Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Owning my own data, part 1: Integrating a self-hosted calendar solution

emilygorcenski.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 157 posts

Re: Owning my own data, part 1: Integrating a self-hosted calendar solution

#91

Post by 8fingerlouie »

I know this is not what people want to hear, but your data will never be safer than it is in the cloud. No setup you can dream up at home with in a reasonable budget will ever come close to the resilience and redundancy you have in the cloud.

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

Re: Owning my own data, part 1: Integrating a self-hosted calendar solution

#92

Post by singron »

dceddia wrote: post #88

I have the weirdest calendar problem: if someone sends an invite to my Fastmail account, it gets swallowed up by Gmail. It never shows up in Fastmail, and in the calendar invite it appears as if it was sent to my Gmail address even though it wasn’t. It’s the strangest thing and I don’t know how to stop it or even what’s causing it (Fastmail support also had no idea).

Does this always happen or only sometimes? In Google calendar, if the event is modified through the API, there is an option to suppress change notifications, and this can prevent non-google calendars from getting invites.

Also did you create a Google account using your fastmail address? I haven't tested it, but it's possible this causes a hairpin route where Google supresses the outbound email since it thinks it can directly modify the calendar.

Re: Owning my own data, part 1: Integrating a self-hosted calendar solution

#93

Post by ubermonkey »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #91

I know this is not what people want to hear, but your data will never be safer than it is in the cloud. No setup you can dream up at home with in a reasonable budget will ever come close to the resilience and redundancy you have in the cloud. 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 conve…

Yeah, it's really about picking your hosting partner.

I'm happy with Apple and iCloud holding our personal contacts and calendars. I'm happy with Fastmail holding our email. I still have local (and other online) backups, of course.

Re: Owning my own data, part 1: Integrating a self-hosted calendar solution

#94

Post by darkwater »

fourseventy wrote: post #60
itissid wrote: post #30

Nice!. I would like to do something like this but for Photos. I want to get off Dropbox and Google for a while. At the top of my list are: 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 fro…

I just did this a few months ago. I used PhotoPrism https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism

I used Photoprism for over a year, even paid the "server license" and I'm now using Immich which is much more powerful, sleek, gets new features very quickly (sometimes it's even too fast paced) and in general has got much more traction with the community.

Re: Owning my own data, part 1: Integrating a self-hosted calendar solution

#95

Post by [deleted] »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #91

I know this is not what people want to hear, but your data will never be safer than it is in the cloud. No setup you can dream up at home with in a reasonable budget will ever come close to the resilience and redundancy you have in the cloud. 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 conve…

[deleted]

Re: Owning my own data, part 1: Integrating a self-hosted calendar solution

#96

Post by murki »

itissid wrote: post #30

Nice!. I would like to do something like this but for Photos. I want to get off Dropbox and Google for a while. At the top of my list are: 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 fro…

If you use a synology NAS their OS (Diskstation Manager) supports this via their Photos[1] and Moments[2] apps

[1] https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/feature/photos [2] https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/feature/moments

Re: Owning my own data, part 1: Integrating a self-hosted calendar solution

#97

Post by thequux »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #82
philsnow wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bflesch might be suggesting that you (or some other motivated + heroic person) write a new spec for calendar collaboration, like what jmap.io is trying to do for mail. I know that calendars and datetime management suck, hard. I hazard a guess that several people have already started trying to replace caldav (because of the suckage of caldav) and have quietly given up (because of the suckage of datetimes and timezones…

I thought the solution to datetime was almost always to use TAI plus a library to convert for display in the UI. (Or UTC and accept that leap seconds might cause bugs.)

Calendar apps expose all of the weird edge cases in dates and times. For a specific instance of a specific event that never needs to move, TAI will work. However, suppose that you schedule a meeting for 28 March at 13:00. You then move that meeting forward a week, crossing a DST switch. If you simply add 604800 seconds to the TAI, that meeting will be at 14:00, which is surprising. OK, easy enough to solve; convert the TAI back to the local timezone, add 7 to the day field (carrying into month and year, as needed), and you're good to go. Now suppose that the meeting was set up in the US, and you realized that you needed to reschedule the meeting while you were travelling in Germany. You get back to the US, and suddenly the meeting is an hour early, because DST rules aren't universal.

Worse, imagine a recurring meeting, every week at noon. You've got the TAI for the original instance, but as you cross a DST boundary, some places will shift according to DST and others won't, and thus you have half the attendees showing up at the wrong time.

Finally, TAI introduces the leap second bug for calendars. When you schedule a meeting for noon next year, you want that to happen at noon, not now plus however many seconds. If a leap second is introduced, you don't want that meeting to happen at one second before or after noon.

TBH, if you find yourself in a situation where you need to deal with calendar events, I recommend updating your CV.

Re: Owning my own data, part 1: Integrating a self-hosted calendar solution

#98

Post by cratermoon »

johnnyAghands wrote: post #73
cratermoon wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! The EXIF data includes the full plantuml used to generate it, under the Plantuml tag. https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/uml/VPBFQXmn3CRlynGYzzdUXn...

Wow! That's pretty slick. I've only thought of EXIF data in the context of my digital camera.

I believe, though I can't find an unambiguous reference, that a tool or user is allowed to define and populate any XMP/Exif attribute it wants, within the technical limits of attribute/value definition of the relevant metadata. Whether or not anything else can read and make sense of that metadata is a different problem.

Re: Owning my own data, part 1: Integrating a self-hosted calendar solution

#99

Post by ranger207 »

I've been using Baikal for a few years now and it's very solid, although it's just for myself and I don't have all of OP's requirements. For my desktop I just use Thunderbird's built in calendar to connect, and on my phone I use DAVx5 and Fossify Calendar from F-Droid. It's forked from Simple Mobile Tools's Calendar app, but unlike the name it's actually the most fully-featured calendar app I've seen. It's "simple" in the way that it just presents you with every option instead of forcing you do dig through half a dozen menus and dialogs to do what you want to do, which is very nice.

Re: Owning my own data, part 1: Integrating a self-hosted calendar solution

#100

Post by raegis »

samspot wrote: post #53
VyseofArcadia wrote: post #37

I have a self hosted calendar solution. It was $15 at Staples, and it hangs in my kitchen. It wasn't a complete out of the box solution, though, I had to do a little work to customize it. I placed a pen cup with a few pens in it on the counter near the calendar to ensure it is always easy to modify.

My wife uses this solution. When I am at work and someone wants to know if I can do a team dinner, I have to call her if she's at home, or tell them I'll get back to them. I never know if I'm free and finding out is inefficient at best.

I used to do this with my wife, and it drove me crazy. Now we use a shared Google calendar, which works way better than prior solutions. Our unspoken rule: if there is an open time slot available, the first to enter it in the shared calendar wins. We're both responsible for entering all family-related appointments in the calendar as soon as they come up. There have been conflicts when either of us forgets to enter something into the calendar, but we just resolve the conflicts as usual. This was a game-changer from my point of view.
Post reply on HN