I obviously expect the same courtesy to avoid getting calls late at night when I’m sleeping. If you know your time zones, you could probably do without additional clocks for other locations in the world. If you are like me, you like little visual reminders. That’s where the free software Qlock comes in.

The program adds as many clocks as you want to the Windows desktop. When you first install and run the software, four clocks are placed on the desktop that you can move around individually. They display the date and time for New York, London, Los Angeles and Tokyo.

A right-click on a clock opens a context menu with options to create a new clock, delete or modify the selected one. Just select Set City from the context menu to change the city to another one.

The configuration window displays countries on the left and cities of the selected country on the right. New cities can be added with a click on Add City. You need to enter the name of the city, the GMT offset and daylight saving times when applicable. User created cities become then selectable under User Cities in the main interface.

Several color schemes are available to visually distinguish cities from each other. The large clock skin can be changed to medium or small, which both display less information on the screen. The small clock skin for instance displays only the name of the city, the day of the week and the time.

The time format can be changed from a 24-hour scheme to a 24-hour scheme with seconds or a 12-hour scheme. Both clock skins and time schemes can be configured individually for each clock displayed on the desktop.

A professional single user version and a gold multi users version of the program are offered as well. They add functionality like alarms, desktop profiles, sticky notes or daily fx rates to the program.

Qlock is an easy to setup software to display multiple clocks on the Windows desktop. It gives users full control over how many clocks they want displayed on their desktop.

The free version is compatible with all recent 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system. Downloads are provided on the program homepage. (via Dottech)

The error caused the times on phones to revert back two hours instead of just one.  This resulted in one disgruntled iPhone user being awoken at 3am instead of 5am, and a great many more complaints from users on Twitter.

In his blog the disgruntled user said…

I am tired and I am grumpy. And it’s my iPhone’s fault! Yes, folks, as if losing an hour’s sleep due to daylight savings isn’t bad enough, how about losing another hour just for good measure? It seems that Apple have borked something with the alarm clock and despite the clock on my iPhone being correctly set, the alarm I had scheduled for 5:55am went off at 4:55am this morning, which is basically 3:55am until my body clock adjusts. Unfortunately my tired brain didn’t spot the critical flaw in the Matrix and now I’m seriously hacked off. But the plot thickens upon further investigation…

It’s not the first time a device has been hit by a daylight savings bug.  Microsoft’s Zune players once famously failed to operate for a full 24 hours as they didn’t recognise the date as a valid day.  Microsoft couldn’t have issued a patch in time as when the clocks ticked over to midnight again, everything started working properly.

It’s far too early for Apple to issue a comment or to say if the same bug will hit other countries when they switch from summer time in a few weeks, after all, when the bug hit people in Cupertino were just getting ready for bed.  We can be dertain though that a patch will be issued, but perhaps not before the bug has had a chance to strike again.

It’s not known whether this is local to New Zealand but if you have an iPhone and use its alarm when daylight savings time changes next, you might want to go back to your trusty old clock radio for the night.

One interesting option is the support for different time zones that can be combined with the notifications. It is for example possible to add the New York, Tokyo and London timezones to the application and receive notifications using the time in these timezones.

Multiple locations – each with their distinct timezone – can be added in the options of the add-on for the Firefox web browser. It is a bit unfortunate that only the local timezone can be displayed in the status bar while the other timezones become only visible when hovering the mouse over the icon and only if that feature has been enabled in the options. Notifications can be added easily in the options as well.

They can be created by selecting a time, timezone and description for the notification. Configuring it to recur and the addition of an url are optional. Simple Timer is an excellent Firefox add-on for users who would like to have access to a system clock on their screen. The notifications, countdowns and timezones are an added bonus that might be interesting for some users as well.

Naturally the second reason is far more important than the first. But either way, you might very well be driven to keep your machine on the exact time. To that end you can either constantly monitor the time on your machine (manually changing it when necessary) or you can set up NTP to handle your time corrections for you.

Installing and configuring NTP is actually quite easy. It will, however, require the use of the command line. With that in mind, lets’ get busy.

Installing

You could open up your Add/Remove Software utility, do a search for “ntp” (no quotes) and install the matching results. Or you can open up a terminal window and install ntp with one of the following commands (remember, you will need either root access or sudo):

• apt-get install ntp
• yum install ntp
  
• urpmi ntp

One of the above commands will install the ntp daemon and the configuration file /etc/ntp.conf.

