What’s the time in Dublin?

What’s the time in Dublin?
Mac Tip #284/11-April-2007

These days it’s highly likely you have friends and family spread across the globe. The Internet makes it cheap and easy to keep in touch by email, live chat, VoIP (making free phone calls over the Internet) and so on.

But there remains one enormous barrier, and that’s the difference between night and day. When it’s noon in New Zealand it’s midnight in Dublin. Or thereabouts.

Making life even more complex is Daylight Savings Time: when it’s summer in New Zealand it’s winter in Dublin. For many of us that means lots of head scratching about whether that notional 12 hour difference is now 13 or even 14, or maybe 11 or 10 hours.

Mac OS X’s Dashboard can help, or more particularly the Clock widget. [You may like to refer to Dashboard, Mac Tip #211/07-September-2005 for help.]

Click the Dashboard icon in the Dock to call up the Dashboard. Now locate the Clock widget and either click it, or drag it out of the strip of widgets. Note: you can call up as many clocks as you need; you’re not restricted to one.

Hover over the bottom right corner of the clock widget and a small letter i will appear. Click that to reach the settings.

Choose a continent and a city, then click Done. The clock widget should now show the time for the place you’re interested in. To check the time in future you need only call up the Dashboard.

Now a note of caution: if your computer isn’t fully loaded with RAM then you should be careful with widgets. Each open widget uses some of the available RAM. If you don’t have much to spare you might prefer to close any widgets you don’t actually need.

To track the weather, use the weather widget. I wrote about that in More on Widgets, Mac Tip #213/21-September-2005. Extra tip for Kiwis: be sure to specify New Zealand when you enter your town in the weather widget settings.

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