About a year ago, perhaps a bit more, I found myself getting uncomfortable with my reliance on tech giants. I started looking into alternatives, but they needed to be simple. My self-image as the cunning, resourceful cyber-warrior who needs nothing more than an old laptop and a secure internet connection is built on very shaky foundations. The truth is that I find talk of protocols and such a bit puzzling.
My first target was replacing having my whole life relying on Google Calendar. Don't get me wrong. It works well, effortlessly syncs across all devices and causes no hassles. But if I want to get out of the shadow of the tech giant, here's where I'm starting.
I settled on calendar.txt: a really simple plain text file, one line per day. It's such a simple idea, I might have thought of it myself, but of course I didn't. Simple-but-useful ideas generally come from cleverer people than me. This one comes from Tero Karvinen:
Tero Karvinen's calendar.txt page
calendar.txt hasn't quite elbowed Google Calendar out of my life. I'm still running them in parallel, partly because I haven't found a really convenient way to look at calendar.txt on my phone. But I'm confident I'll get there.
I keep calendar.txt in a folder that is synced with Dropbox, so the current version is available on my different devices and is also copied to the cloud.
That same folder is also managed with Git. I periodically commit any changes and push them to a Git repository on a Raspberry Pi at home. That gives me a separate copy of the file, together with its revision history, so I can recover an earlier version if I ever need to.
So far, I haven't had any calendaring disasters, so that's a win.
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richard <AT> deckzero <DOT> uk