Charles Choi has a nice hint for those of you who travel and phone home with Emacs. Here’s the situation: you are travelling and log into your home server with SSH and emacsclient. It’s wonderful. Just like being at home except the date/time stamp is wrong. The time and date are whatever your home server thinks they are but you want them to be local time.
The answer is simple. You simply need to change the TZ (timezone) environment variable to reflect your current location. For example, if you’ve travelled to New York (in the US) you would set TZ to “America/New_York”. Emacs, of course, provides a command to do this: (setenv "TZ" "America/New_York").
The zone codes can be a bit opaque so Choi has added a command to the latest Casual suite to set the TZ variable complete with completion. Take a look at his post if you’re interested.