Gregory Tarnoff » Calendars

New year, new post, new things to get done. GSDASTFA

admin — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 03:16:38 +0000

Welcome to 2010.

So according to the movies I grew up watching, we are supposed to have interplanetary travel, contact with alien life, flying cars, and personal robots. Well it hasn’t come around at this point, but some goods things have, for me at least.

I just completed my first year trying to live a vegan life. It hasn’t been one hundred percent successful, I did have a few days where I consumed dairy products, but overall things are going well. I lost nearly 35 pounds just by eating vegan. I find myself more compassionate towards others, calmer, and thoughtful. I also completed my third year without a cigarette. This is awesome.

With 2010 here, I thought it might be a good idea to jot down some things I’d like to accomplish. These aren’t resolutions, but focal points of my time. So without further ado….

Write more. The plan right now is to write one article every two weeks. Starting with this one. Some will be on tech/web issues. Others will be philosophical musings, Buddhist or vegan oriented. (Although I will post any recipes I come up with on my other site http://www.veganseat.info)
Up my creative game. This one is a little tougher, but also a little broader. I want to produce one piece of creative content (not tied to a job) per week. This could be HTML/CSS, Javascript, a WordPress theme, a full site, or a poster/wallpaper. The point is to push my personal envelope creatively and develop my skills.
365 self portrait. This is pretty straight forward: take a self portrait every day. See my progress on flickr – http://www.flickr.com/photos/urothane/sets/72157622992286695/
Bike more. Do yoga more. I am trying to do one or both each day, along with meditating. I want to get fit, have more energy and maybe try to bike a century ride this year.
Get more tattoos. If you happen to have a tattoo studio and need some web work, lets talk trade.

Me Time – My Experience So Far With MobileMe

admin — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:50:22 +0000

Apple’s update of their .Mac online presence and syncing software has received numerous critiques since it’s launch earlier this month. People have struggled with the service being up and lost mail. I struggled with getting it to work for a few days until I stumbled across a solution in the forums that even the Apple techs didn’t have me try. Since then things have been pretty smooth with the exception of calendars.

I bought my iPhone last year to help become more organized. One of my favorite features was that I would be able to sync up my home and work calendars. At work we use Exchange on PCs and at home I use a Mac. I found a method of exporting my work calendar daily to Google’s calendar and then subscribing to that calendat with iCal. At first this was a little clunky but better than the other smartphones I had considered and didn’t cost me a dime. When Google released their sync program for Outlook this became much easier as I didn’t need to do the export.

With the launch of MobileMe they pitched that they would “push” my calendar down to my phone from the MobileMe cloud. Problem is that it doesn’t push down my subscribed calendars. There have been many work-arounds people have suggested, but none of them are clean , easy, and free as of yet. Apple does sync these calendars between computers (if you have two Macs for instance), but doesn’t push the events to prevent duplicating.

Why can’t Apple treat the iPhone/iPod Touch like another Mac and sync the subscribed calendars but not the events? Both of these devices have the ability to connect to the internet and retrieve the feed data so MobileMe doesn’t need to push the data down. This avoids the duplication issue and still allows us to have our subscribed calendars. At this point my trial period expires on October 9th, and while I enjoy all the features it does have, I am finding it doesn’t replace my web hosting package (I did think I could do more with iWeb) and without my calendars it doesn’t seem worth the cost.

Which brings me to another issue I only thought of today. Once I signed up for MobileMe all my music and applications I bought through the iTunes store were being logged under my MobileMe user name and not my Apple ID that I had previously established. If I let my MobileMe account expire, will I still be able to use my applications and get my application updates or will Apple no longer recognize the user name? If the application is free it doesn’t matter, its the ones I paid for that I want to make sure work.

UPDATE:

After writing this post, I began digging around my RSS feeds and trying to catch up. I came across a reference to the service Calgoo being free now. Using Calgoo and Google’s Outlook sync I was able to achieve my holy grail of sync. Technically I don’t need the Google product, but I was already using it, so there was no need to change. Google also supports CalDav now, but requires that you be on iCal 3.x which is only available to Leopard owners (I am still running Tiger) and has several known issues.
Calgoo offers a desktop application that creates connectors between calendar services. It works with Google Calendar, Outlook, iCal, 30 Boxes and Sunbird. I set up the application on my Mac at home and connected a new calendar called Work to the feed from Gcal for my synced work calendar. So on a regular basis (every hour) the Google sync grabs my Outlook calendar and puts it on Gcal. Then (also on an hourly basis) Calgoo grabs the feed from Gcal and puts it on my iCal at home. When MobileMe sync runs it updates the web calendar and my iPhone. The caveat is that my Mac has to be running at home in order for me to use Calgoo.
While this solution does work for me, it would still be simpler for Apple to allow the iPhone to fetch calendar feeds like iCal does. And It still hasn’t convinced me to pay for MobileMe yet.

Google Calendar and Outlook Synchronization from Google

admin — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 15:02:53 +0000

Google launched a synchronization tool this week that allows one-way and two-way syncing with Outlook on Windows machines (where is the Mac version for Entourage or iCal?). This looked to be the holy grail of my synchronization…but alas it is nothing more than a gilded goblet.

I currently run Outlook 2003 at work, iCal at home and on my iPhone. I manually sync my work calendar to Gcal and then use the iCal feeds Google generates to sync to my Mac and iCal. iTunes then picks up the iCal entries and syncs them to my iPhone so I am always ready to go.

This tool should allow me to no longer manually sync work to Google, but it has two major drawbacks:

It only syncs Outlook events I schedule, so all the meetings that people set up that I need to attend I still have to manually sync.
It only syncs the primary Google calendar. I have 11 calendars I use. One for home events, like kids activities. One each for bills, birthdays, weekly menus, paydays (I can separate income from expense this way), work (now), work sync, and several public calendars including Christian, Jewish and US holidays. While I wouldn’t mind if the public calendars don’t get synced, I should at least be able to sync calendars I make like my Home one.

I am rather disappointed with this first release as it really doesn’t achieve much in the way of getting things done and staying organized. I still don’t know how the Google accepting other calendar invitations piece works which of course could alleviate this whole mess as well.

Google Lets You Associate Other Emails to Your Account

admin — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 16:25:42 +0000

So this week Google rolled out this little new feature that in their words:

Adding email addresses helps Google associate useful information with your Google Account. For example, Google Calendar can show invitations sent to any of your addresses.

I thought this was genius. I am constantly having syncing issues with my calendars. I bought the iPhone in September because I thought it would be the solution, however the solution is to export my work calendar (from Outlook) and import it to Google Calendars which I have a feed imported into my Mac iCal. The loop hole here is that I don’t like exporting my work calendar daily.

This new feature could answer that. I associated my work email address with my Google account but when people sent me meeting invites, nothing happened. So I tried my Yahoo! email address and sent an invite to myself. Still nothing happened.

Has anybody gotten this to work yet? Is the invites thing something “coming soon”?