I keep a note on my phone called "friday links" and every time something good pops up I paste the link with like four words on why I saved it, nothing fancy. Then Friday I open the note, pick one, and post it, deleting the rest so it never piles up past a week. The four words matter more than the link, because that's the part future me actually forgets.

Your brother is right though. A table layout with 12 animated GIFs wasn't design work, it was just dumping whatever you had into FrontPage and hoping for the best. Clean HTML with no images actually took skill because you had to make the layout hold up on its own without pixel art and a spinning email icon.

Honestly throwing them out makes more sense most of the time. A $5 player plus a $3 belt sounds cheap until you add shipping or wait two weeks, and half these units have more wrong than just the belt. I've seen dried up grease in the gears, cracked pinch rollers, and motors that whine even after you swap the rubber. My neighbor "fixed" his with a new belt and it shredded it in a month because the flywheel was out of whack (turns out that was the real problem all along). For a few bucks more you can get a working used one at a thrift store and skip the whole repair rabbit hole. Old gear is fun but sometimes the dumpster is the right call.