Instead, initially went with the approach of hosting my dynamically updating iCal file in an S3 bucket and using ICSx5 on Android to sync with it. No CalDAV needed – just HTTPS.

However, FOSS calendars for Android still suck, and for some reason I couldn't get ICSx5 to work within GrapheneOS, so I now use almost the same approach but with Proton Calendar which happens to support calendars from direct links to iCal files. It's not perfect, but it suits my needs enough.

I think the author's approach for using iCalendar format is a good one, though what I've discovered is the amount of support for various iCalendar features varies drastically between calendar software. Rather than dealing with that headache, I somewhat gave up and decided to shove most metadata into the description field rather than use the respective properties.

EDIT: My use case is software I wrote to grab data from various sites (Eventbrite, Meetup, pub trivia companies, public event calendars, etc.), filter for only social events I would be interested in, and combine them into a single calendar I can view in my normal calendar software.

Data is saved in plain text files and I track/backup it using git.

Over the time I've accumulated some interesting modifications:

- Authentication runs with pam on the host system.

- To enable sharing of calendars I run a periodic script symlinking the calendars to all authorized users. Unfortunately this suffers from combinatiorial explosion.

- Using a rights plugin with custom CalDav Attributes and a modified web plugin I added support for access Control Lists.

- To enable public calendars you give read permissions to the `public` user using ACL. Then a nginx hack gives blanket acces for read operations:

  location /public {
      proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:{%RADICALE_PORT%};
      include proxy_params;
      proxy_set_header Authorization "Basic {%RADICALE_PUBLIC_AUTH%}";
      proxy_hide_header Authorization;
      add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin * always;
      add_header Access-Control-Allow-Methods "GET, OPTIONS, PROPFIND";
      add_header Access-Control-Allow-Headers "Depth";
      limit_except GET OPTIONS PROPFIND { deny all; }
  }

I should probably write a blog post about the setup.

I have two calendars, one on my personal server running Mailcow (SoGO) and my work calendar with Fastmail.

They don't work together- I've never found a way to get mailcow's calendar to work with other tools well, and so I spend time syncing between them semi-manually.

I've wanted to de-couple the calendar for a while but the only alternative I knew about was Nextcloud, which I think is a bit heavy weight.

This Baïkal looks great and I can't wait to give it a try. Doing this will also allow me to explore changing out Mailcow for another self-hosted mail service.

Back in the early 2000's I used Mozilla Sunbird to host my calendar on my personal Win2k server via IIS's WebDAV module… I don't think CardDAV was a thing yet but I might be mistaken.

I ended up importing all that data from it into my Google Calendar which is kind of fun because I've got all my homework and whatnot for college courses on there if you go back far enough.

When I do eventually revisit this I am going to look at DAViCal again, as well as Radicale[1], and now Baikal.

[0] https://www.davical.org/

[1] https://radicale.org/v3.html

I really don't understand how these 2 major providers cannot fix what seems to me such a basic feature.

If using my own system would solve it, I'd do it immediately, but I am afraid that it would be just the same: meeting created on Outlook and imported with 2 hours difference.

1. Create a memories like feature from my photos to send on my cell phone, grouping by different features I like: anniversaries, similar activities, A `Me an X(X is Spouse, family, friends etc)`, Over the years(how x has evolved over the years).

2. Be able to save photos taken from my device to my servers.

I've set up three true-nas machines in different places with 2TB of space and want to slowly build this feature.

https://github.com/39aldo39/DecSync

But, solutions like FreeBusy.io do offer connections and work well on calendering polls, etc.

When working with a world locked in Google, Apple, or Microsoft calendaring/groupware solutions on scheduling, it can be a hassle. But, if AI had to roll my own caldav, I probably would not so kudos to the author and effort here.

Check

"calendar systems suck. All of them."

Double check

"I’m trying to break off of big tech as much as I can"

I wish I could check this more ...

I've had similar needs/desires/gripes with my calendars and the terrible state of calendaring apps for a while. So thank you for scratching your own itch and sharing it with us.

