i bought a yamaha pacifica
If you took a Fender Stratocaster and tastefully modified it for modern play, what you would end up with is the Pacifica. This is the guitar Yamaha can build that Fender can't because they're not "allowed" to.
I'll explain.
Pacifica comes in many flavors that I'll detail in a moment, but just to get this out of the way, what I bought was the PAC112VM model.
Why I bought it
There were two main reasons.
The first is the fact on both the PAC112V (rosewood board version) and PAC112VM models, the tone knob is a push-pull to split the humbucker to single-coil.
I was watching videos about this guitar, saw a person demoing it who then pulled the tone knob, to where my eyes widened and I thought WHOA THERE, WHAT IS THAT? I learned yes, single-coil can be had at the bridge side, and that right there is what put this guitar on my radar. If it didn't have that very specific feature, I never would have bought it.
Long time readers of mine know that I don't like HSS guitars, but I like this one because it's arguably the only guitar that gets it right.
The second reason is the neck. It is not like the Pacifica guitars of the past with that skinny neck garbage. This one has some actual shoulder to it. If you look at the measurements, it's close to Fender but with changes that make it easier to play.
Fender American Stratocaster Pro neck has a scale length of 25.5", zero-fret neck width of 1.6875", 22 narrow-tall frets, 1st fret neck thickness of 0.82", 12th fret neck thickness of 0.92", and 9.5" fingerboard radius.
Yamaha Pacifica PAC112VM neck has a scale length of 25.5", zero-fret neck width of 1.6141", 22 medium jumbo frets, 1st fret neck thickness of 0.82", 12th fret neck thickness of 0.90", and 13.75" fingerboard radius.
The zero-fret neck width (a.k.a. neck width at nut) is a little easier to visualize when stated in millimeters. Fender Am Pro neck is 42.8mm and Yamaha Pacifica PAC112V is 41mm. In other words, a 1.8mm difference.
If the Fender neck kept its thickness but had larger fret wire and its fingerboard flattened to allow for lower string action along with much easier string bending without fretting out, that's the Pacifica neck.
And there are also some other things about the Pacifica that make it Fender-esque.
Body is alder. Not basswood. Not poplar. Alder.
Pickups are all alnico V magnets, hence why "V" is in the model name.
Knobs are metal, knurled and tightened into place with a side screw, just like on the Fender Telecaster.
Most Pacifica guitars are under 8 pounds total. They usually weigh in around 7.4 to 7.8. In other words, about the same as a Fender Strat.
And you get all this for less than the price of a Squier Classic Vibe.
Speaking of which, there are three things about the PAC112V where cost cutting is seen. Electronics use mini pots, the nut is plastic and the tremolo block is the skinny type. However, all of that can be swapped out easily...
...or you just get a higher level model Pacifica so you don't have to mod anything. If you were to get any model with PAC612 in the name, now you get Seymour Duncan pickups, Grover locking tuners, TUSQ nut and a Wilkinson bridge - and it still costs less than a Mexico made Fender Player Stratocaster.
Above that, things get expensive with Pacifica Standard Plus and the top tier Pacifica Professional.
Why I went with the PAC112VM
There was a demo model available, the discounted price was good, and I went for it. The only difference between the PAC112V and PAC112VM is the latter has a maple fingerboard, hence why "M" is at the end of the model name. And yes, the all-maple neck is two-piece with the fingerboard laid down on top with no skunk stripe on the back. This is not a Fender, after all.
I was originally totally set on getting the PAC112V, but then I went to check the maple board models before making the buy, and the demo was there. It has very small cosmetic issues due to it being an in-store guitar people picked up and played before I bought it. These little cosmetic things didn't bother me, so I bought the demo instead since it was cheaper than a new PAC112V.
Fender can't make a guitar like this
I said above that Fender isn't "allowed" to make a guitar like this, and I'll explain that now.
Any time Fender strays from tradition, people don't buy. This is why the recently released Indonesia-made Fender Standard Stratocaster pretty much follows what the Mexico Standard used to be. True, manufacturing location has changed, the body is poplar, the bridge is 2-point and not 6-screw, and the neck doesn't have a skunk stripe on the rear. But in all honesty it's really not that far off from what used to come out of Mexico.
