Seriously. I used to have a microwave and oven stacked on top of each other. Both had an LCD, and so some horrible PMs somewhere presumably had entire sets of meetings to spec out the clock feature.

The microwave would not function if the time and AM/PM values were not set. (As far as I could tell, there was no way to actually ever see the AM/PM value after setting it!)

So. Every time the power went out, I would be confronted with blinking times on clocks I didn’t even want, and a nonfunctional microwave.

I will never buy a kitchen appliance with a mandatory clock ever again.

My Siemens oven wanted an Internet connection on first power up.

I fired off an E-mail to Siemens, stating that there was ONE feature which could tempt me into granting it access: NTP support.

Much to my surprise, I got an enthusiastic reply from an engineer stating that this would be rolled out in a future firmware update.

Fingers crossed.

thinking of internet of things - I would expect ntp was top on the to do list for anything wanting to be on that.

I would assume that it usually IS a feature on the top of a list... but then they actually start to work on it, and a new fresh set of young developers get exposed to the nightmarish clusterfuck that is datetimes and networking, and then it eventually gets rejected.

this implies that at some point NTP won't be implemented anywhere because the fresh sets of young developers are too delicate to handle the problems of various older technologies that everything depends on?

Windows, after 30 years and billions of development dollars, couldn't make ntp work. I still must set time manually once a month.

I set up a second private network on my router for iot devices. On a but on a whim.. I don't know how private but its something

A while back I got an Amazon branded microwave w/ Alexa integration. I bought it because it was one of the few I could find in the form factor I wanted, and used the novelty factor to break the tie. The voice activation is useless, but the one thing I love about it is that when the power blinks out it'll get the time from the nearby Alexa & set itself. No more blinking.

> My Siemens oven wanted an Internet connection on first power up.

I hadn't thought of that. I'll add that to my list of reasons why I will not buy an appliance that wants to connect to a network.

Not to mention having to update the time every DST transition otherwise you have a wrong clock which is worst than no clock at all.

I usually set such clocks to some random time that's so off you would never mistake it for the real thing.

I tend to set non-TZ-aware/non-NTP clocks to UTC.

I do this as well. It works well for me.

Bosch microwaves for example let you turn that off. See e.g. https://pdf.lowes.com/productdocuments/3c4ab01b-1931-4181-be... page 18.

Yeah, ditch the clock and backlight the damn keypad FFS.

I can call myself lucky then, I bought the cheapest uW because all the “fancy” ones were all huge, I believe it is Black & Decker branded, if the clock is not set it will stay in timer mode indicating 0:00 (not blinking) if you press just the start button it will run for 30 seconds it also has an uncomplicated kitchen timer function. It’s small, underpowered and will overheat if run for more than 12min straight but i paid $50 for it.

I bought a Forte brand microwave on Amazon. (I've never heard of the brand). But it has been a good microwave so far. and I was happy to notice that when the clock is not set, the screen just stays blank rather than a blinking 12:00.