Hello friends.
Yesterday it had been an unpleasant surprise for me that I’ve missed an important event, because I couldn’t read the United States (English) date properly. I was preparing for a meeting that was (as I thought) on 9th of September, and it was in September, but on 2nd. I am well aware that US date format is MM/DD/YYYY, and that I should read the first digit as a month and not a day, and still I was in hurry or something and managed to misread that.
I don’t use it this date format, preferring 2021-09-02 in my scripts. And in terminal it all formatted in even more readable manner.
drwxrwxr-x. 3 anatoli anatoli 4096 Apr 9 17:56 .vim
-rw-------. 1 anatoli anatoli 42025 Sep 4 23:11 .viminfo
-rw-rw-r--. 1 anatoli anatoli 2296 Oct 24 2019 vimnotes
But it appear that Firefox still somehow tells web apps to use this 9/2/2021 notation. When I complained to people that the time on the website is confusing, they’ve pointed me to my OS settings, which didn’t show anything like that.
And after another messaging roundtrip I’ve been asked to look for Region settings. I went to Settings and indeed discovered Region & Language tabs, where my Format setting is indeed set to United States (English).
I tried to find the alternative, so that I could have unambiguous, machine readable date like 2021-02-09 and 24 hour time. The closest one I could find was Denmark (English).
The only drawback is that numbers are written with separators that no popular programming language will accept as valid.
When I installed Fedora I chose United States (English) because I want English to be the primary language of my computer, and because US English is probably the language I know, because I’ve learned by reading technical articles and playing games that were probably made somewhere in US.
But I don’t live in US, I don’t use the date format, or can convert from feet to yard without Google, neither I want to be reminded of the unfortunate country I am living in, and my inability to change anything inside or about it.
So, my Fedora friends, if I can not escape where I am now physically, I want to tell you that it would be much better feeling of freedom if I could choose to live in a different space online - a CyberSpace. A place where nationalities don’t matter, and information is equally readable by humans and machines.