Let's say Fender changed just one thing one the Indonesian Standard, the fingerboard radius. The radius is changed from 9.5" to 12" and everything else stays the same so the price doesn't change.
If Fender did that, people would freak out even if it made for a better playing guitar and not buy it. That being the case, Fender almost never changes anything for standard production run models, because that's too much of a profit risk.
The only time Fender gets a little (and only a little) wiggle room is for highfalutin models where it's okay to stray from tradition, such as the Fender Ultra II Stratocaster HSS. That model has a 10"-14" compound radius fingerboard, and oh, look at that, it also has S-1 switching to split the humbucker...
...and that's literally the only Fender model with a flatter fingerboard with HSS pickup configuration where the humbucker has a coil-split feature.
What about other brands?
At the price point of the Yamaha PAC112V, the Ibanez AZES40 has a thing call the "alter switch" (seen easily between the volume and tone knobs) that gets you all the single-coil tones EXCEPT bridge-side which is all humbucker, all the time.
The same thing is going on with the Ibanez AZ22S1F. Yes, great looking guitar (it truly does look really nice), but again, you can't get single-coil-alone at the bridge side, but can get everything else. And at this point you've gone significantly above what the PAC112V sells for, so you might as well go a little further and get a PAC612 Pacifica model.
It really is all about the Pacifica neck
As I've said before, it's the neck that makes or breaks a guitar. If the neck isn't good, the guitar is bad.
Amazingly, the lowest cost Pacifica, PAC012, still has the same neck shape. However, on that bottom tier model, the body is mahogany, the pickups have ceramic magnets, and the electronics to split the humbucker to single-coil aren't present. But still, that neck with its great shape and flat fingerboard radius is there.
It took me a while before I finally found something other than Fender and Squier that could truly suit me. I wanted a Strat style body shape, the SSS pickup layout, a neck that wasn't skinny while at the same time having a fingerboard radius that is flat, and have it be reasonably priced.
Yamaha Pacifica is that guitar. True, it's HSS, but it's thankfully a lower-output humbucker that can be switched to get SSS tones easily with one pull of the tone knob. It's a tastefully modernized Stratocaster, with the modernization applied only where it needs to be. That, and pretty much nothing else touches it concerning what it has for its price point.
where did the lights on usb flash drives go?
This may be a small thing, but it was mighty convenient.
Flash drives. Tons of them are out there. Easy, cheap data storage, except something is missing that they had before...
...an indicator light.
It used to be that nearly every single flash drive had a small LED light on it. The old SanDisk cruzer used to have a rather large orange light that was quite nice. When it was in use, quicker blinking. When idling, the light faded in and out slowly.
The USB 2.0 versions of the SanDisk cruzer Glide had a smaller red indicator light on them. Again, same as the orange where fast blinking indicated data transfer and slower fade-in/out indicated idling.
The best flash drive light indicator ever - even if it was slightly annoying sometimes - were certain versions of the SanDisk cruzer mini. The LED was a bright blue that looked like a mod but it wasn't, blinking rapidly for every bit of data transferring in or out. Also, the placement of the light was right on the end so there was no way you could miss it. It was fantastic.
The lights need to come back
If you go all the way back to the earliest PCs, they all had drive indicator lights. Even on PCs without hard drives, the floppy drive(s) had an indicator light. For hard drives, that light was always red in color, and it absolutely had to be there so you know whenever any drive activity was going on. It sucked whenever you didn't have that light.
On other drives, same thing. CD-ROM or DVD drive, Zip drive (remember those?), or whatever it was, they all had activity indicator lights.
To make it perfectly clear: AN ON-SCREEN PROGRESS BAR IS NOT A SUITABLE REPLACEMENT FOR AN ACTIVITY LIGHT. Why? If you have an app or program in front, guess what? You can't see that activity going on with physical storage media in the background.
On-screen progress bars are most useful for things NOT local to your computer (such as loading progress). But for local storage media, yes, a light is needed to show activity. This is especially true for large file transfers. If anything, you need that light to let you know when the file transfer is DONE.
Want lights? Two brands still have them.
