Guy turns a Bluray player laser into a scanning microscope!

This article appeared about a month ago. It's pretty cool. Using an Arduino, some C and Javascript coding and a little motor control, he has the laser scanning in one axis while being moved along the other axis and producing a monochrome image.

I haven't watched the video in the Gizmodo article, I'm curious if he harvested anything from the Bluray player aside from the laser and maybe the power supply. It would probably be better to buy a stepper motor controller for this purpose than to try to repurpose one from a player, but at least you'd know that the power supply from the player would meet the laser diode's specs and you could probably tap it to provide power for the rest of your gadget.

https://gizmodo.com/blu-ray-player-scanning-laser-microscope-hack-youtube-1849914455

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/22/12/21/2245214/old-blu-ray-players-can-be-turned-into-microscopes

OAN (One America News) sues DirecTV for dropping it, loses

OAN is a conservative news network that makes Fox look like a bunch of liberal pansies. They're also on the verge of losing all broadcast relevance.

This is a very strange story. They were initially heavily funded by the CEO of AT&T, which owns DirecTV. He wanted to use them as a proxy to fight some FCC rulings that he didn't like. And OAN took on a life of their own. They were carried by DirecTV. This is known as a carriage contract. And when OAN's carriage contract with DirecTV expired, DirecTV dropped them, largely because of the amount of vitriol they were spewing, especially with Covid denial and election lies.

From the article, "OAN host Dan Ball called the DirecTV nonrenewal "censorship at its best" and urged viewers to "call AT&T's support line. Complain, raise hell, email, phone call daily, every hour, set the alarm on your phone, blow the phone lines up, demand they keep OAN.""

Nice people.

OAN is being sued by both Dominion Voting and Smartmatic for their continuing to broadcast claims that the 2020 presidential election was thrown by rigged voting machines after being repeatedly warned that their statements were defamatory.

So DirecTV stops beaming OAN into homes across the country. DirecTV is a company on their own rights and can make their own decisions as to whom they broadcast. I recall reading that OAN's ratings weren't all that great, and with their legal problems, I imagine DirecTV didn't want to get embroiled in the suits for carrying their programming.

OAN sued DirecTV, and now a judge has thrown out all of their claims, save one, and that is that DirecTV breached contract confidentiality by announcing when the OAN contract was up. That might get OAN some money when that's settled, but nothing like the advertising revenue that they lost when they were dropped as DirecTV was their largest carrier. They were also carried by Verizion's FIOS TV service, and were also dropped.

With the exception of some very small cable TV networks, the only place to watch OAN is from their web site.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/01/oan-loses-key-ruling-in-suit-claiming-directv-broke-deal-by-dropping-network/