2024-02-28 Use of a calendar

In the last millennium, I used the Emacs Diary for my calendar. I mean, why not? The Emacs Calendar is great. Better than the `cal` command-line utility, in any case. But eventually the world got mobile phones and I wanted an online calendar.

Emacs Diary

Emacs Calendar

The example from the Emacs Diary documentation:

12/22/2015  Twentieth wedding anniversary!
10/22       Ruth's birthday.

	21, *:    Payday

Tuesday--weekly meeting with grad students at 10am
         Supowit, Shen, Bitner, and Kapoor to attend.
1/13/89     Friday the thirteenth!!
thu 4pm     squash game with Lloyd.
mar 16      Dad's birthday
April 15, 2016 Income tax due.

	15        time cards due.

Back then, Google didn't want to be evil and I used Google Calendar. When Google changed its mind, so did I. I switched to Radicale.

Radicale

And yet, I sort of missed those diary file entries.

Today, @tadzik@social.tadzik.net posted a link to caleb.

caleb

`caleb` will do its best to interpret a calendar event description, create a valid iCalendar event for it and optionally upload it to a CalDAV server.

Nice!

Example usage, from the README:

$ caleb friday 5pm beer

My main problem was that it took me a while to figure out what the correct CalDAV URL is. I looked into my iPhone accounts (my first mistake) and tried `https://example.org/radicale/alex`, then `https://example.org/radicale/alex/`, then `https://example.org/radicale/alex/Alex` – some of these URLs failed silently, some of them created new collections with the iCalendar filename as the collection name… and I didn't get an warnings or error messages. I mean, it makes sense. It's like a filesystem, you can save whatever you want. But it's not what the calendar apps expect.

CalDAV

iCalendar

So, how do I discover the correct URL? Using a command-line WebDAV explorer like `cadaver`. The following example shows how I log into Radicale and list the contents of the two directory I found. One of them is full of `.vcf` files (contacts), the other is full of `.ics` files (calendar entries). That's the one!

WebDAV

~/src/caleb $ cadaver https://example.org/radicale/alex/ Authentication required for Radicale - Password Required on server `example.org': Username: alex Password: *secret* dav:/radicale/alex/> ls Listing collection `/radicale/alex/': succeeded. Coll: 6304bd43-5d45-208b-0e44-893e509cf3da 1239216 Feb 7 08:13 Coll: cae8e041-61d9-b51a-57db-294b07e8dc1e 520978 Feb 28 11:43 dav:/radicale/alex/> ls 6304bd43-5d45-208b-0e44-893e509cf3da Listing collection `/radicale/alex/6304bd43-5d45-208b-0e44-893e509cf3da/': succeeded. 0008345A-1EFB-4FC2-9545-BB1D7B2EE6E0.vcf 295 Jun 19 2020 000ED281-A0C8-46F2-B3EB-1D13E4224281.vcf 241 Feb 25 2023 007A5E7D-8947-4FC1-95B5-BBADEA9E27DC.vcf 267 Jul 14 2023 ... dav:/radicale/alex/> ls cae8e041-61d9-b51a-57db-294b07e8dc1e Listing collection `/radicale/alex/cae8e041-61d9-b51a-57db-294b07e8dc1e/': succeeded. 00A3A923-47C0-4BE4-B2BF-E365965C3975.ics 1043 May 29 2022 011F4EF6-B431-4531-BB3D-D1E45BD665AB.ics 1266 Sep 10 00:19 02909CE2-D363-436B-858D-3A243A10693E.ics 962 Jun 9 2023 ...

Now I'm finally ready to go back to `caleb` and create the config file, `~/.config/caleb.conf`:

[caldav]
url = "https://example.org/radicale/alex/cae8e041-61d9-b51a-57db-294b07e8dc1e"
username = "alex"
password = "*secret*"

Enjoy!

#Administration #Caleb #CalDAV #WebDAV

*2024-03-12**. @Preuk@framapiaf.org suggested Remind.

Remind is a sophisticated calendar and alarm program. – Remind

Remind