Re: Calendaring?

[doug dougwellington . com]

Technically inclined?  It's funny, I feel like such the dinosaur.  I was a VAX VMS sysadmin and then got into Sun, SGI, Data General, Evans & Sutherland, HP, etc.  Linux killed all that stuff off, so I spent the last twenty years managing Linux servers and writing code, mostly Python with some Node.  I retired a couple ago because of Mr. Biden's vaccine mandate, so I haven't actually written any code since then.  Feels weird.

Anyway, I'm probably going to implement a local store on my Linux server.  I'll keep it under Git and have copies across multiple disks.  I have a couple different service providers, so I'll probably start by syncing a read-only copy to one of them so I can access the info when I'm not home.

The more I think about it, the more I would characterize my needs as a diary and to do list, not just a list of events.

---

From: Conrad Hughes <biz_nmh_workers@xrad.org>
Sent: Thursday, November 2, 2023 11:04 AM
To: doug dougwellington.com <doug@dougwellington.com>
Cc: nmh-workers@nongnu.org <nmh-workers@nongnu.org>
Subject: Re: Calendaring?

 

So since you sound technically inclined..

Just to follow up with a summary of what's involved in self-hosting,
which *does work* across all platforms if you try hard enough, these are
some of the things you need to consider:

  - You can host the server at home or on a commercial hosting service:
    I run davical in a container, and while it didn't do a lot to make
    setup easy, it's pretty much fire-and-forget in the manner of most
    Linux stuff.  If hosting from home you need to sort out NAT so your
    mobile devices can reach the server on the move.  davical is
    lightweight and will run on pretty much any hardware you can think
    of.  OwnCloud is a viable alternative with similar considerations.

  - You need to work out how you're going to back it up, though it
    sounds as if with that clipboard you may not be overly concerned
    about backups ;-)

  - The main ongoing annoyance is server certificate updates from Let's
    Encrypt or wherever.  Without those, every 3 months/year/whenever
    all of the clients will stop trusting the calendar server until you
    update your certs.  There are scripts to do this automatically.

  - There's an Android app to seamlessly connect CalDAV into your
    'phone's calendar.

  - I am ignorant on this point, but being the origin of the formats
    involved, I'm pretty sure that Apple play nicely with it.

  - Windows hates CalDAV but talks to Apple so there is a trick whereby
    you point it at a fake account on Apple and then make changes on an
    Advanced tab which substitutes your server address; this I have not
    made work, but one alternative is to just install a different
    Windows calendar app that can talk to CalDAV, which I have made
    work.

That all done, you can check your calendar anywhere and update it
wherever you've got Internet access, alarms work fine and (with a server
like davical) you can share it with whoever needs to see it; you can
even create multiple calendars and give people read and/or write access
as needed.

Really to go through all that you've got to have a real dislike of
Google et al.; having seen a few folk lose cloud accounts over the years
I think there are good reasons to avoid 'em but doing so is nowhere near
as easy as it should be and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone: having
your calendar intact as far back as the 1990s is not useful enough.

.. and, wrapping all the way back to your original desire for a command
line app, I've never even tried.  PIM GUIs are annoying but just about
usable on Linux, the 'phone is annoying but also just about usable.

This is waayyy off-topic so I'll stop there.

Conrad