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Comment by johnwalkr | Hacker News Reader

I think it's fixed now, but DB (german transit company) used to always use your local time in its app, making it incredibly confusing to book tickets or even check on tickets you already have. I planned a trip from Japan and the train times showing up were something like 2:30 in the morning.

Another bad example is using Windows bootcamp on a mac. Windows writes local time to the RTC and MacOS writes universal time, so when switching between MacOS and Windows, it's always wrong at first.

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Even worse with transit in Vienna/Austria where if you buy tickets in advance for a specific day or date range they seem to take your local time into account if those tickets are bought while in another timezone. That's for tickets where time shouldn't even matter because they are for full days (from midnight to midnight).

If you're in Pacific time and you buy the ticket for a date in the future (let's say June 1st) before 3pm your local time everything works fine. But if you buy the same ticket for June 1st after 3pm Pacific local time (which is already the next day in Vienna) the ticket that you're buying isn't for June 1st but actually for June 2nd (only visible once you receive the confirmation).

So apparently they're somehow translating between timezones for the displayed dates, although that doesn't make sense: If I buy a ticket for June 1st on Vienna public transport I don't care what my local time is. Even if I'm in California while buying that ticket I still want it to be valid on June 1st instead of June 2nd.

> Windows writes local time

I seem to recall there's a registry key to control that and have it store UTC to the RTC

edit: found that one https://superuser.com/questions/975717/does-windows-10-suppo...

I do this, If you have a unix install on the same host, It really helps keep a sane time config. there are ways to do it the other way around. sysctl kern.utc_offset on openbsd. But the unix way feels better to me, so I change windows.

> But the unix way feels better to me, so I change windows.

I'm with you as well. Sometimes you don't have a choice when dual-booting, MS-DOS only wants to work in local time while on the opposite end of the spectrum MacOS only wants to work in UTC, but if I have the choice I'm going to change Windows to use UTC.

Good to know, thanks!

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