I have a nice pink (slim) PS2 with a broken optical drive that I’m trying to fix. I have a replacement drive that has an identical code to the broken one and that visually looks identical except that one of the ribbon cables is longer. I put it in following the instructions from iFixit, but the new drive does not seem to spin up (though it does move the read head, it sound like).

I put the old drive back and try again, with the same result. This is surprising because the previous drive could read CDs (PS1 games) but not DVDs, so I fixed it worse than it was before.

Does anyone have suggestions for where to start troubleshooting? What could have possibly gone wrong to cause this?

My impression is that people in North America are very careful not to swear around their kids. I’ve gotten the impression (from pop culture, so dubious quality) that one of the reasons is they’re frequently reprimanded at school for this.

I (born late 80’s) wasn’t raised this way, and I don’t plan on raising my kids that way either. To me, swearing is part of the language and an abstinence only approach to it seems backwards in and for exactly the same reasons the same approach to sex ed does: the trick is in how and when, not “don’t do it, it’s immoral”.

I assume there are people with different strategies out there and I’d appreciate your view on this!

The Monk and Robot books by Becky Chambers take place in a very solar punk setting where significant rewilding has taken place. The main character is a travelling tea monk (you don’t need to know what that is) who travels with what is called an ox-bike. Essentially the setup is an e-bike-driven lightweight campervan or possibly wagon. My impression from the book is that the front bike does not detach from the back.

I’ve done some literal back of the envelope calculations and I think it would be possible to make something like that in real life with our current technology. But I’ve not been able to find any prior art, except for the Wide path bicycle camper, which is more like a trailer than a campervan. My guess is you could improve on the if you made the bike built in, not least because it’s easier to stop without the damned bike falling over.

Have you ever heard of or seen anyone make something like this? Do you think it could work?

Image description: a screenshot from Apple Health showing a terrible night’s sleep.

We have an electric cargo bike that’s served us really well. We bought it second hand at a pretty affordable price because the battery was shot. Fortunately we found a great local repair shop that could replace it, and we now have a pretty great bike.

Unfortunately the drum breaks on the front wheels are getting really bad after about 12 years or so, and our local bike repair shop is at a loss for finding new parts. The front wheels are mounted on an axle that’s controlled by hyudralics (which gives the bike a great turning radius), so they’re a bit special. The original hubs are Sturmey Archer XL-SD’s, but they don’t seem to be available anywhere.

Does anyone have suggestions for what I can use instead? Has anyone hacked their way to one-side-mounted front wheels for a three-wheeled bike, eg by using a through axle?

Is there a good general-ish purpose scripting language (something like Lua on the smaller end or Python on the bigger) that’s implemented in only Rust, ideally with a relatively low number of dependencies?

Have you used it yourself, if so for what and what was your experience?

Bonus points if it’s reasonably fast (ideally JITed, though I’m not sure if that’s been done at all in Rust).

It’s just this design, lightly sanded and painted.

I’m trying to find content on other instances (primarily communities but sometimes posts). Sometimes I have the @-handle, sometimes I have a URL. I want to open them in my instance in Mlem.

So far I’ve tried the standard search-for-the-URL trick which works for links on the web, but not at all in Mlem.

How do I get Mlem to open a link to a community or post in my active instance? Or, even better, in an arbitrary instance I have an account for?