PNY Turbo Attache, at least for the 256GB USB 3 version, does have an activity light on it. The older SanDisk cruzer Glide USB 2.0 also has an indicator light on it, and does have 256GB versions available. It's an old model, but you can still get it new and sealed at the time I write this. Yes, USB 2.0 is slow, but if you want that indicator light on a SanDisk, that's what you have to get. And no, the USB 3.0 version of the SanDisk does not have the light, even though it looks identical to the 2.0 version.
skype is shutting down
Skype is set to shut down this year, and this made me think of all the internet specific communications stuff I've used over the decades. Yes, it's decades at this point.
In some respects, I miss how internet communications used to be, but it's not like I'd go back to the old ways.
When is Skype shutting down? May 5, 2025. Why? Because Teams exists and Microsoft wants you to use that instead. Fair enough.
It's been years since I used Skype, but when I did, I actually did have a paid subscription because at the time it was one of the cheapest ways to have a reliable phone line through internet. And oh yeah, I used it regularly.
The exact reason I stopped using Skype is because my VoIP box broke. I had this VoIP box (which I think I bought direct from Skype themselves?) that I connected a plain Panasonic cordless phone to, and I loved that thing. Great handset, great battery life, comfortable, awesome ringer, awesome speakerphone. One day I went to unplug the VoIP box out of a power strip to move it elsewhere, and the damned thing cracked apart. Really cheap plastic. The VoIP box, not the Panasonic. There wasn't any other cheap "Skype compatible" thing I could find for sale to plug my cordless phone base into, and the one I bought was out of production, so I switched over to wired headset on my PC. I hated this because that Panasonic phone was so much nicer. I dealt with that for a little while until I didn't need the Skype line anymore, canceled the service and haven't used it since. I was really sick of that stupid headset by that point.
Do I want to go back to communications like that? Nope, although I could if I wanted to, albeit in a different way. Bluetooth phones exist that are very much like the old cordless phones. You pair one to your smartphone and then you can place/receive calls with it. Some have the ability to add additional phones so you can have handsets throughout the house (as in one in the living room, one in the kitchen, one in the garage, and so on).
Skype was actually the first thing I ever used where I heard high-quality audio when speaking to somebody else for Skype-to-Skype "calls". That was weird, because I was very used to standard phone audio, which was 8000Hz to 12000Hz. To hear that bumped up over 22000Hz was different. Even now, every time I hear that high-quality audio on some smartphone calls, I still find it weird.
Then there was the whole instant messenger thing that Skype had. I never cared that much for it. It worked, and that's pretty much all I can say about it.
And on the subject of instant messaging, nina.chat exists that has literally brought back the old AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo! Instant Messenger, obviously run on different servers now. While that is a giant dose of nostalgia, it's one of those things where yeah, okay, use the old software, get sick of it quick and then never use it again.
If there were a retro community built around using those old IM programs, okay, maybe that would be something worth investing time into. But that really doesn't exist from what I've seen.
Questions also come into my head. Why bother with an IM client for chat? Why not just use IRC, which can be used in an instant messenger style? For retro computing in general, wouldn't you want as many computers as possible to be able to use it, regardless of age or OS? Even text-only terminals can use IRC with software like Irssi.
I just don't like the idea of messaging being "tied" to a specific client. And that brings me back to Skype. From what I remember, it's like I said, I did not care much for the way Skype did messaging. Yes, it worked, but I remember the client really have a problem keeping settings where I had to reset things over and over. That got annoying real quick. And it was also annoying that to send/receive messages, "must have Skype client". AIM, YIM, ICQ and heck, even MSN wasn't like that. You could use alternate clients with those, BUT NOT FOR SKYPE. Stupid.
Skype was a thing, and soon to be not a thing.
And as far as retro instant messaging goes, IRC is absolutely the best choice just solely for the fact it works on any computer, even if what you use has no GUI at all.
creating an audio cd in 2025
Oh yes, we're going here. I've been going all-in with learning how to do things with optical media lately, so I went ahead and acquired some CD-R discs.
You might be asking why I would even bother with this. I'll answer that.
This is not so much for the '90s nostalgia factor (although I will admit that's a small part of it), but rather because CD is just so darned reliable. And there's another reason I'll mention in a bit.
Before getting into the audio stuff, some quick notes on data stuff first.
Out of all computer media there is, only two will last the test of time. CD-R and ultrium tape cartridges. The tape itself is really expensive, and an ultrium tape drive will instantly give you massive sticker shock.
