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.

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.

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

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

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!
<pre> ~/src/caleb $ <b>cadaver https://example.org/radicale/alex/</b>
Authentication required for Radicale - Password Required on server
`example.org': Username: <b>alex</b> Password: <b>*secret*</b>
dav:/radicale/alex/&gt; <b>ls</b> 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/&gt; <b>ls 6304bd43-5d45-208b-0e44-893e509cf3da</b>
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/&gt; <b>ls cae8e041-61d9-b51a-57db-294b07e8dc1e</b>
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 ... </pre>
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 ​#Caleb #CalDAV #WebDAV
​#CalDAV #WebDAV ​#WebDAV

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

> Remind is a sophisticated calendar and alarm program. – Remind