Is this possible? About 3 years ago I bought a Dodge pickup truck with a blown engine for $500. The prior owner had driven it after the serpentine belt broke and it "seized" from overheating. When I first got it I changed the serpentine belt, put in a very low-viscosity oil, and tried to start it to see if could hear what was wrong. It ran but burned oil, a bad miss and I diagnosed it with a bent valve. Well, I parked it in hopes of one day rebuilding the whole engine. About once a month I would start it and let it run for a few minutes just to keep things loose and charge the battery. Last week I started it and forgot. 6 hours later I remembered and ran to turn it off. But it was running perfectly? No missing, no oil burning, and the valve noise was gone. It appears that letting is idle that long fixed the valve. It was not bent, just stuck. I have driven it around a couple of times now. Not really trusting it but I had it on the freeway at 80. The tires need replacing now but I think the truck fixed itself. As I asked it this possible?

Not fixed, but operable. I'm sure if you did an inspection you would find the valve guides out of tolerance, wear on the rockers and lifters, possibly on the cam shaft. Oil burn usually is piston rings not sealing. If he ran it slow when it seized it is possible thermal expansion caused the rings to bind in the cylinders. That would have scored things and your running may have "polished" them. With out knowing if you inspected the spark plugs, did a compression check hard to know what really was wrong and what running it did. In any case due for an oil change and an inspection of the old oil filter to see if it caught any metal. Might even send the oil in for a lab report. Also possible is the valve issue was unrelated to the seize, existed before, and the detergents in the new oil cleaned up the gunk the previous owner let build up.

If you want to move this out of the may fail at any time, to reliable, you will need to pull the valve covers and inspect and R&R, bore scope the cylinders to see the wear patterns and inspect the valves and seals. You might get lucky and not have to pull the head.

A variation on the famous "Italian tune-up". Take the offending vehicle out for a few miles, drive it like you stole it (or it's a hire car...). Known to "cure" many problems, one way or the other (fixed or properly broken).

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

I would watch the oil level like a hawk. Oil change is a idea. If done look for metal shavings. And check the block for cracks.

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Sitting here thinking*, no serpentine belt, does this mean no charge? Maybe it never was seized, just ran until the battery discharged. By now there is no way to know.

*Danger Will Robinson Danger

Sitting here thinking*, no serpentine belt, does this mean no charge? Maybe it never was seized, just ran until the battery discharged. By now there is no way to know.

*Danger Will Robinson Danger

I think you are right. The engine never seized. It had been sitting for 3 years before I bought it. The light oil freed things that were sticking.
I did a compression test and all 8 cylinders look good. I need to buy a camera and take a look for scoring. I have less than $700 in this vehicle and it's towed my boat today. I am happy with the investment.


What it looked like when I bought it.

We've all heard the story about a cleaner who turned something critical off.... well....

Annoyed janitor turns off super-cold freezer and destroys decades of scientific work, causes at least $1M in damages.

It could be the plot of a dark comedy if it weren’t a science tragedy.

A janitor working in a laboratory who was annoyed by an incessant beep reportedly flipped a switch that killed the noise — but also shut off a storage freezer, destroying decades of scientific work, according to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute lab in Troy.

The cleaner’s alleged carelessness cost the lab at least $1 million in damages, a lawsuit the university filed against its third-party cleaning service charges.

“People’s behavior and negligence caused all this,” Michael Ginsberg, RPI’s attorney, told the Times Union in Albany. “Unfortunately, they wiped out 25 years of research.”

The super-cold freezer the custodial worker allegedly shut down held cell cultures, samples and other elements stored at minus-112 degrees Fahrenheit, the Times Union said.

But when the worker from Daigle Cleaning Services shut off the circuit breaker Sept. 17, 2020, to silence a beeping alarm, the temperature leapt to a minus-25.6 degrees that damaged or destroyed the material, the lawsuit claimed.

A cleaner reportedly shut off a circuit breaker because of a beeping alarm – and in the process, allegedly wrecked decades of scientific research.Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

The freezer alarm had been triggered by a mechanical malfunction that stopped the unit from maintaining a constant temperature, as it was supposed to. Repairs had been scheduled for Sept. 21, 2020, the Times Union reported.

