Another daylight savings event passed. I think it's sole purpose it to mess up my sleep pattern.

NTP, for those who don't know, stands for Network Time Protocol. Pretty much every thing supports it.

A commercial NTP clock are hard to find in New Zealand, and expensive, at $300 or more.

Anyhow my friend came up with almost free wall clock, that automatically adjust the time, by using an unused cell phone.

He had an old Android cell phone, with no phone provider / no SIMM card.

He uses it as a wall clock, by hanging it on the wall, with a USB charger. It uses NTP to sync time to his wireless access point. Obviously it has a battery, so a quick power loss has no affect.

Just about everywhere sells cheap Android tablets. In New Zealand there are a lot for $100.

UNRELATED FUN TIME FACTS

Though most devices use NTP, an alternate way of getting time is GPS, which essentially are flying atomic clocks.

However GPS time is off by more than 19 seconds.

Also GPS time is set to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which doesn't use daylight savings.

Don't believe me?

"GPS cannot tolerate the introduction of leap seconds. Hence, in 1980, when the Department of Defense started keeping time on the GPS satellites, its system time and frequency were set to agree with UTC(USNO MC). At that time, TAI minus UTC was 19 seconds. Since then, UTC has been delayed many leap seconds and GPS time has not. Hence, GPS time is still very close to TAI minus 19 seconds."

http://www.allanstime.com/Publications/DWA/Science_Timekeeping/index.html

http://www.timeanddate.com/time/gmt-utc-time.html