ArxCyberwolf

Working at a restaurant right now, on break. Can’t wait to deal with all of these lovely people!

Don’t be happy, nor horny, just bursting with rage

Don’t let Vin Diesel hear you say that…

Monthly or even weekly tests are definitely preferable. You don’t want to wait until a serious emergency to find out the motor locked up or the controller doesn’t work.

Fun fact: despite the videos claiming the sirens were broken, they actually weren’t. The sirens (Federal Signal Modulators) were performing the Alternate Wail signal, a combination of the Wail and Hi-Lo signals. All Federal Signal electronic speaker sirens can perform this signal, as well as the mechanical Thunderbolt 1003 and 3T22 sirens also made by the same company. Chicago sadly switched to the standard Wail signal years back.

https://youtu.be/2Tr6hCZAVhI

There’s a few others who have done the same on YT as well.

It’s a common tradition for small towns to keep their old noon whistles going, decades after they stopped being used for their original purpose. There are tons of 1920s, 30s and 40s-era sirens that are still used every day as noon whistles, as well as some Cold War era stuff.

There’s a whole community of siren enthusiasts like myself, there’s thousands of us. Sirens are really neat machines that have a ton of interesting history and unique models. It’s a niche hobby for sure, but I have no shame in sharing it.

Exactly. A basic electric mechanical siren just consists of a motor, a centrifugal fan called a chopper, and a stator to chop the air as the rotor spins. It can’t get any simpler than that. There are tons of mechanical sirens from the 1920s and 30s that are still in service today because of how basic and easy to maintain they are!

Bit of a rant about my city’s system: Our sirens are tested weekly on Mondays, since we live around a lot of chemical and petro plants that can release some nasty stuff if something goes wrong. Haven’t had any serious warnings since I moved here years ago, but the sirens themselves can’t exactly be relied on either.

Problem is, our system consists of “High Power Speaker Station” (HPSS-32) sirens made by a company called ATI Systems. Holy fuck these sirens are garbage. Speakers manufactured in China that leak rainwater inside and short out the drivers, controllers that completely lack redundancy if one or both of the amplifiers fail, which renders it only half as loud or entirely silent. ATI refuses to support older hardware and forces the city to buy new controllers when the old ones die within a decade, causing the maintenance costs to outweigh having just gone with a less scummy manufacturer.

ATI itself is a horrible company that basically suckers cities into buying their junk by undercutting legitimate manufacturers, then leaves cities hanging when their sirens start rapidly failing. San Francisco recently had to remove their entire system of HPSS16 and HPSS32 units because the system kept failing and had a ton of security vulnerabilities. The system didn’t even last two decades, yet the Cold War era STL-10 mechanical sirens they replaced had served the city without issue for half a century.

So yeah, I don’t exactly feel safe with our current system. If your city has ATI sirens, don’t count on them in an emergency and get a weather radio instead.

They’ll likely run a different signal than the normal test. If, for example, they normally test in “alert” (steady) then they might use the “attack” (wavering up and down) signal instead.

Don’t feed the troll. They don’t actually care if it’s gambling or not.

Oh, don’t play the victim. Everyone knows who you really are.

Also helps identify trolls and bad actors at a glance if you don’t already have them tagged as such.

If it’s not within my field of view, it might as well no longer exist. Especially if I need that item.

You have the power to curate your feed and block problematic users. There’s no algorithm that’ll do it for you here.

No, fuck you!

That’s what I was thinking of. Thanks!

Exactly. Vigilante justice is not the solution here, it’s only going to get a lot of people hurt.

Pfffffffft. Amateur.

smokes 12 joints at once