woke up thismorning and my tablets clock was 4 hours off. any ideas why?

Did you by chance wake up in London?

Maybe I traveled to London in a dream.

I had a pocket PC that had a second internal battery that kept the realtime clock running with the main battery removed. Just before it went out completely it lost time. Some devices have internal super caps that do the same thing but not for as long as a battery. Another thing that can change your clock time is if you recently installed an application that has the power to reset you clock.

speaking of clock time, how did it know to change during daylight savings time? does it auto-sync to a server somewhere?

sometimes a runaway process on my tablet will cause the clock to timeshift by approx 79 seconds.
annoys the sweet bajeebus out of me because gcc and make will then complain about a clock skew (when a few minutes before it was all normal)

it happens quickly and normally after something screwed up.

once i run "ntpdate pool.ntp.org" on it its fine again.

(note, normally the clock stays in good enough sync naturally it just jumps every now and then)

My guess is alien abduction. Do you feel, um... probed?

The N8x0 keeps an internal clock on the RETU chip when the N8x0 is off.

To set the time on that chip, set the time accurately in Maemo and as root run:

What keeps the internal clock running when the battery is removed?

hamsters!!