Apparently! That or I just have a trustworthy face haha

Those guys must have a lot of fun with vapes. The liquid is 50-70% glycerine, and you get the stuff everywhere.

The system is also likely designed to have false positives so they can validate that the security people are doing their job. This is more obvious on the x-ray machines but resembles the "can you spot the phishing email" emails that often get sent out in corporate environments to detect people who need additional security education.

Also, it's not illegal to travel when covered in nitrate dust. Maybe you really were working with explosives or fertilizers earlier in the day. So it really should be just a flag to check that you don't still have the explosives with you.

Or to assume it's a false positive.

Shortly after 9/11 I was flying out of Hawaii back to the mainland and I watched the screen when they swabbed my bag. It reported as positive for every single type of explosive (to the best of my knowledge, I was not carrying anything even remotely explosive). The tech looked at the results, said "that can't possibly be right" and waved me on.

In my experience if they test positive the tech will stop and wipe down the machine before trying again. They're highly prone to false positives.

In my experience, UK airports seem to not want you to leave the country — contra to the perception the government project regarding not wanting you to stay in the first place. :/

Had a number of experiences where their identity scanners (for some destinations they scan you at the start of security and just before the gate to ensure you get on the right aircraft) failed to be operational resulting in delays that ultimately may have forced me to miss my flight and stay in the UK. On the other hand, arriving from Ireland to the UK results in no checks because of the common travel area — you get waved through a special gate which is reserved for passengers from Ireland. LOL

These things are also notoriously prone to false negatives. I know a person who uses the same laptop briefcase to take their handgun to the local indoor shooting range, with magazines and ammo, and also uses that bag as a carry on for travel.

The bag goes right next to the shooting bench at the firing line. It presumably gets a decent amount of powder residue on it, and yet it's been swabbed several times and not set off anything. My buddy is scrupulously careful to remove anything non-airport-approved before taking it on a trip, so the fact that something "bad" was previously contained in the bag has been double/triple checked to be absent before they show up to the airport.

If you like old buildings, clock and bell mechanisms, or rigging, there's a fascinating series of bell tower repair videos on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/@DingDongitsthebellguy

He also posts on reddit under dingdongbellguy

They don’t seem to be in contact with the people who actually fixed it.

It's almost certainly this. I suspect the advance button can be used to advance the time via morse code LED flashes and only then committed when you get to the right hour.

Perhaps the long-press commits the hour, which is why it rang once initially.

I used to use Morse to blink out status codes in similar things but I think by the mid-2000s I'd moved from PIC16F628s to atmega328.

I didn't build the chime box but it looks like the sort of thing I used to do back then.

How is this any different than decoding binary? If you can read a chart of codes involving either dot or dash surely you can also read a chart of codes with either 0 or 1.

I had that thought too when I saw the parent comment earlier, but then I looked up the Morse code digits and I have to admit that they are much easier to decode from a flashing light than binary and I'm pretty good doing binary in my head:

    ----- 0000
    .---- 0001
    ..--- 0010
    ...-- 0011
    ....- 0100
    ..... 0101
    -.... 0110
    --... 0111
    ---.. 1000
    ----. 1001

Also, if I see a light with short and long blinks and a pause in between, I'm going to immediately think Morse, not binary, and decoding it is almost intuitive.

I would GUESS that someone tried figuring it out in 2023 and replaced the battery as troubleshooting. If it were me, I'd probably do the same then stop when I hit a wall so I didn't damage it further. I don't wanna be the guy who damages a 100+ year old public clock

I could just hear the clockmaker James Martin calling me a butcher in his disapproving manner

YMD and DMY i can understand; MDY is just insane, who came up with that.

YYMMDD is standard(ish) ISO 8601 - the new versions of the spec require a 4 digit year but older ones allowed it, and ISO 8601 is also commonly used in manufacturing.

For someone who is not familiar with that person/channel, what is that way to understand circuits?

