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What Time Have You Got? or
Where Are You In Time?
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 | Do you live a town, NOT shown on most maps? |
| Have you ever used TIME? psstt, It is that built in application - found in the upper left side of keyboard, just to the left of the touch pad and right of the green power button - with the overlapping circles, one is a clock, the other a globe. |
| Do you read manuals? (OK, I asked 3 questions!) |
Well, I can say yes to all of the above.
What is Time? Well, it is a neat little application that can give you information such as dialling codes, time differences, sunrise/sunset for where you are, where you are going and to set and manage alarms. OK, it won't do the dishes at night but that's another application.
I won't go into HOW to set an alarm and lots of the other stuff, I leave it up to you to read your manual. But what I want to show you here is how to add your home city!
The first thing you need to do, before you start is to figure out your Longitude and Latitude. These numbers pinpoint where you are on Terra Firma. If you have a GPS, great! Write it down and move to section 6. For those of us who have not gotten that cool toy yet do the following.
| Go to the Microsoft Terra Server at http://Terraserver.Microsoft.com . (yes that's http://terraserver.microsoft.com there is no www after the http:// ). Now don't attack me cause I sent you to a microsquish site, this is the BIGGEST server and it is way cool. I lost several hours looking up where I grew up, where I live and where I am working (3 places in 2 different states). This server has a mondo huge database of satellite images, famous landmarks, bodies of water. .. bodies of land etc.... You can enter your city, state/province and country and it will return a map. |
| So once you get to the site click on the link for "Find a Spot on Earth" (no not the dog!) |
| Enter your city, state/province, and country and click get |
| It will return a list of found locations, with date of image and how it was taken. Click on a link and see where you live. |
| Now that the image has loaded what do you do? Well you could be like me and loose several hours zooming and panning to find your house. But before you do that, at the bottom of the image is a button/link for "about this image", click this. This will take you to the details of the page and list the Longitude and Latitude. Note that they give the numbers out to 4, that's FOUR, decimal places but you really only need two! ( I live in Murrieta, California and mine are 33.56 N and 117.27 W. Oh, yes get the N, S, E, W designations too! |
| Next open up the time application and select Menu:Edit:Add City... as shown below. |
| That will open the Add City Dialog box shown below. Fill it out, with your information. You might ask what GMT offset is. That is the difference between your time zone and Greenwich, UK. Greenwich is at 0 degrees Longitude, West from there, Longitude's have a W designation and a plus (+) GMT offset and if you are going East from there you have an E designation and a minus (-) GMT offset (you might ask what is 180 degrees E or W of Greenwich? would you believe it is the International Date Line!) Anyway, sorry for the digression, the Pacific time zone is a -8 hours and follows the Northern settings for Summer Time: Spring forward in April. Fall back in October. If you did not get your Longitude and Latitude, that's ok cause you have an opportunity to set it visually next. |
| When you click OK you will then see the following screen. If you think the cross hairs are correct and you filled in the longitude and latitude, then click OK. Else click on the map close to where you are and then click OK. |
| You will then see the screen below. Now if your home city is not what you just inputted, then you click in the grey area that shows the city name and your home city or go to the control panel and set it there. When you come back to time, it will show up as your home city. As you can see, my home city is Murrieta, CA and I spend a lot of time in Salt Lake City. There is a 1 hour time difference and they are 561 miles apart, as the crow flies. |
| You should also note that if you click on the clock(s) on the left side they will change from analog to digital or visa versa. You can also type into the "city" area and select other cities to get information about them. |
That's it people, way cool if you ask me.
