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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: October 27th, 2023

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  • I’m the opposite. I find it particularly inconvenient not having discs to simply pop on a player.

    I use a couple of streaming services but those really are just a video on demand channel.

    I have a few mp3’s here and there, lol many on dvd-r but finding those when they are scattered about then writing to a spare flash drive just to stick in the player to watch is just a bit inconvenient.

    Use a hdd? Well I could if I had the time to collect everything together and find a hdd and a caddy but I simply cba.

    Basically the primary source for video and audio in my hoard is off optical media itself. And I’m adding more and more, so will be getting a couple of Billy shelves in the new year.





  • Its also a bad mark on the testing applied to office 365. The lack of basic testing from Microsoft in recent years drives me up the effing wall.

    What should have happened is they should have tested PowerPoints reaction to saving a file to:

    1. Full local storage.
    2. Full remote storage.
    3. And any other file operation exceptions such as permission errors.

    If your hdd had filled up I bed PowerPoint would have had something to say. It probably has no idea that the cloud storage was full, because someone didn’t test for that and highlight that the cloud storage back end (onedrive) was probably never given such functionality.

    As a former software tester I would have not signed off PowerPoint nor onedrive until such a quality assurance UX flaw had been addressed. That’s what I used to do, I certainly affected the design of the software as I found the design flawed many times, not just unable to handle an error but also to have the wrong or non existent feedback to users.

    When I worked in a company that used 365 (dont any more thankfully) onedrive was a pain in the effing IT support buttocks. It was constantly getting “stuck”, constantly and silently failing to sync conflicting files, its UI lacked the basic usability features needed to let the user detect this and deal with it without me getting involved.



  • When I get around to it I will have certain images printed out properly on optical paper.

    This is the same technology used to make prints from negatives, the paper can be exposed to the negative or a digital image can be printed to it using a laser.

    Fuji and Ilford offer it as archival type of printing. I’m sure many others do.

    People wanting to print at home using inkjet can use archival paper and inks but I gave up inkjet years ago because unless you actually print then it just dries up.

    I have a colour laser instead but I’d not consider that photo quality.

    If you want the best archival quality look for companies that use Fuji’s Crystal Archive paper. Same kind of stuff used with negatives thus same multi-decade stability.


  • r/analogcommunity is a good place to start

    They might talk about DSLR scanning but unless you have such a camera and are interested in trying it you are best just sticking to a photo scanner plus software that will scan multiple slides at once.

    They will probably recommend an Epson scanner but Canon make them also.

    The software usually is supplied with the scanner and usually will scan several slides or negatives at once.

    Because you have so many to scan you dont need to scan at too great a detail. The resolution of scanners are usually hyped up on the packaging, if you scan at a lower resolution to speed up scanning.

    Prints can be scanned at 600 or 1200dpi as they are already quite large. Negatives and slides can be scanned at 2400 or 4800dpi, which will give decent speed plus a finer detail to allow them to be enlarged.

    Over 4800dpi is not usually worth it as the hardware resolution of the scanner usually tops out at 4800 or 9600dpi.




  • I wouldn’t want to load, click, wait, unload 800 DVDs

    To me seems easier than sit, browse, search, get coffee, search again, download magnet link, open, watch, watch, Christ why are there no seeders, delete, browse, search, download link again, watch, yay seeders, get more coffee, watch, huh why have I only got 80%, crap, everyone only has a max of 80%, why didn’t I notice that, go to bed.

    And if you are in the UK like me:

    Browse, find torrent, view blocked page… (Torrents in the UK are effectively dead, nobody does it).

    Scan the doc

    Meh, I have a sheet feeder for that sort of reason. You could always just take a photo of them. Much quicker if you are rushing.

    play around with OCR

    Don’t bother. Tick the OCR box and just let it be.

    My solution (and I actually am doing this sort of thing): Copy the loose video files off each disc, burn to fewer Blu-rays. Oh and I never made printed indexes, that was a waste of ink. Text files and grep. Nothing more.


  • my old computer no longer has a working DVD player, so I wouldn’t know how to read the contents.

    Go onto Amazon and buy a new drive, they are dirt cheap. Heck you could get a usb-c one for future proofing.

    Then you can either keep the discs or just copy everything off. Saves all that tedious faffing about with endless searching, downloading, indexing. Unless you enjoy that, which I don’t, you’ll get bored out of your skull and give it up for a while to play Hogwarts Legacy or something, then come back a year later to continue only to find the law got involved and killed the trackers you were relying on and you also have no idea where you got to anyway.

    I’d just spend pocket money on a drive ;)






  • They’re the kind that are so clear you actually see the verbatim logo on the readable side

    Those are the silver reflective layer ones. They use silver because of it’s better archival life vs aluminium, I have many pressed CD’s that also use silver and the rest is to see how much light shines through.

    Very scratchy topside, which is basically ALL white besides a tiny verbatim and dvd-r logo on the middle, somehow feels heavier.

    Printable disc. That’s a different item code for sure, not the same discs you used earlier. You say it had the same packaging? What logos were on it? Was the “AZO” logo on it?

    You said the printable surface was “scratchy” well that’s not normal it’s supposed to be smooth.


  • I just keep the DVDs and Blu-ray as they are considering I use optical media for archives anyway!

    But let’s say I have a dvd that needs backup because it’s extremely rare or, and this is actually more likely and what I actually do: I’m off on holiday at the end of the week and want to have Red Dwarf series 1 and I don’t fancy bringing the dvd itself along because I’m short on space when packing.

    Well, rip the disc to an ISO file or as a mirrored directory structure. It’s only a maximum of 8GB for a single disc. I just rip a mirror of the disc using vobcopy.

    Vobcopy will rip a title, or a chapter or will recreate the exact copy of the disc as a mirror, all the VOB files, IFO files etc. That way you have everything, all extras and all menus. It is a mirror of the disc, no re-encoding.

    If having a 8GB iso is not what you are after and you need to re-encode, well that will need you to rip each disc specially, that means to learn how the extras are laid out, what audio tracks are what etc. You can rip it all to separate files, but you will lose things like menus and other presentation elements which is why I just mirror the whole disc.

    As I keep all my discs and use them as intended I don’t need to worry about ripping extras if I don’t need to. In my example I mirrored Red Dwarf S1 but that was just so I could avoid taking the disc on holiday (I was already taking other discs and had no room) and I didn’t care to re-encode. I also simply deleted that rip when I was done with it as, well it’s still on dvd.

    But I do have some rips of DVDs I no longer have. I may have upgraded to the Blu-ray and wanted to rip the main title for eas of use when on holiday etc, or I simply didn’t care enough to keep the dvd of something but I couldn’t just not have a copy of that thing I didn’t care much about. Thus I have ripped certain DVDs that I don’t intend to keep, only the main titles and no extras. I only rip what I can’t be bothered much about so I really can’t see the point in ripping the extras for something that is just above the “delete” key lol.