ArxCyberwolf

I’m just your average Canadian wolf. I’m a siren enthusiast and railfan as my main hobbies. I run the Civil Defense Sirens Wiki, and am working on restoring a few vintage sirens (such as a FS&S Model L and a rare Sterling Siren MOD. F) as well as a 1970s Safetran mechanical crossing bell.

  • 14 Posts
  • 1.95K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle




  • ArxCyberwolftomemes@lemmy.worldN-no, please...
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    4 days ago

    In particular, dithering was a very common way of blending colours together in old video games and programs despite hardware limitations preventing more than a few colours per block of pixels. The CRT display helped blend them together since the individual pixels weren’t as clear as on a modern LCD display. A lot of old games look noticeably worse on a LCD display compared to a CRT.








  • ArxCyberwolftoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldFalse alarm
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    6 days ago

    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.





  • ArxCyberwolftoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldFalse alarm
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    6 days ago

    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!


  • ArxCyberwolftoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldFalse alarm
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    19
    ·
    6 days ago

    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.