Bored

[cdybedahl]

The stationary phone on my desk, my work computer, my mobile phone and my iPod all show the time. None of them agree with any of the others on what the time is. The two phones and the iPod are all within three minutes, though, while the laptop is almost fifteen minutes off.

Comments

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

My own machines use NTP and run to within 20 milliseconds of official Swedish Standard Time. I suspect that the iPod gets set to that when I sync it. The mobile phone I have to set manually (which is stupid, considering that the GSM signal contains a pretty accurate time), so that's a little off.

The desk phone and the laptop are set to whatever Telenor thinks is all right. One notes with a certain amount of cynicism that our new company policy is "Quality First".

Oh, and there's a tickbox in the Date&Time system setup panel in OSX to have the machine sync to Apple's NTP servers. That should be good enough for tenth-of-second precision or so.

[steverogerson.livejournal.com]

I would find it annoying if my mobile phone synched with local time. When I am abroad, I have my watch set to loocal time but leave my phone on UK time. That way I can check the time in the UK and it stops me phoning people at home in the middle of the night.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

I don't know how most phones do it, but the way that is handled in computers is that its internal clock runs on GMT and the user's desired timezone is added when the time is displayed.

[khrister.livejournal.com]

The last few trips to the USA, I've had my mobile start beeping about changing date and time to the local one, everytime roaming switches provider. When I actually let it change it, it didn't beep nearly as many times...

When I got home, not a beep. Apparently, Swedish providers doesn't want to provide that service.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Well, that sucks.

[khrister.livejournal.com]

And you can add your own ntp servers to the dropdown list, if you don't want to use Apple's. I use Chalmers' (my employer) NTP servers for all my machines.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Except you don't want to do it that way, since the control panel also forcibly adds some really stupid synchronising options (meant only to avoid DoS:ing Apple's NTP servers, as far as I can tell). Better to edit /etc/ntp.conf and start ntpd manually, like you'd do on any other Unix (and I use Statens Provningsanstalt's stratum-1 servers).