Nire Bryce

@NireBryce

reality is the battlefield

she/they (pl)
breadthcharge.net/

the first line goes in Cohost embeds

🐥 I am not embroiled in any legal battle
🐦 other than battles that are legal 🎮

I speak to the universe and it speaks back, in it's own way.

mastodon

email: contact at breadthcharge dot net

I live on the northeast coast of the US.

'non-functional programmer'. 'far left'.

conceptual midwife.

https://cohost.org/NireBryce/post/4929459-here-s-my-five-minut

If you can see the "show contact info" dropdown below, I follow you. If you want me to, ask and I'll think about it.

Nire Bryce @NireBryce11/19/2023, 10:54 AM

Pendell @pendell

Pendell @pendell11/19/2023, 10:05 AM

up at 4 am thinking about the entire spindle of CompUSA branded mini CD-RWs with a black recording surface. CDs with black recording surfaces are nothing new or unique - albeit they are very cool - but it seemed to be relegated to pressed discs and 700mb CD-Rs manufactured by the likes of Smartbuy and Ativa (oft sold as "Black on Black"). Any attempts to search for black CD-RWs turns up absolutely nothing - I always just assumed the dyes needed for rewritable discs were incompatible with the dyes needed for a black recording surface.

And yet here is this spindle of black CD-RWs proving me wrong. ImgBurn reports the disc manufacturer to be Plasmon. They clearly did make this, it's a thing I can hold in my hand right now. Yet I still can find no information or record of this product existing, not in a standard 12cm 700mb variant, let alone an 8cm 185mb variant.

This is just going to nag at me for the rest of my life. lmao.

#CD-RW #CD-R #optical media #Black on Black

Nire Bryce @NireBryce11/19/2023, 10:47 AM

that font

Pendell @pendell11/19/2023, 10:51 AM

which one

there's like 8 different fonts on this thing

Nire Bryce @NireBryce11/19/2023, 10:54 AM

each one made more absurd with the juxtaposition

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in reply to @pendell's post:

Millennium @milliesquilly11/19/2023, 10:38 AM

I find myself wondering what the use case is in general for mini CD-RWs - like full-size ones are of course useful, but I've always perceived the mini-CD as more "a novel packaging gimmick for certain things like CD singles or those credit card sized ones" which makes sense for pressed discs or CD-Rs where once they're burnt you might be selling or giving them out as a product, but like with a CD-RW it's inherently more "not necessarily permanent storage for your own stuff" which makes me go "why not just use a full size disc"

Now if it were DVD-RWs that makes sense since there's camcorders that record on mini ones of those directly. Although I wonder was there like a mini audio recorder that recorded onto mini-CDs? That would make sense as a use case for these.

(or it's an I Just Think They're Neat thing I guess haha)

Pendell @pendell11/19/2023, 10:50 AM

Better! Sony (and maybe a couple others) made digital cameras that saved pictures to mini-CDs instead of memory cards, because there was a brief period where that actually made sense to do thanks to the gulf between flash memory prices and CD prices. I bought these explicitly to use with my Sony Mavica CD400 :eggbug:

In that context a mini CD-RW makes a whole lot more sense, since you can just offload your pictures to a computer, wipe the disc, and reuse it for more pics!

Nire Bryce @NireBryce11/19/2023, 10:55 AM

they also fit like 4 in a pocket, unlike larger CDs, so they were easier to hand out to folks if you were doing indie music or like hanging out with people, 128m was is still a lot of songs for the 1998-2004 period of storage

Millennium @milliesquilly11/19/2023, 10:57 AM

Yeah for pressed discs or CD-Rs that makes total sense - but I figured one wouldn't generally use rewritable disks for that

Nire Bryce @NireBryce11/19/2023, 10:57 AM

if you keep any you rewrite 'em

but also -rw had some density benefits iirc that you couldn't realize with -r. or something. i remember there was a reason to use them.

but -rw also matched the form factor of diskettes so i'm sure it got a lot of office use

Millennium @milliesquilly11/19/2023, 10:59 AM

Hmm I note the CDs in the picture say 185mb instead of 128mb, this is maybe the density benefits?

Nire Bryce @NireBryce11/19/2023, 11:00 AM

updated the edit too to mention office use, the benefit may literally have just been price because of that, it's been nearly 20 years <_<

Millennium @milliesquilly11/19/2023, 11:02 AM

the passage of time comes for us all :(

Pendell @pendell11/19/2023, 6:01 PM

This is another interesting thing about mini-CDs, I've seen quite a few different sizes! The mini-CDs produced by Sony specifically for their Mavica cameras are all 156mb, but they're the only manufacturer I've seen use that size. Everyone else does either 185mb or 210mb (which I believe is analogous to 650mb and 700mb on 12cm discs, respectively). However I also have 3 Compaq-branded mini CD-Rs that claim to be 180mb. So who knows. It was probably just wild west, open season on storage capacity for these things.

Millennium @milliesquilly11/19/2023, 10:01 PM

It is weird to me that it would not be somewhat standardised like the capacity of a 12cm CD is

Pendell @pendell11/19/2023, 10:44 PM

another possibility is that 156 is to 650 and 185 is to 700, and that all the 210mb mini CD-Rs are technically going beyond spec, in the same way 800 and 900mb 12cm CD-Rs do - but where those 800 and 900 discs have to worry about the limits of how far the laser can reach, mini CDs do not have that concern (to the same extent), so can push capacities as far as the plastic can hold it :p