@BitBangingBytes@mikelectricstuf It does indeed - thank you for the link. I asked Vision Engineering if they could supply spares and they said no, but that someone was 3D printing them. I'll look into it. I'm a bit scared about the strength of a printed part - it's under a lot of stress!
@BitBangingBytes@mikelectricstuf This bit, and a pic of the Mantis+stand for context. It's ancient (probably 25 years old) but the optics are still great.
@Gammitin Those MO discs were like alien technology at the time. I remember using 5 1/4" ones in the mid-1990s, about 600Mb capacity, speed almost like a hard disc, and rewritable! I used to use them to bring home drivers and files I'd downloaded from the internet at work.
@RetroNora7734 Now all you need is a program on the host computer that sends the same stream of garbage and you can declare it working. Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day.
@spenley You're right, that's a great point! The em-dash is not only difficult to type on a regular keyboard, it's a sure-fire sign that the text was written by an LLM. π