[HN Gopher] Tz: A Time Zone Helper
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       Tz: A Time Zone Helper
        
       Author : polm23
       Score  : 101 points
       Date   : 2021-03-22 06:48 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | tantalor wrote:
       | Is the diagonal white/black separator in the example supposed to
       | indicate something? It appears to suggest something like "night"
       | towards the right, and it lines up with the numbers, but the
       | numbers on either side of it are different, ranging from
       | 10am/11am to 9pm/10pm.
       | 
       | Edit: Oh! Is it just showing how the UI appears in dark mode?
       | Then the diagonal is meaningless and distracting!
        
         | curben wrote:
         | The diagonal combines light and dark themes' screenshot.
         | 
         | Light: https://postimg.cc/BPW3vwJN
         | 
         | Dark: https://postimg.cc/dkZvwKcL
        
       | njt wrote:
       | I wrote a similar tool based on the idea of choosing cities and
       | "shifting" the time: https://zeitzono.org/
        
       | SamBorick wrote:
       | For a similar experience on the web I highly recommend
       | https://everytimezone.com/
        
         | Zenst wrote:
         | I see they handle Daylight saving, albeit they flag that entire
         | week as the change from what I can see for the UK which has a
         | change from GMT to BST (which they call UST+1) on the 28th -
         | yet whole week gets labelled that in which it changes.
         | 
         | Personally I'll be glad when we do away with such daylight
         | saving TZ changes.
        
           | globular-toast wrote:
           | It doesn't seem to handle DST properly at all. If I set the
           | date to the 27th, it shows London on the 28th being GMT, if I
           | set it to the 28th it shows London on the 27th being BST.
           | Both wrong. It should instead show the 28th as being only a
           | 23 hour day and the 31st October being a 25 hour day.
        
       | loloquwowndueo wrote:
       | Very neat!
       | 
       | I normally use
       | https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html which has
       | similar functionality but something that works in the command
       | line definitely sounds interesting. I might give it a go (pun
       | intended haha)
        
       | geocrasher wrote:
       | This is very neat! I can use this at work where I talk to people
       | from all over the world on a regular basis. Will it displace
       | https://worldtimebuddy.com/ in my workflow? I don't know, but
       | it'll be fun to find out.
       | 
       | Not being one of the Cool Kids who has a golang environment ready
       | to go, I logged into my trusty CentOS 7 box and installed golang
       | with "yum install go" which went fine. I cloned the rep and
       | attempted to build:
       | 
       | git clone https://github.com/oz/tz
       | 
       | cd tz
       | 
       | go build
       | 
       | Nothing. Nada. Dead. Not even an error.
       | 
       | Some googling[1] led me to 'go list -x' to list the modules,
       | which was failing. I suspected failed IPv6 resolution (an issue
       | on this box) so some more googling[2] led me to add this in
       | /etc/gai.conf:
       | 
       | precedence ::ffff:0:0/96 100
       | 
       | This solved the problem with IPv6 hanging up, as IPv4 is now the
       | preference. Neat. Now, it still failed with another error:
       | invalid pseudo-version
       | 
       | This appeared to be due to an older version of git, so I
       | installed a newer version, again after some googling[3]:
       | 
       | yum -y erase git
       | 
       | yum -y install https://repo.ius.io/ius-release-el7.rpm
       | 
       | yum -y install git222
       | 
       | I also had to reinstall golang with 'yum install go' and now I am
       | rewarded with a completed 'go build'. Neat! I am looking forward
       | to checking this little program out.
       | 
       | [1] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/16104 [2]
       | https://stackoverflow.com/a/21672312 [3]
       | https://github.com/golang/go/issues/38373#issuecomment-70187...
        
         | svieira wrote:
         | Your travails reminds me of Joe Armstrong's talk _The Mess
         | We're In_ where he talks about the pains he had getting his
         | slides for the talk ready:
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4
        
         | Geezus_42 wrote:
         | Same issue on Ubuntu but using "go get" worked although I have
         | no idea where the config file the developer mentions is.
         | 
         | Comment to dev: Please provide better documentation.
         | Installation steps and configuration are terribly lacking.
        
         | ydant wrote:
         | Seconding the recommendation for https://worldtimebuddy.com -
         | it's a really simple thing it does, but it's somehow the only
         | site/tool I've found that clearly displays the timezones in a
         | way that's easy to understand, including the cross-day issues.
         | It helped a lot for me scheduling meetings between both coasts
         | of the US, India, and Australia.
         | 
         | It looks like this tool does a similar kind of display, so
         | definitely worth giving a shot.
         | 
         | As for this command, I already had go installed on MacOS
         | through homebrew (although I rarely use it in any form) - and
         | the build went fine and the command runs as expected.
        
           | geocrasher wrote:
           | One thing I like about woldtimebuddy.com is that you can
           | share the link with others so that everyone is clear on
           | scheduling. The one that always gets me is India, as they're
           | an additional half hour ahead.
        
             | mywacaday wrote:
             | the copy the time window you've selected from
             | worldtimebuddy to plain text is nice as well
        
             | ydant wrote:
             | Agreed. It's also concise and easy to screenshot. This CLI
             | tool is less so.
        
