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

emilygorcenski.com

121–130 of 157 posts

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

#121
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I'll preface this by stating that I fully realize that localized datetime is absolutely byzantine and fraught with difficulties. That's the rationale for leaving it to an external library as close to 100% of the time as possible. I also realize that there might well be complexities involved in calendar software that I'm unaware of. Hence my comment - I'm genuinely interested to learn. That said, I think your examples…

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.

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

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just did this with Immich. I have 2TB of photos in it and I backup my phone automatically. Using cloudflare tunnels to access remotely.

same. super convenient to be able to go to photos.[domain].com for my photos. the immich android app is great too. cloudflare tunnels is a game changer, I can't believe it's free.

> same. super convenient to be able to go to photos.[domain].com for my photos. the immich android app is great too. > > cloudflare tunnels is a game changer, I can't believe it's free.

Could you explain cloudflare tunnels are secure. I understand not punching holes through one's firewall and dealing with a residential connection that's often targeted for exploits. However, if one targets the tunnel endpoint to exploit is it more secure even though it's still exposed to the public?

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

#123
post #47

Another route is to go serverless and use DecSync. Thunderbird (or Evolution) will sync with the Android app (F-Droid available) and your Cal, your Cards, and tasks, and even RSS will be replicated on the other peers. https://github.com/39aldo39/DecSync

Interesting. I don't see any iOS support, and unfortunately it doesn't seem to be maintained.

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

#124
post #65

I too have been on a very aggressive mission to decloudify myself lately(as in, since comrade musk and co took over everything and I have 0 reason to trust him or anyone around him). And to be fair, for all the hundreds of gigabytes of data I have, the migration took no longer than two weeks, on and off, and it works infinitely better than I was hoping. The only service I've outsourced is email since I hate dealing w…

> It's biggest strength is that it's both accessible and has a slot for an M.2 NVME and a SATA drive so you can have a safe backup in one spot.

If you want to increase the resiliency of your data, look up the 3-2-1 backup strategy (and maybe also RAID).

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

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just did this with Immich. I have 2TB of photos in it and I backup my phone automatically. Using cloudflare tunnels to access remotely.

same. super convenient to be able to go to photos.[domain].com for my photos. the immich android app is great too. cloudflare tunnels is a game changer, I can't believe it's free.

Check out pangolin. You can get all the awesome of cloudflare tunnela without having your traffic sold to dat aggregators. Jims garge on youtube just did a decent video on it.

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

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

same. super convenient to be able to go to photos.[domain].com for my photos. the immich android app is great too. cloudflare tunnels is a game changer, I can't believe it's free.

> same. super convenient to be able to go to photos.[domain].com for my photos. the immich android app is great too. > > cloudflare tunnels is a game changer, I can't believe it's free. Could you explain cloudflare tunnels are secure. I understand not punching holes through one's firewall and dealing with a residential connection that's often targeted for exploits. However, if one targets the tunnel endpoint to explo…

Secure how? You're exposing a port to the Internet, the tunnel doesn't make it more or less secure. If you don't trust the service, don't expose it.

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

#127

If you are on NixOS for your home server, take a look at my project that does most of the work for you. Bundles router, DDNS, firewall, vpn, ad blocking, and all the apps into a single integrated service if your machine has two ethernet ports. Even if you don't use it directly, the services are broken out into modules which can be referenced for your own setup: https://homefree.host

> most of the work for you To be fair, I think the author's main work was spent on tailoring those calendar import/export scripts. :) As for your setup, what do you use for calendar & contacts hosting? I couldn't find any details about that on your website.

It's still a work in progress, but currently exposes baikal, radicale, and nextcloud as services. I'm looking to add a front end that integrates calendar, contacts, and docs without needing to know what "caldav" is. Look in the "services" folder of the source repo to see which services are already integrated.

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

#128
This is one of those deep dives whereby you are either pivoting into building a calendar startup, or you are massively procrastinating actual work by overfocusing on scratching some tech itch.

Other variants of this malady include:

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

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

#129
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I'll preface this by stating that I fully realize that localized datetime is absolutely byzantine and fraught with difficulties. That's the rationale for leaving it to an external library as close to 100% of the time as possible. I also realize that there might well be complexities involved in calendar software that I'm unaware of. Hence my comment - I'm genuinely interested to learn. That said, I think your examples…

> You never move events around in TAI (the unambiguous storage format) just as you don't go manually flipping bits in an SQLite database.

You actually do. From the point of view of future scheduled events, a event scheduled for 13h00 in a specific timezone is still "13h00 in a specific timezone" even when crazy people on that timezone suddenly declare a new Daylight savings time to start before the event happens. All future "timestamps" are prone to move due to such shenanigans. And you need to keep your timezone DB as updated as possible to update thing as soon as possible, if you don't want users with wrong times on their future events.

If you're not doing something like full rfc9557 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9557 "Internet Extended Date/Time Format (IXDTF)" [iso 8601 local time + as-of-now known timezone offset + IANA timezone] as "timestamps" you're probably truncating important information that will bite you back later if you're doing a calendar/scheduler.

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

#130
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…

Nextcloud memories if you use NC already, otherwise immich is pretty good like others have mentioned
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