Hackaday Newsletter 0x97

Daylight Savings Time Strikes Again! [HACKADAY]() The Hunt For Alien Radio Signals Began Sooner Than You Think [Read Article Now»]( It’s About Time By [Elliot Williams]( I’m pretty good with time zones. After all, I live in Germany, Hackaday’s server is in Los Angeles, and our writers are scattered all over the globe. I’m always translating one time into another, and practice makes (nearly) perfect. But still, it got me. I was in the states visiting my parents, when Daylight Saving Time struck, but only in the USA. Now all my time conversions were off by an hour, and once I’d worked through the way the sun travels around the globe, I thought I had it made. And then my cell phone started reporting a time that was neither CEST nor EDT, but a third time zone that was an hour off. Apparently some cell towers don’t transmit time zone information, and my phone defaults to UTC. Who knew? For a short while, my phone lied to me, the microwave oven clock in the hotel lied to me, and I felt like I was going nuts. But this all got me thinking about clocks and human time, and possibly the best advice I’ve ever heard for handling it in your own programs. Always keep time in something sensible like UNIX time – seconds elapsed since an epoch – because you don’t have to worry about anything more than adding one to a counter every second. When and if you need to convert to or from human times, you can write the function to do that simply enough, if you don’t already have a library function to do so. Want to set an alarm for 2 hours from now? That’s easy, because you only need to add 7,200 seconds, and you don’t need to worry about 59 wrapping around to 0 or 23:59 to 0:00. Time math is easy in seconds. February 29th? That’s just another 86,400 seconds. It’s only us humans who make it complicated. From the Blog --------------------------------------------------------------- [Why x86 Needs To Die]( By [Julian Scheffers]( The x86 architecture includes remnants of the 8086. Is it time for a refresh? [Read more »]( [Keebin’ with Kristina: the One With the Offset-Stem Keycaps]( By [Kristina Panos]( Kristina unearths some strange keyboards, but the Postal takes the cake. [Read more »]( [The Lunar Odyssey: Moon Landings From the 1960s to Today’s Attempts]( By [Maya Posch]( Getting something down on the moon isn't easy. [Read more »]( [Hackaday Podcast]( [Hackaday Podcast Episode 263: Better DMCA, AI Spreadsheet Play, and Home Assistants Your Way]( By [Hackaday Editors]() What happened last week on Hackaday? The Podcast will get you up to speed. [Read more »]( If You Missed It --------------------------------------------------------------- [2024 Home Sweet Home Automation: A DIY SCADA smart home]( [Open HT Surgery Gives Cheap Transceiver All-Band Capabilities]( [The Perils of Return Path Gaps]( [DIY Pocket PONG Breaks the Mobile Spell]( [Apple Vision Pro’s Secret to Smooth Visuals? Subtly Substandard Optics]( [Your Voice Assistant Doesn’t Have To Be Cloudy]( [Hackaday]() NEVER MISS A HACK [Share]( [Share]( [Share]( [Terms of Use]( [Privacy Policy]( [Hackaday.io]( [Hackaday.com]( This email was sent to {EMAIL} [why did I get this?]( [unsubscribe from this list]( [update preferences]( Hackaday.com · 61 S Fair Oaks Ave Ste 200 · Pasadena, CA 91105-2270 · USA