Before you fire up the daemon you will need to take a look at the /etc/ntp.conf to make sure you have the ntp servers you want to use configured.

Configuring

Most likely your NTP installation will already have a configuration file that is ready to go. My Debian-based NTP install had such a .conf file. All I had to do was start the daemon. But you might have special needs or your install might not have been as complete.

The section of the ntp.conf that you will want to take a look at is the server section. Each line in this section is set up like so:

server IP_ADDRESS OPTION(S)

Where IP_ADDRESS is the actual address of the server you want to use and OPTION(S) is/are the option(s) you want to use.

There are two options that you might want to use for every server. These are:

iburst: This option is used when the configured server is unreachable. When your machine can not contact its NTP server it will send out bursts of eight packets (instead of just one).

dynamic: This option allows a server to be configured even if the server is not reachable during configuration. This option assumes that at some point the server will be reachable.

If you look at my /etc/ntp.conf file you will see the following in the server section:

server 0.debian.pool.ntp.org iburst dynamic
server 1.debian.pool.ntp.org iburst dynamic
server 2.debian.pool.ntp.org iburst dynamic
server 3.debian.pool.ntp.org iburst dynamic

If you are not sure what servers to use visit the official NTP organization NTP.org to find a list of trusted servers.

Starting the Daemon

Once you have everything up and running go back to the root terminal and issue the command:

/etc/init.d/ntp start

or

/etc/rc.d/init.d/ntp start

which will start the ntp daemon. NTP will now slowly start to adjust the time on your server. But don’t worry, it makes the adjustment slowly. First the daemon waits for at least ten packets of information before trusting a source.

Now test to make sure your installation is working by issuing the following command:

ntpq -p

which should give you a listing like:
remote refid st t when poll reach delay offset jitter =========================================================
+point2.adamants 64.202.112.75 2 u 44 64 377 75.955 -7.045 2.992
*station.mars.or 209.81.9.7 2 u 10 64 377 75.477 -1.144 0.977
-www.broadbandja 64.34.180.101 3 u 56 64 377 72.764 3.766 0.977
+pxe.lax-noc.com 209.81.9.7 2 u 25 64 377 65.686 -7.753 2.539

If you see zeros for the values you know ntp is not connecting. As you can see above my setup is connecting.

Final thoughts

NTP is an easy way to ensure your servers or your desktop is always using the correct time. In mission-critical machines, this can be quite important. Employing NTP will give you the security of knowing your machine’s right “on time”.

A vertical taskbar on the other hand displays the time, date and the weekday in the system tray. The best way to create a custom solution would be to use a third party tool like Timekeeper which can fully replace the Windows clock. Timekeeper adds itself to the available Toolbars of the Taskbar which can be selected by right-clicking the taskbar.

The Windows clock can be disabled in the same right-click menu as well. Timekeeper basically can display date and time information in multiple ways to suite the needs of the user. It comes with predefined time and date formats that can be added with just a click and custom ones where the user can pick the information that he wants to see.

Data can be placed separately in various formats. It is for example possible to display the time in 24 or 12 hour format with or without leading zeros. Several information are unique to the application and not provided by the Windows system clock. This includes displaying the timezone as well as day and week of year.

The software adds also visual elements that can be changed. The user can select an alignment for the clock, a text color, background color or choose a transparent background and even the font. That’s great if a custom theme is being used or if the user wants a larger font for the time so that he can see it better.

The clock surely looks unique and the blocks are available in black with white numbers and in white with black numbers. To be honest, I would not pay $204 for this clock. Would you ?

found: uberreview

Here is the movie that shows the clock.

Update: the original movie is no longer available, and we had to search for a copy of it on the Internet. After some searching we found the clock on YouTube, and you find the video link embedded below. You may want to turn down the music as it may not be your taste at all.

A lot of activity is going on at the same time, which may be to much for some users who may prefer a simpler clock. The concept of the clock on the other hand is interesting, and die hard Pong fans looking for a new clock may like the idea of hanging it up in their homes.

The clock’s designer, Sander Mulder, released a limited edition of the clock which sold out in one day. You may sometimes see one of those rare clocks for auction on eBay.

You can also check out this WordPress site which details how you can build your own Pong clock. The description includes the parts list needed, and explains every step of the process with pictures and text. It is still fairly technical, and users who never build an electronic device before may run into a world of troubles trying to build the pong clock.

One suggestion would be to ask a friend, or to hire someone to build the clock for you. While this surely drives the price up, you can be sure that you do not get shocked to death plugging it in for the first time.