Why switch? It’s not too complicated a concept for the average person to understand and deal with. In fact, it’s intuitive. Sure in software the logic has a few nuances that are a bit complex when needing to deal with local time and timezones, but that’s why we make the computers do the tricky work.
My understanding is DST did still save appreciable energy until we replaced incandescent lights with fluorescent and leds. Longer daylight in the evening when people are awake and less in the early morning when people are asleep means lights aren’t being used as much. The average light bulb used to consume 60 watts or more and also let off significant undesirable heat, so with a house full of lights DST really did cut back energy usage. Now though with led lights low consumption and virtually no heat, it’s not nearly as significant.
Clearly you’ve not had to write and maintain much XML.
Not to ask a possibly silly question but I haven’t seen these questions asked and I don’t know your network experience. You’ve supplied the actual network address of your pihole machine and not the 192.168.1.250 address shown, right? And you’ve set your pihole server up to have a static ip address as well, correct? You don’t want it assigned dynamically and therefore randomly everytime it renews its lease.
If the ip address is statically assigned - either hard-coded as static on the machine or at least being statically assigned on your router via its mac address - then setting the dns server on your router should work. I would however assign 2nd and 3rd dns servers as Google dns or cloud flare ip addresses in case your pihole server is ever down. (1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8 or some of the others). If that’s all confirmed and your machines are not receiving your configured dns settings from the router, it’s possible (seems unlikely) the spectrum supplied router is ignoring the settings and assigning their dns servers. If so, buy your own router and put it between your home network and the spectrum hardware. Then you have control and it doesn’t matter what their hardware does. You’ll just set yours up on a different subnet - 192.168.x where x doesn’t match the same value as the spectrum network - and you should be good to go.
Good luck!
That’s all good info and explains some of the problems that could be resolved for us programmers if we were on UTC, but for the most part these are programmer problems and the computer handles it for everyone else. Additionally, it makes a few issues clear that won’t be resolved with a UTC switch.
First, as mentioned countries all over the world decide for themselves what timezone they’re going to follow. Even if countries were to switch to UTC, we know they all won’t do it nor at the same time, so programmers will have to deal with that added complexity too having some on UTC, some off, some switching on this date or that… if the movement got serious we’d have another Y2K frenzy, but not one that ended on a specific date… it’d linger for years as various countries came on-board. Additionally, we’d still have to deal with all the historical calendar, timezone and DST switches he mentioned. Those wouldn’t go away… in fact we’d be introducing a bunch of new ones.
Fact is timezones are understandable and work pretty good for normal people and their day-to-day tasks. Normal people aren’t going to want to understand UTC and then have to translate their normal day times to and from others around the world. No matter where you are I understand what you mean when you say your morning started at 6am or you eat at noon or you go to bed at 11pm or 23:00 for that matter. With UTC I don’t know what 23:00 means in Australia, Germany or India relative to your day… not only programmers but even normal people would have to know how to translate that to a time they can relate too, so you’d have to know timezones anyway. So while I’d know 23:00 was exactly the same point in time for each of us, I wouldn’t know how it relates to your day the way it relates to mine… is it morning, night, mid-day? It would actually make today’s programmers problems - which isn’t too common for most of us - a problem for everyone.