ttj - Tom Jones

Crossing the Pacific westwards, the ship's time gets set back one hour at a time.  The ship's management arranges it so that at land stops, it is synchronised with the location.  Changes between one stop and the next are somewhat arbitrary, but the idea should be to keep changes smooth and have dawn and dusk at sensible wall times. I set around 5 clocks at each change. The Casio F-91W is the easiest.  I set the hour back using the three buttons on the watch.  The only annoyance is that I have to cycle +23 hours, as one can not decrement the hour directly.  It's not that annoying, and one knows it's going to work. For the Debian (Linux) laptop, I change the /etc/localtime symlink to point to location in /usr/share/zoneinfo/*/*, such as /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Vancouver.  This is fine when there is a well-known city to select.  It sometimes involves research and experimentation to choose one with the correct (current) offset.  Once the symlink c...

In " apple conflates time zone and time offset in the middle of MacOS ", we learned about conceptual muddle around time zones and offsets in MacOS's settings. Since then, I have set the Time Zone to St John's Newfoundland.  In the process, I learned just how primitive Apple's "MacOS" software is. I unchecked "Set time zone automatically using your current location".  I clicked in "Closest city" and started typing.  I was going for St John's.  After a few letters, there were no matches in the interactive matching.  I hit return anyway, and got the following: As if to validate its claim that an extension process had "exited", the depicted pane remained completely empty after I dismissed the "dialog" "box". I turned off and on again the settings window, and researched the topic.  Apparently you have to type it exactly to match what it's expecting, or it doesn't match and crashes.  In this case. ...

A clock should tell the time.  How well does this clock do that: Not bad, in that you can tell the time from it.  But why obscure part of the last digit?  Just to be cute?  It makes it harder to read. This kind of thing is a very active kind of stupidity.  It didn't just happen like that.  A whole team of renegade employees probably conspired to do it, wrote "codes" and "algorithms" to make it happen, and managed to slip it past management and the entire quality management process, to despoil the front screen of the iphone.  On its way, the "codes" probably got reviewed in a "codes" review system, someone commented on a better way this or that could be computed, and someone checked if the graphics algorithm worked for edge cases.  Some east asians then manually tested it. And it would have been better if all of them had done nothing. This is similar to all the effort put into things sliding around the screen and transitioning: huge amounts of...