Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

I got the belt back, but they sanded the new belt down to the correct width instead of replacing it. Eh, whatever works.

I installed it in one of my bad-belt floppy drives, and it's actually grabbing the spindle enough to grab the metal hub & spin the mylar disc! Progress!

But the drive isn't reading any of my boot disks. Bummer. Next step: Check the heads & hope I didn't break one.
💾

If you're able to pry off the LRFs (Little Rubber Feet) without dirtying or damaging the sticky stuff & without leaving any sticky stuff behind, you can use a clean backing sheet for stickers or peel-off stick-on labels to keep the LRFs clean & easy to peel off when it comes time to put them back on the computer.

Make sure to peel off any sticker chaff first if you use a sticker sheet. You don't want to stick the LRFs to any sticker parts, only backing parts.

Life-Hecker

The lesson I took away from that mistake was to write-protect the source disk before thinking of starting a copy.

That force of habit is still with me today. If I format, image, or copy anything & have more than one SD card involved (including micro-SDs in SD dongles), I flip the tab to "Lock" on the source card.

The worst computer mistake I ever made was on my C64, way back when I had only one floppy drive. I wanted to make a backup copy of a disk, & the disk copying program I was using had to format the backup first. It was halfway done with the format phase when I realized I was holding the blank floppy in my hand and that the disk I wanted to copy was being formatted.

This is in my ~/.shrc on BSD to keep me from accidentally nuking or clobbering files I forget are there:

alias cp='cp -ip'
alias mv='mv -i'
alias rm='rm -i'

This also works in ~/.bashrc for bash, & with GNU versions of cp (except `cp -p` preserves different file attributes), mv, & rm.

"Interact with this post if you remember _______"

Thanks to the magic of the Internet, your kid might have to explain why they got 8-tracks, disco albums on any medium, and/or pet rocks.

ATTENTION ALL PLANETS OF THE SOLAR FEDERATION
ATTENTION ALL PLANETS OF THE SOLAR FEDERATION
ATTENTION ALL PLANETS OF THE SOLAR FEDERATION
WE HAVE ASSUMED CONTROL
WE HAVE ASSUMED CONTROL
WE HAVE ASSUMED CONTROL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUzAWw4qsmA

This #DarkPattern showed up after I emptied my shopping cart. Sneaky, Amazon...