CD-R, even at just 700MB/disc, is the best thing you could use to store important documents and photos for about 10 years if not longer. An external USB optical drive is cheap as are CD-R discs. When all the hard drives and USB flash sticks fail, CD-R will still be working.
And don't worry, there will still be optical drives in the future. There are super nerds right now successfully recovering data from storage media of the late 1970s. If they can recover data from a half-century ago, you'll still be able to read your CD-R data in 2035.
Okay, on to the audio stuff.
In Windows, the best tool is Windows Media Player in Windows 10, and that's pretty much all you need to know there. Fairly easy to figure out.
In Linux, three things are required. FFMPEG to encode proper WAV files for CD audio, Brasero to burn and/or make BIN/CUE files, and VLC for playback to test out the disc once burned.
If you don't have FFMPEG, Brasero and VLC installed, install those first.
Get all your audio ready. It doesn't matter if it's video or audio files. Could be WEBM, MP4, MOV, OGG, MP3, whatever. Just dump everything you want to burn to disc in a folder.
Navigate to that folder in Terminal and run this:
mkdir for-cd;for i in *;do ffmpeg -i "$i" -ar 44100 "${i%.*}.wav" -y;mv *.wav for-cd -v;done
This will a) create subfolder for-cd, b) make WAV versions of all the files at a proper 44.1kHz, c) move all the WAV versions to subfolder for-cd.
Launch Brasero and start an "Audio Project", which is for a traditional audio CD.
Drag-and-drop all the WAV files in the for-cd subfolder into the Brasero window.
Do two things to each track.
Right-click the track to add the song title and band/artist name.
After that, right-click the track again and select "Insert a Pause".
Doing this will insert a 2-second pause between that track and the next one.
Add title/artist info for every track, then add a 2-second pause for every track except the last one since that's the end of the disc.
At the bottom of Brasero, your disc title is there. Change it to whatever you want, such as "My Custom Mix Disc".
There is a drop-down at the bottom of Brasero. You can either burn direct-to-disc right then and there, or you can burn an image file. The latter option makes a BIN and CUE.
If you are the type that prefers to directly edit the CUE file with a text editor before burning a disc, yes, you can do that. I specifically mention this for those that still prefer to use the command line utility cdrdao (which literally means CD-R Disc-At-Once). Some Linux users really like that utility but hate the process of making the BIN and CUE files. Well, just have Brasero make the BIN and CUE, edit the CUE to suit, then burn the disc with cdrdao afterward. Job done.
Or, if you don't want to deal with any of that, just have Brasero burn the disc.
Once the disc is burned, that's when you launch VLC to test it out. Insert the burned disc in the drive, launch VLC, and at top left click Media > Open Disc. A new smaller window will appear. Click Audio CD, then the Play button at bottom.
If all went well, your audio CD will start playing and you'll see all the CD Text stuff you input in Brasero for each track.
So what was that other reason for using CD-R I was talking about?
The other reason CD audio is being sought after again is because of cars and annoyances with smartphones.
Want to know how many cars were made with CD audio players? Millions. How do I know? Years ago, I owned a nearly-base spec 1986 Chevrolet Camaro, and it had a factory installed General Motors radio with CD player. It was just single-disc, but the point is it had one even on a 1986 model when CD was still a very new thing.
Cars with CD players were around for about 35 years. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if a few 2025 models still offered it.
The smartphone annoyances I'm talking about where music playback is concerned is that it's not as simple as 1) pick song, 2) play, 3) adjust volume. An app has to be launched, maybe a login is required if it's a streaming thing, and so on.
With CD, it literally is a 1-2-3 process. Pick song, play, adjust volume. And pretty much all car CD players have a shuffle feature, so the songs don't have to be played in order.
How many songs can fit on an audio CD? 80 minutes of music. If each song is 3 minutes in length, that means 26 songs can fit on the disc. If you want to get really technical about it, the maximum number of audio tracks that can be written to CD is 99. You could burn 99 "songs" to CD if they were all 0.8 seconds in length each.
Before you ask, yes, Brasero will show how much you can fit on the disc before you burn it, so you don't have to guess.
Given the fact the majority of car owners drive a car over 10 years old, it most likely has a CD player. It's right there, ready to be used. Nothing to plug in, no fumbling about with wires or connectors or anything like that. Insert a disc and start the music.
