nastybun

How awesome is this?! Here’s a t-shirt that contains a speaker that you can control from your pocket! Finally, life can have sound effects and background music! See for yourself:

Just imagine how classy you’d be! More excellent stuff here.

Just a shame they’re all made up…. I really want that door lock.

So whomsoever is in charge of these things here has decided to shift the end of daylight savings from last sunday to this sunday. This seems like a small issue, right? You just wait another week before shifting your clocks back. Not so! For the professional geek such as myself, this poses a myriad of problems. Lets face it, devices that display the time that need manual adjustment are so last century. Your computer clock, any modern phone clock, media devices, GPS device, fancy watches.. with all of these things, you tell it where you are (or it just knows in some cases) and it automagically updates your clock. Brilliant! It has ESP! Taste the marvel of the future! Unfortunately, these devices work from a timetable of changes that’s stored internally. It hits last sunday and knows that it’s time to change back an hour. Wonderful! Until that is.. they change the rules. At that point, all these files need updating. Now some of your devices will update themselves, a la your PC. Other devices may have a patch available from the manufacturer, but it’s more than likely that they manufacturer doesn’t know about the change, or just can’t be bothered releasing an update for a mere week’s difference. Except that I believe this is a permanent change, so these devices may permanently be a week out. Nice! It also means a hell of a lot of manual changes to things for the professional geeks out there who are supporting back-end servers that don’t update themselves, users with calendars that are all out of whack for a week because not everyone in the city has the same patches installed, and CEOs who whine super loudly about the slightest IT issue because they’re a pain in the arse. All this because someone somewhere decided that we need a week’s more DST.

Spare a thought for we who went through the same issues in Perth when the decided to introduce DST. A whole summer of messed up times, calendars and devices with no official fixes, and missives/appointments flying this way and that having hours added and removed from them at every step. I’m pretty sure no meeting had all participants show up on time that whole summer.

It also ends up that my dodgy old mobile is actually better off than my shiny new one, because at least it can display the correct time this week without intervention.