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."
Design spec is up to 5 years. The one in the photo looks like it may have a date written in Sharpie on the side. I don't think it's 25 years old though. The "090323" on top could be DDMMYY indicating a battery from 2023.
I agree with the 2023 decode there, but there is still a bit of a puzzle:
If someone knew to replace the battery just three years ago, I would expect they also would have enough knowledge to set the clock itself. Or at least explain what was going on. Maybe this person isn't connected with the building anymore. But I would expect the new owners would be able to contact the old owners for help on this instead of sending a generalized call for help.
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
Could also be YYMMDD
In most of Europe it would be DDMMYY - but seeing how the English still measure stuff in feet and inches I wouldn’t be surprised if they have some illogical way of structuring the dates as well
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.
I debugged terrible git clone performance over the VPN at my last company. It turned out our firewall was stripping TCP window scaling by default, which included both our internal GitHub Enterprise instance hosted on AWS and github.com. I collected a bunch of packet traces (tcpdump was sufficient) and eventually got the networking folks to fix the firewall config.
This was a company of a few thousand people with programmers working from home who all must've assumed it was fine to get no more than ~1 Mbps git clone performance. After a few months of putting up with it I finally got tired of the issue and spent 30 minutes tracking down the cause. It still took a week or more of back and forth between me, and the networking and security teams. And it became an ongoing issue as they were allow-listing IP addresses, not fixing the root cause. Why are Cisco firewalls stripping TCP window scaling by default in 2026? I have no idea!
My first Linux install, best I can recall, was from a Slackware CD circa 1995? So I guess, me too. I've not used Linux as my desktop since Mac OS X in maybe 2002 but I've always had a Linux box running somewhere or being responsible for Linux boxes since then. It's only in the last few years I've gotten fed up with RPM-based distros and preferred Debian or Ubuntu. My intro to Unix was probably SunOS though.
Yeah, what happens to me is I need a thing, go to Amazon to order it, see that I already bought it 4 years ago, spend 30 minutes trying to find it, then let out a big sigh and order it again.
The 13 is the last generation of the mini and I still have mine. Good to know I'm not missing anything. Battery capacity isn't even below 80% so I can't replace it under Applecare yet.
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.)
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