CD players in cars are easy. Easy is good. You just have to make the discs.
dvd+r dl discs are the best thing for long term data storage?
In '23, I copied a lot of data off a big pile of old (some ancient) discs I had, both CD and DVD. After getting everything copied over and backed up, I vowed I would never return to optical media storage ever again.
Well, that's changed.
I bought a 50-pack of DVD+R DL discs. DL means Dual Layer. A regular DVD+R holds 4.7GB while a DL holds 8.5GB. In this day and age, 8.5GB doesn't sound like much, but that's well more than enough to hold thousands of documents and photos. It's not a BDXL level of optical storage, but I'll get to that in a minute.
The bitter truth about flash drives
You can get 512GB flavors all day for real cheap. That used to be over $100, then it was $50, and now well below that.
It's very tempting to just stuff everything on a flash drive, put it in a box or whatever, forget about it, then retrieve it later when you want the files on the thing.
Bad idea.
The flash cells over time will bleed charge. If the flash storage sits too long unused, guess what? Dead drive. And yes, this can happen with SSD as well.
What you're supposed to do is periodically plug in the drive even if no files are read or written to charge the thing. This is annoying because it means you have remember to do this. You go get the flash media out of storage, plug it in for 20 minutes, disconnect properly afterward, put back in storage, repeat once a month.
But let's say you do the exact opposite and use the flash drive all the time, reading and writing files to it as you normally would. Everything is good, right? Wrong. That decreases the lifespan of the memory and you can (and most likely will) end up with a dead USB stick.
Ideally, a USB stick is best used sometimes. Use it a few times a week and no more than that to make the drive last as long as possible. The cells keep a charge, and file system remains stable... hopefully. But trying to figure how much use is too much or too little is also annoying. What's the correct amount of use? Nobody knows.
What this basically means is that flash media absolutely sucks for long term data storage, and this leads to...
The DVD+R DL disc
DVD+R DL has been around since 2004, so it's obviously a very mature storage technology. If you have an optical drive, it probably already has the ability to read and write DVD+R DL discs, especially if it was made in 2012 or later.
In Windows, a freeware utility you can download called Nero InfoTool will tell you the media types your optical drive will support. It's old, but still works.
In Linux, libcdio (and probably libcdio-utils) needs to be installed so you get the cd-drive command line utility.
Run that, and right near the top it states yes, the drive does have DVD+R DL support.
If I had some seriously crusty old optical drive that didn't have DVD+R DL support, plenty of external USB DVD burner drives are out there for cheap.
Why bother with DVD+R DL?
DVD+R DL is, as far as I can tell, the cheapest way to get long term data storage that actually works.
What do I mean by long term? Ten years.
Why use the disc and not a CMR hard drive like a Seagate Barracuda Pro? CMR HDD is an option, but with DVD of the non-RW variety, the files cannot be messed with once written. Once they're there, it's permanent. Also, the only thing you have to do to store DVDs properly is put them in a cool, dry place. DVD is a true "put away and forget it" media.
And one other thing. If a CMR hard drive just outright dies, your only option to get that data back is to send the drive to a data recovery service, pay a big chunk of money, and hope for the best. If an optical drive dies, the data can be moved physically. Take the disc out, use another drive that works.
Why not Blu-ray?
There is archival grade M-DISC BDXL media, but it is not cheap. At the time I write this, it's over $10 per disc. True, each disc can hold 100GB. But you need a Blu-ray burner with M-DISC support, which is also not cheap. But even if you have the burner and the discs, any time a burn doesn't go quite right, you're out 10 bucks each time that happens.
The alternative cheaper media for Blu-ray is BD-R and BD-R DL discs. With BD-R you get 25GB per disc, and BD-R DL bumps that to 50GB/disc.
Blu-ray at cheapest is the BD-R 25GB flavor, and that roughly translates to 90 cents/disc if you bought a 50-pack of them.
DVD+R DL is about 60 cents/disc when bought as a 50-pack.
But then there's the cost of the drive. Getting multiple drives for DVD is way, way cheaper compared to Blu-ray. 60 vs. 90 cents per disc isn't much, but $30 for a DVD burner vs. $100+ for a decent external Blu-ray burner can add up real quick. There are ones cheaper than $100, but they won't last. External DVD drives are the better deal.
