I once wrote an automated kickmute userscript, which worked essentially as a manual ban. It would kick the user and then bin their message automatically. Got in trouble for being a little too heavy handed though...
@PM2Ring It sat in mom's display cabinet for years, without being wound, yes. I gave it a tentative wind the first time and it lasted from Friday evening (say 9PM) until Sunday morning, 1:30 AM ;-)
I wound it a bit more this time, so we'll see ;-)
But according to mom's memory, having to wind it up each week is about right ;-)
@PM2Ring Yep, getting it serviced one day is on my list of things to get done once I have 'spare' money (right now all the spare money is going into a 'buying the car fund', after that it will go into a 'buy a battery' fund, then there's also the 'buy an e-bike fund' ....) :P
For now, it seems to work fine, the pendulum needs a little tweaking... There's a screw to make it longer/shorter so time goes slower/faster... it was a bit slow, losing about a minute a day, but it seems I have now made it a bit too fast.... it seems to now gain half a minute a day XD
@PM2Ring Yep, it looks pretty clean! It's mostly just lightly tarnished. The stuff under the glass was already much less tarnished than that base, probably because it was less exposed to oxygen.
My mom got it as her inheritance from her grandmother. BUT! She swears her grandmother used to have a similar one, but with those little balls instead of a pendulum? You know what I mean?
And that this one was instead not her grandmothers, but "aunt Dinie's".
And that aunt Dinie swapped the two before mom got to 'select' it. She has her sister, my aunt, backing her up on that, so I'm tempted to believe it :P
I know there was smoking at my grandmother's place, it was pretty common for everyone to smoke inside at that day/age, and mom has stories about glasses with cigarettes being on the table at birthdays, like we serve snacks :P
I do not know if aunt Dinie's place was any different.
Yep. Those balls are part of a balance wheel. Like a pendulum, but rotating in a horizontal plane. So the ticking rate isn't determined by the gravitational acceleration.
At the very least, there was also smoking inside our house when I was very little, mostly just during birthdays though. And the clock has always been inside the display cabinet as far as I know.
When clocks run continuously, the wear & tear, and any gunk gets spread around evenly. When they sit unused, there's obviously no mechanical wear, but gunk & corrosion isn't so evenly spread. So that impacts the smooth functioning, and can accelerate wear when you start using the clock again.
@PM2Ring Yep. To be honest, if the story is true, I'm a bit disappointed because it means I missed out on an even cooler clock ;-)
@PM2Ring I hope there's very little gunk at least, since it's been in a display cabinet + under that glass for as long as I can remember, and mom was rather meticulous in keeping dust out of that cabinet :P
But yeah, it should probably get serviced at some point, and I'm definitely getting that done. I've also considered taking a course in servicing clocks, there seems to be one nearby that lets you bring your own clock for the course :D
Yeah! I've seen that clock/watchmaker on that BBC show, 'The Repair Shop', do some amazing cleaning :D I want the cogwheels from my clock to be just as shiny, one day :D
One of my favourite old-school websites belongs to Tom Van Baak. He's American, but he obviously has a Dutch name. :) He's a self-confessed time hacker. He's got lots of clocks, from mechanical to atomic.
His best pendulum clock is so precise that he can use it to detect the tidal effect of the Sun & Moon on the pendulum, by comparing it to an atomic clock.
We now have atomic clock chips. They aren't quite as accurate as the bigger clocks, but they're a lot more portable. But they aren't cheap.
Until the 1960s, precision timekeeping was essentially a branch of astronomy. But atomic clocks have made that obsolete. Almost. People still want time to be connected with the rotation of the Earth, not totally determined by atomic vibrations.
Industrial & commercial air-conditioning consumes a lot of energy, but it tends to be more efficient than domestic aircon. And business tends to get cheaper energy rates because they buy lots of it. But with DST in hot climates, people go home & turn on their home aircons an hour earlier than they would without DST.
Summer over here was a bit milder than the few years before it too, though. It had a few hot days, I think 2/3 heatwaves, but not as much and blisteringly long as the year before that. It's now early spring here, and warm for the time of year today, 20 degrees C
It's going to be less warm for the rest of the week though, and they're predicting some thunderstorms for later this afternoon.
Yeah. It's mostly been a max of 21° or 22° for the last few weeks. But we keep getting these occasional weird extra hot days. It's not like the climate I grew up with...
@PM2Ring it's cold nowadays, some days ago we had snow with 3°-6° C, today it's windy and 10 °C. They don't predict temperatures more than 24 °C anytime soon.
You may have noticed that over the last several weeks, we ran an experiment that added a link to chat on Stack Overflow and some Stack Exchange sites in an attempt to make it more visible to site members. We'll be adding the navigation bar link to the remaining Stack Exchange sites this week and ...
Is that... something that needs a mod to intervene? Or staff? Have you raised flags/contacted the proper 'authorities' for that? Or is it just something that's annoying you but not technically breaking any rules? :)
And yeah, I'd prefer to have what happens there stays there, and if someone doesn't want to interact too much or anything, for both parties to respect that :)
@JourneymanGeek blocking doesn't work when one just creates another accounts and hides their e-mail (which the site allows, stupidly enough, so that not even owners can view it)
@PetəíŕdtheWizard No problem. If they do decide to bother you about this kinda stuff on here again, lemme know. That shouldn't happen :)
CC @Twineee-MissesShadow-Wizard so you know not to do that again. Keep what happens off-site, off SE and don't use SE to try and sort out your problems elsewhere.