Charles Choi offers a small tip that many of you might find useful. Choi spends a lot of time in online conferences and chats. These often involve interlocutors in other time zones and, of course, it’s useful to know what time it is in those time zones. For those of you who, like Choi and I, live in Emacs, there is the world-clock command that list the times in various time zones. You can open it another a buffer beside of below your chat buffer and stay on top what time it is for everybody you’re talking with.
The problem is that it’s a bit limited. Here’s the default output:
Seattle Friday 06 October 15:30 PDT New York Friday 06 October 18:30 EDT London Friday 06 October 23:30 BST Paris Saturday 07 October 00:30 CEST Bangalore Saturday 07 October 04:00 IST Tokyo Saturday 07 October 07:30 JST
That’s great but what if you’re talking to someone in Denver or Beijing? You can’t expect the command to list every possible place where you might be talking to someone, of course, but if you regularly chat with someone in Beijing, it would be nice to have it listed. This is Emacs so of course you can do that. It turns out that there’s an alist of TIMEZONE/PLACE that you can edit to customize the output to your liking.
Again, this is a small thing but it’s a nice amenity and, in the way of Emacs, you can configure it to meet your specific needs.