’re flaky, janky, and flimsy. Plus there’s never anywhere to put them; they come with short little cables so they’re invariably hard to plug in. So instead I ganked a blu-ray reader/DVD writer drive out of an old Dell I have lying around and installed that, and man is it nicer.

My inaugural project was to make a couple of audio CDs for the car. This project involved little to no piracy; all of the audio came from legitimately purchased CDs that I bought as directly from the band as I could. I want to fund the artists, not the sniveling IP hoarders. So I’ve got discs now that have my favorite 25 out of ~120 tracks I bought from them in my cars. I ripped the discs to FLACs the second I had them and have been listening to them on my phone, my precious originals safely stored in a CD rack.

I also bought a new spindle of CD-Rs, which is also getting harder to do. The ones I bought have inkjet printable labels. And it just so happens my old inkjet printer has a disc printing feature that I’ve yet to use. So I tried it out. Getting this particular printer going in Linux for more than basic features is a no-go; CUPS+Gutenprint is available for at least a thousand makes and models of Epson printers including the models above and below mine in the range, but specifically not mine. I chose to take that personally, but in the meantime I have discs to print. Funnily enough the printer can do this without a PC at all; it has a feature specifically for printing JPGs onto discs, and another feature that I have to assume is designed specifically for piracy:

My Epson XP-830 Expression Premium “Small In One” printer has a built-in feature to copy a CD from the scanner bed to the disc tray. That is, put a CD label side down on the scanner glass, put a printable CD-R on the disc tray, and it will figure it out and copy it. I can think of no purpose for that other than to hand out copies of Now That’s What I Call Music 7 or Windows Vista Home Premium to all your high school friends. It’s useless for things like “File Archives 2011” or “Iron Butterfly Beach Party Mix” but it’s a very user friendly counterfeiting workflow.

So mostly I installed this optical drive for reading rather than writing. I can see a future where I replace this drive with an M-disc burner; I keep threatening to start a Youtube channel, and that might be how I archive video footage, but…I don’t know.

Last burned a PS4 jailbreak bluray 😏

I burn exactly one DVD every year.

The school where I teach wants us to deposit all tests done in digital format (I teach programming) at the end of the year on a DVD-RW.

I keep an old USB DVD drive around specifically for this, but I also have some old PCs that I could use. I use k3b to make these discs.

I was debating just now burning a DBAN disk just to use the ancient HP I recovered to wipe old IDE hard disks.

That idea broke down when when I realized that the ribbon connector was actual floppy and there was no IDE connector.

It broke down further when I tested the optical drive with another disk to see if I could stubbornly use it with a USB IDE adapter. The drive didn’t seem to spin up and I’m not wasting my time burning a drive when I have other options.

I finally grabbed a Linux Mint live USB and another computer. I’m supposedly running shred on the drive, but I forgot to include output so I’ll just know when I get back in to work Monday. Top does say shred is using processor cycles, so I guess it’s fine.

I have an old car so I burn CDs all the time. After streaming music on shuffle for awhile, I find it refreshing to listen to an album all the way through.

The last CD I burned happened to be legally obtained music off of Bandcamp (a mix of some Trocadero songs).

Though of course a lot of the time, the songs I burn come from other sources.

I maintain a collection of PCs stretching back to the late 90’s, so I still regularly burn CDs and DVDs of install media for the ones that can’t boot from USB. I should try to get PXE working on my network, but using physical media is fast and convenient for me. I also occasionally burn extra backups to BD-R media.

One of my professors in college demanded the class turn in a video production assignment as DVDs.

… This was in 2018

I was the only one in the class who even had a DVD burner (… Because I’d used it some years prior for PS2 games piracy and it was still in my storage box)

So the class bought a spindle of DVDs and I spent an afternoon burning everyone’s assignments to DVDs.

No idea what would have happened if they didn’t have a pet ultranerd like me. Like, did teach expect 'em to go and buy a USB DVD burner just for that?

About a year ago, burned my family photo collection as yet another backup. Took a stack of DVD-R’s to write, but now I also have it in one more format!

I burnt a Windows 7 install disc about a month ago. A guy I work with found his old PC and wanted a fresh install so he could give it to someone.

I discovered Ventoy about a week ago…

Last year a friend of mine was feeling romantic and wanted to give a physical audio disc to a crush. It’s not a mixtape but still …