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

One of those little 5 subject spiral notebooks you can pick up at the gas station work great. I've had one open on my desk next to my computer for the past 20 or so years. Never had an outtage, no subscription fees, privacy is pretty good too. Requires a pen though but that's about it.

Another CalDav server I can recommend is Radicale. It's written in python and designed in a pretty modular way, enabling authentication and authorization (and more) plugins.

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; }
  }

These public calendars are can be viewed on a web calendar (https://gitlab.nomagic.uk/popi/js_calendar_from_ics)

I should probably write a blog post about the setup.

I've been using WritePads and Pilot G2s to keep track of things these days.

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 that purpose and pretty much gave up because of how unintuitive and complicated it was merely to make a single file available. I can see why it would be needed if sharing a calendar with other people with calendar apps that support CalDAV, but I think it's kind of a waste of time if hosting a calendar for one's self.

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.

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 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.