A sign on the lab freezer door explains the source of the alarm, and also had instructions on how to silence it, the Times Union reported.

“No cleaning required in this area,” the sign said. “You can can press the alarm/test mute button for 5-10 seconds if you would like to mute the sound.”......

Update to original story: Family sells 1 million pennies found while cleaning home

He wouldn’t disclose the final sale price, non-disclosure agreements were a key part of the transaction, but he admitted that his family was “more than satisfied” with the number.

He said anonymity was a frequent request with the majority of the prospective buyers, many wanting to avoid a media firestorm like the one the Reyes family just experienced.

A new toy for the kids to play with (and some not so young). :-D

Caltech’s new ‘Morphobot’ is a little transforming robot that can walk, drive, and fly.


Cheers.

The best Christmas present ever.

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Grant
Darwin NT

Santa please drop one off in my house :-)

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

Well, i know twitter has been steadily circling the toilet bowl since Musk took it over, but now it appears that unless you have a Twitter account, you can't view any Twitter posts directly.
A few sites i visit will often have a feed on their main pages with a list of tweets, but if i click on any of them it now takes me to the Twitter login page and not the Twitter account. I don't have a Facebook account, nor a Twitter account. nor a Google account, nor a Play store account, nor a Microsoft account, nor an Apple account and i have no intention of getting one of any of them in the foreseeable future.

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Grant
Darwin NT

No twitter here either.

No twitter here. Never had a want for any other social media accounts except this SETI one.

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hi, u can try to replace twitter.com in the adress by nitter.net

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Finally, an excellent legitimate use for ChatGPT- Man designs ChatGPT bot subscription service to annoy and waste telemarketers' time

Jolly Roger is not the first to use this trick to scam the scammers. A chatbot named Lenny has been giving robocallers their comeuppance since 2008. However, Lenny is not as effective since it doesn't recognize when a key press is needed to reach a human – a prevalent practice these days. The Wall Street Journal notes that auto-dialers can make about 100 calls per second, and the telemarketer only gets on the line if there is a human response, such as a key press.

On the contrary, if the autodialer is talking over the Jolly Roger bot, it will "push" the most common pass-through keys to prevent the dialer from hanging up.
...
The voices sound human, but the phrases can be repetitive and unnatural, often going off-topic or talking over the caller, breaking the illusion. However, they usually work well enough to keep an anguished scammer on the line for up to 15 minutes, especially if they think they're about to persuade the person to provide credit card information.

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Grant
Darwin NT

Nothing better than wasting the tele-scammers time.

I'll do that on occasion if they get past my free call block service which hangs up on them on 1st ring if the phone number has already been flagged as telemarketing, survey, spam, or scam.

That's 99% of all calls to my house phone and about the same percentage of unwanted calls to cell phone.

Yep, it's official Twitter login now required to view tweets

Twitter will now require users to have an account on the social media platform to view tweets, a move that owner Elon Musk on Friday called a "temporary emergency measure".

Users who try to view content on the platform will be asked to sign up for an account or log into an exiting account to see their favorite tweets.

"We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!" Musk said in a tweet.

Yep, it's official Twitter login now required to view tweets

Twitter will now require users to have an account on the social media platform to view tweets, a move that owner Elon Musk on Friday called a "temporary emergency measure".

Users who try to view content on the platform will be asked to sign up for an account or log into an exiting account to see their favorite tweets.

"We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!" Musk said in a tweet.

That should reduce his Ad revenue even more than everything else he's done so far- combined.
The "data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!" was probably more a case of most of those that actually knew how to keep everything running have all cleared out, and as the system gradually degrades, so does it's performance.

I'm thinking it's now in a slow but steady death spiral, till people discover the next Twitter like thing after which it will just implode on itself as everyone else left there jumps ship en masse.

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Grant
Darwin NT

It could also be to stop us “non-twitter” people from seeing twitter posts. Also could be a money grab pay if you want to see.

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I'd go for an attempt at money grabbing.
Another no-vote on being forced to have a Tw*tter account.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?