Mike Stone

Mostly The Lonely Howls Of Mike Baying His Ideological Purity At The Moon

Complaints About Calendars

27 Feb 2023

I think it’s pretty obvious that calendars are super useful. I’m not talking about the kind of calendars you hang from your wall either. I’m talking the digital kind. The kind you have on your phone. Or on your computer. Or as part of your browser. Or as part of a million other things. And therein lies the problem.

It seems like these days that every service comes with its own calendar. My computer has a calendar app. My phone has a calendar app. My browser has a calendar app. Home Assistant has a calendar app. Etc. Etc. Etc. And that’s just the apps. Never mind the fact that I have personal calendars and work calendars and family calendars and I’m going out of my mind with all these stinking calendars!

Calendars are great for scheduling all sorts of things. Not just your own time, but when it comes to stuff like Home Assistant, automated tasks. The problem is that pretty much everything wants to have its own calendar, and often they’re not compatible. Sometimes they are. For example, my browser has options for a local calendar, a Vivaldi cloud based calendar, a CalDAV, and a general web calendar along with the ubiquitous Google Calendar. Home Assistant on the other hand has a local calendar and an option for a Google Calendar (if you want to go through the trials and tribulations of setting that up), but not much else in the way of options. Given, the calendar in HA is pretty new so I’m expecting they’ll be adding more later.

I’m not offering any solutions here, but it would be really nice if all these calendars would communicate in some way. I don’t mean assuming that everything under the sun wants to sync to them and they don’t have to sync back. I feel like the closest offering to this would be Google Calendar, and that’s assumining you’re perfectly cool with Google having your schedule broken down by the hour.

Now the word calendar sounds funny to me after writing this because I said it too much.

Day 2 of the #100DaysToOffload Series.



Looking for comments? There are no comments. It's not that I don't care what you think, it's just that I don't want to manage a comments section.

If you want to comment, there's a really good chance I at least mentioned this post on Fosstodon, and you can reply to me there. If you don't have a Mastodon account, I'd suggest giving it a try.

If you don't want to join Mastodon, and you still want to comment, feel free to use my contact information.

Also, don't feel obligated, but if you feel like buying me a ☕ cup of coffee ☕ I won't say no.