What a pain they are. Sure it’s nice to have your local time, and it’s convenient for lunch to be at 12:00, but seriously in our connected age, we’re constantly having to convert time zones… Say something like “I’ll do a facebook live at 1pm” and someone will ask “I’m in pakistan, what time is that?”
So also repeatedly as an on and off HAM radio operator, I’m constantly torn between local time and UTC. International radio stations use UTC, a lot of HAM support uses UTC….
Now years ago, I gave up AM/PM time and switched every device I use to 24 hour format… It’s second nature to me now, but yes… I do a rapid mental conversion to AM/PM time whenever I have to relate to something on a schedule, like TV listings, or just talking to “normal” people about when to meet.
So today on my RaspberryPI that is dedicated to satellite reception, I switched it’s time zone into UTC. Why? Because satellites know no time zone, they are on UTC… and many satellite predictors out there use UTC… Sure some use your local time, which now is inconvenient…, but for the most part, when I get a prediction a sat is going to make a pass starting at 02:53UTC, I can tell my raspberry PI to do something at 2:53UTC, without having to do the dumb mental conversion to local time.
A benefit of switching to UTC… if I talk to someone in London, I’ll be naturally be using their local time zone.
So the question is, how far should this go? Like should I switch my phone to UTC? Is that even possible?
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