Um the idea of a pendulum in an old fashioned clock is that it is actually the clock's frequency reference. It's purely mechanical, no electricity or radios. The length of the pendulum determines the frequency (usually 1 hz). You can slide the weight up and down a little bit to adjust the speed. The spring unwinding gives the pendulum a little kick on every swing so the clock doesn't stop. You wind up the spring every so often so it doesn't unwind completely, and the swinging pendulum advances a little ratchet that moves the hands a little on every swing. If you lived in a town in the pre-electricity era, the local church would ring its church bells at noon, 3pm, etc. and you would use that to set or adjust your clock as needed. The church clock itself was directly or indirectly set using solar noon (as observed with a transit telescope or dipleidoscope) as a reference. Fancier pendulum clocks had various sorts of thermal compensation and could be very accurate. It was a highly developed technology that is now mostly forgotten.
Connecting wifi to this would be at best purely decorative. I guess it would be a cute hack but meh. You could look on hackaday.com which is full of projects like that. I've mostly found them kind of pointless, but that's just me being a grouch.
What is it that you want to talk about? There's plenty about programming, math, and stuff like that. Maybe other stuff too, but that's the stuff I'm into. Hacker News is definitely overrated and always has been though.
Java isn't exactly hard, and it's not particularly fundamental. It's just bureaucratic, and Python will be both more enjoyable and more useful. Java was trendy in the 1990s and lingers on because so much Java code is still around. If your goal is to use a serious type system (Lisp and Python don't have that), Haskell will be far more enlightening than Java. If you want to use the JVM for some reason, Clojure (a Lisp dialect that run in it) might interest you.
For low level fundamentals, you want assembly language! That gives you almost no assistance and you have to do EVERYTHING yourself, organizing the program in your own head. For old fashioned imperative programming with lots of organizational assistance, try Ada.
You will probably have to learn C at some point, but save it for later when it will be easier for you to spot the weaknesses.
I don't remember being that impressed with HTDP but it's been a while and I didn't look much. I'd say read SICP first in either case.
The Java thing sounds totally uninteresting and if your next language after Lisp isn't a a mainstream one, I'd say try Haskell.
Regarding math: it can help but it's not that important for pure programming. If you're good at languages and writing, that's helpful in the same way. If you're good at music, that is at least a helpful mindset.
I'm using Borg and it's fine at that scale. I don't know if it would still be viable with 100TB or whatever. The initial backup will be kind of slow but it encrypts everything, and deduplicates it too if I'm not mistaken. In any case, it deduplicates the common situation where you back up another snapshot later. Only the differences get written in the second backup. So you can save new snapshots fairly quickly and without much additional space.
No, Jitsi is a chat program. I must have been confusing Rumble with some other thing. But as with youtube, the video collection is much more important than the software. Releasing all the youtube software wouldn't change youtube's dominance even slightly.
I thought it wasn't a secret that votes were somewhat public. If they aren't, ok, but that's news to me.