And then there are less than 292,277,024,583 years left until 64-bit Unix time rears its ugly head. When will these boffins learn that their band-aid solutions just won't cut it.

I survived Y2k, I'll survive Unix2038!

Slight gripe: an unsigned 8-bit integer has a maximum of 255, not 256.

Also the RTC does keep on counting up seconds even when the power is off, via the RTC battery.

Upgrading your computer to 64-bit has very little to do with fixing this problem though. 32-bit CPUs can do 64-bit math just fine. But a lot of things, like filesystems, databases, etc. have 32-bit timestamps stored in a fixed-size column.

Hopefully most things out there that use a 32-bit time_t are only using it for interval computations, and not absolute storage. Interval computations are good as long as the interval itself is less than 2.1billionish seconds long.