What can fit on DVD+R DL?
Everything but video.
Video files are, by far, the largest thing anybody has on their drive(s). Take away the video, and what you're left with images and documents for the most part.
Without video files taken into consideration, 8.5GB/disc actually ends up being plenty of space to back up photos and documents.
To put this in perspective, a big digital photo is about 4MB. You can fit over 2,000 photos that size on a single DVD+R DL. As for documents, a really big PDF over 100 pages long would be anywhere from 25 to 50MB. Yes, MB, not GB.
Aside from entire-system backups, video is pretty much the only reason anybody buys big-capacity data storage in the first place.
If you have tons of video, sure, get one or two 8TB Barracuda Pro CMR HDDs (the 8TB is the best deal going at the moment).
But for everything else that's for long term data storage? DVD+R DL all day.
Yeah, DVD+R DL is old tech, but proven, reliable, and most importantly there's no periodic maintenance required. Write the disc, verify to make sure it took, store, put away, done.
Now for some nerdy notes to ensure maximum compatibility for burned data discs.
Here's the 101 to ensure maximum compatibility with any DVD burned. This mainly concentrates on Linux, but also applies to Windows and probably macOS as well. All of this is optional. You can choose to follow it or not.
The decidedly ancient Yellow Book CD-ROM Mode 1 data standard all the way back from 1984 is what to use when you want your burned data discs to read everywhere. There are rules to follow, and they're fortunately easy.
Before I get into that, if you don't follow the rules, there's the possibility your burned discs will only read in certain operating systems and even certain optical drives but not others. In my personal experience, I had it happen where I burned a DVD in Linux, brought it over to an older Windows 10 laptop with a DVD-ROM (yes, ROM, meaning no write capability), and the disc absolutely would not read. The reason? I didn't use Yellow Book Mode 1.
What I found is that if I keep any individual file under 2GB, I can get away with multi-dot files (like file.whatever.ext) and long file names, provided I use both Rock Ridge (for Linux) and Joliet (for Windows) extensions.
Confused? I'll make it slightly easier.
If you don't feel like looking at all your files to check for over-2GB stuff, put everything in a split 7z archive. 7-Zip makes it stupidly easy to create archives that auto-split into 2GB chunks on creation.
7z a stuff.7z -v2g folder-with-all-my-crap
The above literally means "Launch 7-Zip, add to archive stuff.7z, auto-split to 2GB volumes, put everything in folder-with-all-my-crap into the archive".
Both will create stuff.7z.001, stuff.7z.002 and so on until completed. When you double-click the .001 file, if all the other pieces are present, it auto-joins and opens as if it were a single file. At that point you choose whether to extract it somewhere or not.
As for the Rock Ridge and Joliet extensions, for most people this is only a thing to take into consideration when using Linux to burn discs.
The Joliet extension is something any Windows disc burning software should automatically use since Microsoft has been directly supporting that since Windows 95. The Rock Ridge extension is for UNIX/Linux use to allow for things like very long file names, inclusion of per-file permissions, and so on.
Typically, Linux users use genisoimage to create an ISO first, then wodim to burn a disc with. (If you don't want to mess around with Terminal, scroll down to "Is there an easier way for Linux?" below.)
Using these terminal commands below will create an ISO and then burn a disc using both Rock Ridge and Joliet so it can be read in Linux or Windows with no issues:
genisoimage -rJ -V disc-name-not-over-32-chars -o /path/to/my-dvd-name.iso /path/to/dir-with-files
sudo wodim dev=/dev/srX -v -data -eject /path/to/my-dvd-name.iso
Note that /dev/srX in wodim is an example drive path. You need to run lsblk -p to determine the actual drive path. If using an external USB burner drive, it will most likely be something like /dev/sr0 or /dev/sr1.
Also note that /path/to/ is something you have to figure out. If you have the folder with all the files you want to put to ISO on the Desktop, then the path would be something like /home/your-username/Desktop/dir-with-files. If you also want the generated ISO on the Desktop, the path for that would be /home/your-username/Desktop/my-dvd-name.iso.
Explanation:
For genisoimage, -rJ is "Rock Ridge and Joliet", -V is the disc name you make up with no spaces that doesn't exceed 32 characters in length, -o is the output and ISO name of your choice, dir-with-files is where the files are that you want in the ISO. You may want to type that as /path/to/dir-with-files.