         | twic wrote:
         | > I logged into my trusty CentOS 7 box and installed golang
         | with "yum install go"
         | 
         | Ah well there's your problem!
         | 
         | I'm always nervous about installing language toolchains from
         | the standard repositories on CentOS, because they are often
         | very out of date, or intertwined with the rest of the base
         | system in awkward ways (this is more of a gcc concern perhaps).
         | I have no idea what the state of Go on CentOS is, so this could
         | be baseless nervousness in this case.
         | 
         | If there is a software collection for a toolchain, that may be
         | a better bet than whatever is in the main repo. There is one
         | for Go:
         | 
         | https://www.softwarecollections.org/en/scls/rhscl/go-toolset...
         | 
         | I can't work out what's in it, so i have no idea if it would
         | have made life any easier around your networking or Git issues.
         | I can't even tell what version of Go is in it. The fact that
         | there isn't a Go toolset for CentOS 8 hints that it might be
         | quite out of date.
        
           | geocrasher wrote:
           | Indeed this is definitely the wrong flavor of Linux for
           | anything cutting edge. Which happens to be why I love it so
           | much ;)
        
         | throw0101a wrote:
         | > _Will it displacehttps://worldtimebuddy.com/ in my workflow?_
         | 
         | That site is a bit too sparse for my liking. I find the
         | following to have a decent landing page:
         | 
         | * https://everytimezone.com
        
       | gkfasdfasdf wrote:
       | FYI I was able to install using homebrew go (go 1.16.2):
       | go get github.com/oz/tz
       | 
       | And it put the tz executable in ~/go/bin
       | 
       | Kinda surprised the readme didn't mention it. Is this not the
       | preferred way to install go CLI tools now with 1.16+ ?
        
       | globular-toast wrote:
       | > The program will adjust to light and dark terminals themes.
       | 
       | Instead of doing this you should use named colours. "Green" in my
       | terminal is definitely the correct green for my terminal theme.
        
         | chrismorgan wrote:
         | Look, you and I may have sane ANSI 16 colours, but it'll be a
         | very significant fraction of people that don't (and almost no
         | one will customise the next 240 colours). Remember things like
         | that there's a distressingly high chance that blue is almost
         | invisible against black, and even _bright_ blue's contrast is
         | commonly much too low--to say nothing of the limited palette
         | range.
         | 
         | But what this program is doing is using termenv's
         | HasDarkBackground function to decide whether the terminal is
         | light or dark, and is then specifying RGB colours. It'll try to
         | guess whether to use 16 colours, 256 colours or 24-bit colour
         | and do some kind of mapping down if necessary (which I bet this
         | app makes a _total_ hash of, probably not having chosen the
         | colours carefully). But the way it figures out the terminal's
         | background colour... ugh. _Some_ terminals will support it, but
         | for many it'll fail and just assume black. Looks like on unix
         | you could set an environment variable COLORFGBG to override
         | this, https://github.com/muesli/termenv/blob/6bb55115565c27f4cc
         | 681..., but if you're on Windows, tough luck, apparently you're
         | not allowed to have a light terminal (which you can get in
         | Command Prompt by running `color f0`): https://github.com/muesl
         | i/termenv/blob/537e36cb0472a69a3c828....
         | 
         | The simple fact of the matter is that there are no particularly
         | good solutions for handling colour in terminals if you want the
         | colours to cohere and naturally map to real-world colour
         | understanding, which is what something like this would _prefer_
         | to be able to do. Things are just barely OK if you just want
         | colours with no inherent semantics.
         | 
         | So... yeah, might be nice if they used the 16 colours, but I
         | can readily understand them not doing so, and if they _did_ do
         | so, although it'd make it better for some, it'd make it worse
         | for others. Where does the balance lie? I dunno.
        
           | muskox2 wrote:
           | I think the best thing to do is use the first 16 named colors
           | and give users the option to disable colors if they want.
           | This supports most use-cases.
        
             | TeMPOraL wrote:
             | The best way would be if the software just outputted
             | objects instead of text, and let the user style them for
             | display in any way they want :).
        
         | zamadatix wrote:
         | Agree for raw "syntax highlighting" styling output, disagree
         | for styling the output such as here where the gradient
         | represents additional information/context. Especially since it
         | takes the terminal background configuration into consideration
         | when making that choice.
        
       | siraben wrote:
       | I just packaged it in my overlay so Nix users can try it out
       | without installing it (works on macOS and Linux)
       | nix run github:siraben/siraben-overlay#tz
       | 
       | or, when it gets upstreamed into Nixpkgs                 nix run
       | nixpkgs#tz
       | 
       | Seems like a useful thing to have so you can visually see when
       | multiple time zones have overlapping daylight! Neat!
        
       | dnrvs wrote:
       | Looks great! A few years ago I built basically the same thing as
       | a simple web app: https://tz.now.sh/
        
       | speakspokespok wrote:
       | Worldtimebuddy is great but if you're looking for something even
       | better, on Mac you cannot beat 'The Clock' app. Exact same
       | functionality as Worldtimebuddy but goes farther and allows
       | renaming those clocks. If Dan is on EST and Jules is on NRT,
       | rename the EST clock to Dan and the NRT clock to Jules and slide
       | back and forth to easily do the timezone math.
       | 
       | If you work for a cloud company and need to schedule cross AZ
       | work this little app will save your life. What is local time in
       | IAD when SYD is doing 10PM maintenance local time? What about
       | NRT? :-)
        
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       (page generated 2021-03-23 23:01 UTC)