Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

BTW, both are Matsushita EME-278TY drives, which Toshiba used in the T4500, T4600, T4700, & T4800 series of laptops.

I gave the belt another 10 minutes in a bath of boiling water, and it's just not going to shrink any more. It's done.

I got the other floppy drive, and the belt actually broke at the motor spindle. I guess I did too much "come on please just work" last time I used it. I taped it back together, but only so I can size possible replacements; there's no way it'll ever work again in any belt-driven system, let alone an older floppy drive.

That looks about as good as I can get it.

A nearly clean surface & a toothbrush rendered filthy from scrubbing it. That's looking nice. :3 The surface where I'm scrubbing hard is getting scuffed up, but that's actually a good thing; the new keyboard's adhesive should grab better.

You can see my progress in the left corner. I got about 3x as much off in a few minutes with pumice soap than I did in several hours with Magic Eraser.

Back to cleaning the Timex Sinclair 1000 case so I can install the new keyboard: I gave up on Magic Eraser. I'm making much more progress with some Fast Orange and a cheap toothbrush.

Holy crap, boiling the belt for 10 minutes almost worked! I had a tiny bit of trouble getting the belt back around the disk spindle & guide pulley, but it wasn't quite as much trouble as it should've been. It's just barely too slack for the motor spindle to grip while a disk is in the drive.

❌ Don't boost image bots that don't lead you to their sources.

✅ Do boost image bots that do lead you to their sources, especially if it's a direct link to the authoritative source.

🆗 Indirect links or leads are okay as long as there's no apparent conflict of interest (such as via a portal the bot owner controls).

I'm serious about their scraping response.

"As a result she is very limited with the data returned since creator/work information is generally missing or hard to identify, therefore is not reliable and risky/problematic to share without manual control."
LOG
THE
PAGES
YOU
SCRAPED
FROM!

If nothing else, cite THAT with each image! It's not that hard. I follow a dozen bots meeting that bare minimum.

But Archillect seems intent on robbing attribution for cashable fame.

Ban it.

here to mastodon, not here to the instance i'm on.

someone brought archillect here.

it's a bot whose owner can't be arsed to make it source so much as the art/photo theft blog it scrapes from, & the quarter-assed "solution" they endorse is a reply bot that gets sources wrong so often i've never seen it get one right.

archillect's popularity & eternally dickheaded response to scraping, which the bot's owners will monetize if they haven't started already, is why i committed to boosting only sourcing image bots.

BTW, the only reason my repair toots are CW'd is because they're each running pretty long.

I just found the strangest advice: Boil the belt in water for about 10 minutes. I have no idea if it'll work, and the one who suggested it never elaborated.

http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?47700-T4600C-laptop-floppy-drive-repair

Well, I have a drive of unknown condition with the belt out, a drive that was known working 17 years ago save for a belt now gone slack (but not removed), and an unknown-condition drive on the way. Worst that happens is a belt I already measured breaks apart from really bad advice.

Reading online and talking to the indy Radio Shack folks, I'm told I can probably get away with using a rubber band as a temporary replacement belt. I'm sure I can, and now that I know how to dig the floppy drive out, it's something that I could try, but the fewer times I disassemble the laptop all the way from the top shell down to the bottom, the better.

Also, things are starting to look up regarding the mere existence of replacement floppy drive belts.

And so many of the responses to that Tor Browser & NoScript bypass are doing nothing but arguing semantics over whether it should be called a zeroday or not. #DontReadTheComments