Top all-time · #20839
Nava Whiteford
Personal blog · everydaything.substack.comsciencehardware
Nava Whiteford writes Everyday Thing, a personal blog at everydaything.substack.com about science and hardware. Since 2022, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 5 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-02-10, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this Substack for its optical photos of MiniDiscs and other disc formats, and for a teardown of a home optical spectrometer, the B&W Tek BTC100-2S.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A thing every day.
What Hacker News says?
Pre-mastered MDs are pressed and the format is physically similar to CDs. I would be interesting to put this disc under an optical microscope, I assume it would look similar to a regular pre-mastered disc but perhaps it's actually a recordable MD (which look very different) or some kind of R&D experiment. I took a bunch of optical images of MDs and other formats here for reference: https://everydaything.substack.com…
Comment linking /p/a-pre-mastered-minidisc
on “Dissecting a Dummy Promo MiniDisc”Submitted 35mm cinema film and digital audio as a story · 110 points
HN discussionIt's so cool to see this on HN. I think this is one of the B&W Tek units that came from the NuSkin device which was err... of debatable scientific merit. It appeared on Dr Oz at one point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfizniDX3pQ Loads of these appeared on eBay as well as the complete Nu Skin units with identifying logos removed they used to go for about $15 which was a bargain. I think I picked up 5 or 6. Wrote…
Comment linking /p/b-and-w-optical-spectrometer
on “Home Optical Spectrometry: The B&W Tek BTC100-2S”Submitted Minidisc Optical Sled Teardown as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted An Analysis of a Plastic Spoon as a story · 2 points
HN discussion