Blitz, Phil and I were recently discussing the challenges involved for us non-EU folks, of dealing with DEF-time being standardised on CET.
For me, based in Australia, the situation for MP is made even worse by the fact that, from my perspective, most of you guys live on the wrong side of the planet!
So, I decided that what would really help, would be a desktop clock that could show time in all the time zones I need to keep track of.
The built-in Win7 clock can only show 2 other times in addition to local time. Not enough for my needs and it's been a source of annoyance for a long time. Joining DEF made me decide I really needed a better solution. So I went looking for free solutions (Yes, I'm a tightarse. Being unemployed tends to do that to you). Here's what I found:
- I've always been a fan of timeanddate.com's world clock (and their other handy features), but having to have a browser open isn't always convenient. They do have various apps you can install, but on Windows, only Win8.1 & Win10 are supported. So no joy for me there.
- worldtimeserver.com has Vista/Win7 compatible world clocks, which look quite nice, but they use Adobe Flash, and the Sidebar Gadget, both of which are big strikes against them in my book. I don't allow either of those things on my computer. Some Kaleuns might like them though.
- Qlock - Light on system resources, a decent amount of features (and more if you pay for the Pro versions), and looks decent enough.
Naturally, I went with Qlock. You can set the size and colour of each individual Qlock, place them individually or as a group, and they 'stick' to each other, and the screen edges, kind of like lego blocks, so they're easy to position nicely.
Here's my desktop with them set up:
And here's a close-up (I went with the medium size):
And since someone is bound to ask what that "other thing" above the Qlocks is, it's the
Windoze version of the Linux tool
GKrellM, "a single process stack of system monitors which supports applying themes [over 190 to choose from!] to match its appearance to your window manager, Gtk, or any other theme." It lets you see everything going on inside your PC at a glance, comes with a lot more features and tools than you can see here, and I wouldn't be without it.