Such a pleasant surprise to wake up and see my hometown at the top of hackernews!

This sounds like such a fun project, especially to share with like minded friends.

Yeah I repair old cameras these days. The amount of cameras I've fixed by just poking at random stuff until it unjams is surprisingly high. Even more so the number I've "fixed" by just replacing the batteries.

I want friends like that!

What a lovely blog in general: some really fun retro-computing projects, written up in a very thoughtful, human way. Feels like a throwback to the earlier hacking spirit of the internet. Thank you, Colin: your "experiment with writing" is a success as far as I'm concerned!

i wish i could fix The Sun clock on Broadway and Chambers

it's literally kittycorner from City Hall, and hasn't been running for a while...

i'd do it for free if i knew who to even bother about getting up into it

It being a municipal hall at first, I wouldn't be surprised the town wanted to spend a little extra, but at the same time, I imagine they needed to calculate the weight of the clock tower and over-engineered it in case the weight put too much strain on one end. Seeing that it's all stone on the outside. Were you referring to the white beams on the blue ceiling, or other beams? I'm guessing it's to support the weight of the machinery.

True.

Was just reading one of his posts earlier while having lunch, only a few miles from that very clock tower, the one in the post here. Other side of the capital!

This made me giggle! Thanks.

I've actually never connected the two before! The brain is so context-dependent...

Now now, you know full well there is no antimemetics division

I came here via unslop.news, so I have no idea what you're talking about.

I really wish I didn't have to read about AI in the comments of a post like this too, ugh.

This is how it was about 15 years ago.

Fred is a great YouTube rabbit hole... His "Age of Steam" series for the BBC is fantastic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl_UA36ouzM&list=PL2vJ5Cg-wl...

I just got to tour Big Ben in July when I visited London. The mechanism is an amazing piece of technology and the precision achieved at the time of development was crazy. Also being able to stand next to the bell as it rang was truly an awesome experience.

I thought it was scheduled to come back. Just not in exactly he same place.

Is the Jawbone coming back?

"a circuit board which definitely was not from 1877" ;)

Obviously, the next logical step is a Home Assistant integration.

Depends on your local community, worth considering what spaces there are and just reaching out or showing up.

Where I live there is a local "optimist club" that does volunteer events every few weeks. Lions club does similar in some towns. Knight of Columbus also (I think they are Catholic church related though so might not be for you). Shriner club, and Masons also come to mind for some cities. Now that my kids are in school there are a ton of organizations that need adult help (marching band, sports...) and people are starting to learn what I can do - I wouldn't be surprised if someone calls me for help in something else.

Of course the above all depends on the exact situation in your area. Some of them are just a social club, and some are not. Some of them have religious affiliations that you may not like. Some of them are good in abstract but you hate the particular people in them.

I was heavily involved in the local maker space where I previously lived. The place seemed to attract these kinds of problems. Some people want to fix a VCR, others might want to fix a clock tower (who knows). Being involved there meant being around people who could really do anything, and the community seemed to know that.

Gorgeous building and a nice wee pub across from it! A couple of friends of mine used to stay not far from there.

I've half an idea I did some networky stuff for the Community Wardens probably around the time that chime box was fitted - if you see anything marked Alvarion or Ceragon, it's probably got my real name on it somewhere.

I'd love to poke about in there some time, maybe if I'm down in that part of the world I can jump in and volunteer to help too.

Does it work on a gear and pinion principle or an AC synchronous motor?

Written on 11th April

I had hoped we could do a "test" by letting the clock chime thirteen

What in the Orwell

Next time you're in Baltimore, be sure to visit the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower where you can see its gravity-driven pendulum clock. It's a beautiful mechanism with a very specific claim to fame: "The clockworks is the largest four dial gravity driven non-chiming clock in the world with the magnificent 24ft dials."

https://imgur.com/a/PjAv85o

https://www.bromoseltzertower.com/about/virtual-tour

(The elevator motors are also up there so there's a lot going on.)