For wodim, find your DVD drive path first with lsblk -p. If it's an external DVD drive over USB (which it probably will be), it will most likely be /dev/sr0 or /dev/sr1. The -v outputs a little extra info while burning the disc, -eject automatically ejects the tray on completion, and lastly the ISO name tells wodim what to burn to disc.
Is there an easier way for Linux?
Yes. Use Xfburn - especially if you plan on using Blu-ray.
For whatever package manager you use, search for that and it should be available as it's in a whole bunch of different distros. You can burn direct-to-disc or make ISOs with it.
Xfburn is also smart enough to where if you drop in over-2GB files, it will give a soft warning that the disc may be incompatible with other systems (which basically means "probably won't work in Windows"). However, to ensure maximum compatibility, type in a volume name that's under 32 characters with no spaces just like you would with wodim.
And like I said, use Xfburn if you plan on doing the Blu-ray thing, since the software has built-in BD disc support.
Now for some even more nerdy notes about making super-ultra compatible CDs for vintage DOS computers.
Making super-ultra compatible CDs that will work with MS-DOS
In this scenario, you're using CD and not DVD, and the instructions below is my best guess on how to make the most super-ultra compatible CD for use on a vintage PC. Why just a best guess? I don't have an actual vintage MS-DOS PC to test with. But I do remember enough about MS-DOS to where this will most likely work.
ISO 9660 is understood by MS-DOS, so as far as I'm aware, the only real thing to look out for are directory and file name considerations.
Any file or directory follows 8.3 rules, which means 8 case-insensitive characters and optionally one dot followed by 3 case-insensitive characters. The allowed characters are A through Z and 0 through 9.
Allowed special characters are all these _^$~!#%&-{}@`'() and if DOSBox is to be believed, that actually works.
To avoid complications, I wouldn't bother with that and just stick with A-Z and 0-9.
One of the easier ways to get a bunch of files to CD for MS-DOS use other than just copying them over is using a ZIP. Other archive types exist, but ZIP is by far the easiest.
In Linux, zip gives you the optional -k flag, which in man zip is described as:
Attempt to convert the names and paths to conform to MSDOS, store only the MSDOS attribute (just the user write attribute from Unix), and mark the entry as made under MSDOS (even though it was not); for compatibility with PKUNZIP under MSDOS which cannot handle certain names such as those with two dots.
This means all you have to do in Linux is put all your files in a folder (and you can include subdirectories, also with files in them), navigate to that folder in Terminal, and run this:
cd /path/to/files
zip -r -k archive.zip *
All files and folders in the ZIP will be converted over to 8.3 that DOS can understand.
If the archive is too big, use the split utility in Linux to break it up, then CHUNK in DOS (search for "dos chunk file splitter" in your search engine of choice) to combine the files.
Splitting for DOS CHUNK use in Linux using 700k pieces (you can specify any size you want in b for byte, k for kilobyte, m for megabyte, whatever):
split -a 3 -b 700k -d archive.zip archive.
Yes, the dot has to be at the end. This will create archive.000, archive.001, archive.002 and so on.
This should go without saying, but I'll mention it anyway. Any utilities I mention below should be in PATH. If you don't know what that is.. um.. learn to DOS.
In DOS, put all the files in a folder and run CHUNK to combine and get the ZIP. If you put everything in C:\SPLIT, it would look like this:
C:
CD\SPLIT
CHUNK /C ARCHIVE ARCHIVE.ZIP
Preview the ZIP using PKZIP for DOS:
PKZIP -VM ARCHIVE.ZIP
Once satisfied with what you see, delete the old split files afterward:
DEL *.00*
Make a folder, go to it, use PKZIP for DOS to unzip that extracts folders along with any subdirectories and files within:
MD \EXTRACT
CD\EXTRACT
PKUNZIP -D \SPLIT\ARCHIVE.ZIP
Ultimately, whether you choose to write files as-is outright to CD, use ZIPs or split ZIPs, everything has to be to 8.3 spec if the intent is to use those files in MS-DOS. If all the data is "8.3'd" and the CD is written as Yellow Book data mode 1, DOS should be able to read and understand that without issue. I believe even an ancient MPC compliant PC like the Tandy Sensation should be able to read the disc.