I'm curious when you say that "[CalDAV] is an area begging for disruption". Can you enlighten us as to what your wishlist could be for (a) better protocol/systems/ecosystem might be? (a rant about your pain points might work too).

Thanks again!

My recurring events are all blocked off on the calendars already ("private" for personal events on my work calendar), so it really is quite a quick update.

I only need to manually add some appointments per week (not even every day, I'm a lucky guy) and realized I do not even need a grid layout for my calendar.

Having worked with times and dates in my favorite programming language already, I feel confident I can make something simple based on the standard default classes.

Even running something as simple and important as a calendar through third-party apps has started feeling very strange the last years.

The integrations that are installed on the end devices (phone) sync all that private data into the cloud platform regardless of the backend server. State is shared.

Google Information Services, and Apple's backend's unpublicized equivalent both process and store that related data, regardless of the phone you choose to use or the options you choose on that phone. There is a reason gigabytes get sent up to the cloud every evening, and its all encrypted.

Until you remove the implants on your phone you won't be able to receive any benefit from repatriating the data. That requires jailbreaking, or installing a new OS (something like Graphene), which is model specific due to compatibility issues.

One thing for which I don't have a solution yet, and neither does that article seem to address, is how to send invites. My data is one next cloud now, so if I create an invite it sends it. But if I create a it from a client (eg phone) it doesn't. The best I've found is manually export as ics and send an email myself, which ain't great.

Anyone has a solution for that?

  services:
    baikal:
      image: ckulka/baikal:0.9.5
      restart: always
      ports:
        - "XXXX:80"
      volumes:
        - /mnt/baikal/data:/var/www/baikal/config
        - /mnt/baikal/data:/var/www/baikal/Specific

  volumes:
    config:
    data:

https://homefree.host

Other variants of this malady include:

- Building a todo list app. - Building a web framework. - Editing Wikipedia articles. - Building your kernel.

This part confused me a bit. Wouldn't running the NAS at home be more safe and secure? Or are they talking about backup safety?

Ultimate self hosting that. Also only costs $15/year approx.

I'm in the Proton ecosystem, but from what I understand their Calender kind of sucks right now.

Is this feasible? Has anyone seen a tool like this yet?

Citizenship application is asking for my travel for the past couple years. And I have no idea. Especially since in Europe a weekend getaway to another country is feasible.

Some sort of long term tracking would have been really useful

At Qbix, we build software for communities to collaboratively manage various things, and that includes events. For example, here are three sites we built, all different:

1) https://yang2020.app for Andrew Yang's 2020 campaign and Yang Gangs - to help people collectively organize and knock on doors, etc.

2) https://new.freetalklive.com for a libertarian show that pulls their episodes into the site, and let people watch and discuss them

3) https://gba.community for their annucal conferences in Washington DC - all the speakers, events, etc.

We've long ago implemented integrations with people's devices (phones, computers). You can add contacts to your address book using .vcf files, and they can even contain thumbnails. They don't need to include people's phone numbers, they can include their IDs on your site, and URLs to contact them.

Similarly, we have a button to subscribe to calendars, and it even works on MacOS. Imagine each user having a calendar appear on their phone. The subscription will pull new events into the calendar, update and remove old ones. About the only downside is that the OS usually suppresses any VALERT info that we place there, so you can't place alerts on these events. But you can have location, directions, etc. You can have a URL for group rides. We've built it all!

For both contacts and events, what you really want is access control - some people can see some things, others can see other things. If you paid for an event, you can see the location and time, for instance. You can maybe see the speakers, etc.

It was my main reason to purchase Motion but they eventually removed it.

1. Create a shared family calendar 2. For things that need to block work calendar, invite my work email to the event.

Ownership is not about storing everything at home (or well, it's part of it), but having control over your data, which you can easily have while at the same time using the convenience that the cloud offers.

In the cloud your major concern is not losing data, but losing access to data, and you can counter that with making backups.

If privacy is a concern, use something like Cryptomator[1] to source encrypt data before uploading it. Cryptomator in particular integrates well with mobile phone operating systems, and has clients for all major operating systems (yes, Linux included).

Source encrypt your backups as well, and nobody can read your data besides you.

[1]: https://cryptomator.org