Tomorrow I won't have to deal with it getting dark at a soul-crushing 5:30 pm. Nor will I have to wake up blearily an hour early in the spring. Instead I will be enjoying my new, custom time zone. It's "JEST", for "Joey's Eastern (non)Standard Time", and in JEST, there is no spring forward or fall back stress.

The folly of daylight savings time (Ben Franlin's best prank ever) really becomes apparent when you have solar power. It's bad enough that the sun is setting at 6:30 without compounding that by an hour. By keeping my clock set so the sun sets in midwinter at 6 pm, I will maximise what little light there is, and minimise time spent using batteries in the dark.

Of course, it helps that I'm my own boss, and that most of the people I work with are probably not in a nearby timezone anyway, and that most things are done asynchronously. Since JEST is an hour ahead of local time here in the winter, I will, at worst, tend to be running early.

So I only have to change my clocks one time -- and by "change", I mean create a custom timezone in Linux. Here's how to do that.

Make a custom timezone file. The standard one for North America is a bewildering 3000 lines of special cases, conflicting legistlation, and historical weirdness, but I only need one: echo "Zone JEST -4:00 - JEST" > JEST.zone Compile and install it to somewhere; I put it in ~/.zoneinfo zic JEST.zone -d ~/.zoneinfo Set TZ to use it. Also TZDIR if it's not in the system directory. export TZDIR=~/.zoneinfo TZ=JEST

Update: Turns out it was easier than I thought, just setting TZ=FOO+4 will make date display a timezone "FOO" that is 4 hours behind GMT. So all I need is to set TZ=JEST+4

Result:

date: Sat Oct 30 21:43:39 JEST 2010 date -R: Sat, 30 Oct 2010 21:43:39 -0400

Previously:

Also, for Android:

Android does not seem to have an way to define your own time zone. I select Barbados from the time zone list, since it is on GMT-4 year round with no daylight savings.