Begging the question why not delete the contacts? I've been thinking about it: certainly most of the numbers in my contacts list are probably invalid by now. But there's definitely a delta of finality to going "oh there's like 10 people I will ever call and that number is only going to go down... "
I suppose it's the same as those who keep 100's of deserted discord servers open. FOMO? That odd chance you may need that contact.
replied to the parent, but --
Last time I tried I couldn't find a way to bulk delete contacts. I had to delete them all one by one. I couldn't stand how tedious it was and gave up. I don't feel any kind of sentimentality towards these contacts, given most of these people I haven't spoken to in nearly 15 years
I don't connect google to my phone anymore, so at least they don't pollute any data elsewhere
The problem is TAI is not the source of truth in real life. In real life, Arizona can change its laws and suddenly that event is going to happen at a different TAI timestamp. That’s why the unambiguous storage format has to be a date time with time zone, and not just a timestamp.
Good point. Seems I also made a reasoning error by failing to consider that timezones, being arbitrary legal constructs, can be changed at the drop of a hat. However it doesn't seem particularly difficult to fix. My error was suggesting using TAI for storage. I guess that works only for events in the past. So the timezone that the event belongs to is what should have been used for storage, you should forget leap seco…
In practice it is difficult enough, to do the right date arithmetic using the datetime library in the right timezone.
CalDav and the ecosystem of libraries and self-hosted solution around it is horrible. Don’t do it yourself. Just use https://calendar.online/ and call it a day.
I know I will probably get pushback over this, but CalDAV sucks . People say that it's great and that it's easy; yet if that were true there would be way more self-hosted CalDAV solutions out there and they would be far more ergonomic than what's available. I was not impressed with Radicale. Because there's really only one calendar file I wanted to serve to myself, I tried implementing my own CalDAV server just for t…
My CalDAV provider is ZOHO. To sync with Android I use DAVX5 which runs a background sync service (open source and non-root). I had a lot of issues getting it working, could be because of different CalDAV implementations. DAVX5 to ZOHO calendar sync takes forever. Evolution on Ubuntu has pretty good CalDAV support, but it would refresh the entire calendar each time upon switchin between the mail view and calendar vie…
I also use zoho (for mail, calendar, contacts) for my family and I...and yeah the first time i set it up with DavX5, it was odd to say the least...though not sure if it was zoho's fault, or maybe both some possible glitch with zoho and DavX5, that didn't quite jive with my brain - at first. Now, i see no issues with Davx5 and zoho cal and contacts...at least it sync really well on my android phone. I have not tried Evolution for years (and certainly not with zoho yet), since i tend to default to thunderbird...But am about to set up my partner on one of the Gnome-based linux distros once their Windows 10 dies later this year...and considering how they like to use their computer and their workflow, gnome seems most appropriate for them, so have been considering suggesting for them to us Evolution as email client...so will be interesting to see how zoho works there. (Glad to hear it works for you!) As i noted, i like to use thunderbird, and as far as mail and calendar, actually i guess i have been lucky, since zoho seems to be working great for me - and for a couple of years now! However, contacts synching has never worked right - like, never at all. Sure i can export contacts from zoho and import them into thunderbird...so the issue is not the basics of contacts functionality within thunderbird per se...but the syncing between t'bird and zoho is certainly an issue, and have not had a chance to dive deeply enough to see if the issue is a t'bird issue or zoho...although like calendaring on my android phone, contact synching is not an issue with zoho from my phone (again via Davx5)...so, i'm confused. But, agreed with your points: i'm happ[y zoho customer, but they're not perfect...then again, at their low costs, i kinda can't complain too much. ;-)
I've been self-hosting Nextcloud for calendar and file sharing for a few years now. I use DAVx5 on my Android device and my wife's iphone syncs out of the box. It's been a very solid solution for us and isn't that difficult to get up and running.
"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).
I worked on the CalDAV client that’s in every Apple product. I agree, the protocol sucks. But we also had a ton of trouble handling Exchange and Google’s non-compliant CalDAV server, which all the users blamed us for. Now that I work at Google I can see that gCal apps use an entirely different protocol.
Would be nice if you use your experience and financial stability of a Google job in order to build a better open-source protocol. Just like when ZX2C4 decided he's fed up with OpenVPN and went to create Wireguard this might be your moment to shine. IMO the quality of software is only pushed forward by motivated individuals with the right skillset.
"Would be nice if you use your.. financial stability of a Google job to build an open-source protocol"
Well, sure, it'd be nice if we could all spend our time building things to give away for free, but it's just not always possible. Life happens and people shouldn't have to explain or apologize for it.
> I’d imagine you can set this up and run it easily from a NAS at home if you want, but I opt to keep my data safely protected in Switzerland, so I subscribe to about $100 monthly of server time to run my websites and all my integrations 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?
The author of the article researches far right extremism and has been targeted by certain groups in the past IIRC, I read this part as a concern about physical safety, but this is just my speculation.
I know I will probably get pushback over this, but CalDAV sucks . People say that it's great and that it's easy; yet if that were true there would be way more self-hosted CalDAV solutions out there and they would be far more ergonomic than what's available. I was not impressed with Radicale. Because there's really only one calendar file I wanted to serve to myself, I tried implementing my own CalDAV server just for t…
The book Dreaming in Code [1] goes into great detail about how CalDAV (and WebDAV) came about through the work of the group who built the Chandler calendar program (or tried to). It’s been a while since I read it (at least 15 years), but I think it partially discusses some of the ways a protocol like this can get lost in committees during the design process. The fact that this project started around 2001 should also…
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).
Is your Google email forwarded to the fastmail? If someone invites my personal email from Google calendar, my Gmail account gets put on the invite. I always attributed it to the forwarding. It's odd but also pretty convenient as I still use Google calendar.