A lot of news stories have been pitching the idea of changing your smoke detector batteries when you change your clock. Probably a good idea. (Especially if you’re Tim/Hannah.)

But I’d like to pitch another idea, being the obsessive-compulsive I am. Not a replacement, but a supplement.

Don’t blindly set your clock an hour ahead. Set your clock to the precise time. GPS provides an excellent time source, though there’s no guarantee that a normal GPS unit actually displays the precision time it’s receiving. It’s probably accurate enough. Cell phones are also usually very reliable. A system running NTP is also a good bet, as it’s usually accurate to a handful of milliseconds. (Unless it runs Windows, in which case it polls for the correct time every 7 days insted of every 1024 seconds, and only if “Internet Time” is enabled. Unless you changed the polling interval in the registry.)

As Monk would say, you’ll thank me later.