Wild seeing local stuff on HN. My dad used to work in that police station, probably the first (and only) HN story I’ll send him.

Ahh this made me like the internet today, thank you

One of the factors for the location I bought my house was the church bell that would ring on the hour from 8am to 9pm. The neighbors had the curch turn it off. :(

Maybe you could get this one to do 9am, noon, 3pm, 6pm weekdays, so you get the sound, but not the annoyance?

Sure, but that doesn't tell you if the gearing has bound up or the motor is trying to turn something and it's jittering back and forth (or a small trail of smoke has emitted from the motor 3 hours ago). Plus it's a fun thought exercise.

This came to mind because I recently had reason to set up automated sump pump monitoring for a rental property which doesn't have a proper basement, just a crawl space.

We had the choice of just installing a binary state (wet or not wet) zigbee liquid sensor, which we did, talking to a cheap USB dongle and home assistant, just above the height of the sump pump. But in addition to that I put a $60 camera which has a medium-wide overview of the whole crawl space, generally centered on the sump pit so that it can be checked in the event the liquid alarm goes off.

Stapled some cat5e across the floor joists that comes up through a small hole in the utility room where the PoE switch is. Theoretically it should also serve to check for things like "are raccoons inhabiting the crawl space?" or a few other possibilities.

Intriguing. That circuit board definitely looks like a little company's product from decades ago or a one-off - no silkscreen, single layer, "yellow" board material. Also, in the bottom right, it looks like there are some pads that have been left undrilled. As long as those three mains coloured cables in the bottom left aren't mains, it looks reasonable to keep running (there's not a lot of clearance between that area and the microcontroller...)

Also looks like it was hand assembled, by the component mounting. Wires soldered straight to board isn't great, but not a huge issue if stationary and undisturbed.

I'm rather disappointed their list of enhancements didn't include improving the documentation and debugability of the system.

It's a place in Scotland, but they're both named after the same battle over a port in Panama in 1739.

I've seen this headline floating in my feed for a while and assumed it was about some place called Portobello in North Carolina or similar. But having discovered it's about the real Portobello...down the rabbit hole...

At first I thought the bell chime controller was a hobby project. Long ago there were many electronics firms in the Edinburgh area so someone who worked as an EE could easily have knocked up the controller using "appropriated" parts from work. But the soldering is not quite right. It's too good for a total beginner, but not good enough for a professional. Also the single chip I think implies an MCU of some sort, so it's not going to be more than about 30 years old. A date code from the chip would be nice.

Then I realized that "box to control church bells" is probably a thing and a quick Google search dragged up this: https://www.electronics-lab.com/project/church-bell-controll... note that the PCB in the 5th picture bears a more than passing resemblance to the one at Porty.

Fun fact: my Dad's mother's family ran a shop on the High Street in the late 1800's. The building is still there and is on the next block down the road from the police station.

The clock machinery isn't really doing much any more. This clock no longer needs winding, and it looks like the weights are gone. There's a small motor powering the time train. That's the little one at the upper right. The pendulum is still in use, but if they used a synchronous motor and a toothed belt, the pendulum and escapement would be unnecessary. The clock would just sync to the 50Hz National Grid. There's no visible mechanical backup for the time train. After an power outage someone is going to have to climb up there and reset the thing.

The big gearhead motor with the roller chain powers the chimer, and, apparently, its schedule is totally controlled by the PIC microprocessor. There are remnants of a mechanical striking train at the lower right. Notice the curved rack. It doesn't seem to be doing anything. Usually there would be a snail, a stepped cam that tells the chimer what hour it is, read by a cam follower attached to the rack. That may have been present at one time, but it's gone now.

The chimer apparently gets tripped on the hour, but has no idea what time the time train is displaying. So time train and chimer CPU have to have their hour set separately.