The Stratford-revered glockenspiel has stood proud in the main street, Broadway, since it officially opened in 1996, but it had stopped working over the weekend.

Stratford District deputy mayor Min McKay said it was a large tourist attraction.

She did not know the reason why it had stopped but hoped an engineer would check it on Tuesday.

Edit: If you’re reading from All, this is Stratford in New Zealand, it’s named after Stratford upon Avon but it’s not the same place 🙂

  • @liv
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    2 months ago

    Search engines have really gone to hell. It’s one of those words with two meanings.

    Here’s the one I most want to see, in Hamlyn

    Here’s the Graz one

    Here’s a random one in Texas

    I don’t think it would help us estimate, though, because it depends on quality of manufacture and some of them were made like a century ago. I’ll just have to hope for the best!

    • @DaveOPMA
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      22 months ago

      Wow you must have some awesome google-fu! I’m not sure if search engines can be blamed, since the Wikipedia disambiguation page doesn’t mention this kind of glockenspiel.

      I don’t think it would help us estimate, though, because it depends on quality of manufacture and some of them were made like a century ago. I’ll just have to hope for the best!

      Time to start planning!

      • @liv
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        22 months ago

        Planning to make our own glockenspiel?!😀

        It’s much easier to find something if you know it’s a thing. But I think google (and maybe wikipedia) failed us on this. If I win lotto I’ll give that paid search engine a go.

        • @DaveOPMA
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          22 months ago

          The secret is that paid search engine is a search aggregator. They take results from Google, Bing, Brave, etc and then order them with some tweaks.

          And for the record, I tried it and it didn’t help in this case.

          Planning to make our own glockenspiel?!😀

          I wasn’t, but even if I wanted to all I can find are instructions on making glockenspiel instruments 🙁

          • @liv
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            22 months ago

            I can’t find it either, though I bet I could find something rudimentary in a library. But it’s an old artisan skill, so the only real way to learn is to apprentice ourselves to a master clockmaker. I did however spot how to build one in Roblox!

            What has your general experience of Kagi been like? Disappointed it was no better at this.

            • @DaveOPMA
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              2 months ago

              Before Kagi I was running self hosted Searx (technically searxng as it keeps getting forked) which is a search aggregator. It runs the same search over multiple engines then lists the results based on which ones come up the most often. I like Searx but it’s slow (takes a few seconds to retrieve all results from search engines and build the page). Kagi does the same but is very fast.

              I’m not sure the search results are generally better with Kagi but it does have some great features. E.g. you can block, lower, raise, or pin certain sites. So I block all the Pinterest domains so they don’t show up in results, and I pin Wikipedia so if it’s in the results it’s always at the top.

              Raise and lower just bump up or down that site’s importance.

              There are also some AI things like summarising pages and one I recently discovered is you can type in a question and get a chatGPT-like response (but it’s not using chatGPT).

              I think the main reason I use it is not that it’s better but that I like to support projects that are trying to do things different, I want a world to exist where a search engine can sustain itself without ads (since I’m gonna block them anyway). I’m lucky that the cost isn’t an issue for me, so I see this as a way to support the goal.

              If you want to test it out, you can sign up for 100 free searches (and can then also have a look around all the customisation options), but if you’re already a pretty skilled searcher I wouldn’t expect it to be significantly better.

              • @liv
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                22 months ago

                That’s a bit disappointing. I probably do have good search skills but the way search engines are going it takes more effort these days to get the same level of results, so I was aspiring for something that could help if I ever got to the point I could afford it.

                Next time I’m doing a big project I’ll give the 100 free searches a whirl.

                I was hoping it was more like vivisimo/clusty which used to clump results in patterns, or old version altavista which used to dredge up 10x more results than other engines.

                Good on you for supporting tech goals and stuff. That’s really cool.

                • @DaveOPMA
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                  22 months ago

                  They have lenses, which is a way of searching under specific categories (For example, “Recipes” or “Programming”). But this is kinda the opposite, it’s not grouping results by category but rather filtering by category.

                  You could check out searxng as well. I ran it on a server but it’s the kind of thing you could probably run locally on your laptop (and perhaps that would be best, so you can always access it without running a service for the world). I haven’t tried it, but you could probably do it using Docker Desktop. It should all be pretty light weight and run on pretty much anything. Could be a fun project!

                  • @liv
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                    22 months ago

                    Thanks, I will bookmark that!

                    I’m learning so much it stuff by lurking around here! You guys are single handedly catching me up to this decade.