The what?

A few minutes ago I was sitting on a sofa with nothing to do, thinking, "maybe it's time for my annual blog entry". You may be wondering whether you should bother reading something that's been created simply because I had nothing better to do, but I submit to you that all good things are created that way. Think about it. Anyway, it's mostly about calendars, which sounds boring but it's astonishingly enlightening. There's a bit at the end about the rest of my life, if you're interested.

Anyway, the great synchronisation is the title I've given to the epic drama that has unfolded in my life over the past few days. For years I lived with no form of organisation in my life, as I couldn't come up with an effective calendar system. I'm a modern kind of guy, and find writing with ink on paper to be a real chore. But I'd never found an electronic calendar that I could use with different operating systems and on my phone, all telling me the same thing. Hence the quest for "The Great Synchronisation".

The Task

I own a Nokia E51 running Symbian 60 version 3, and find the built in calendar to be pretty handy. If I wanted to make things easy for myself, I could use Microsoft Outlook and use Nokia's software to synchronise the two calendars. But no: I have to insist on using Mozilla Thunderbird, and for reasons I can't even remember. Perhaps it's because it looks pretty next to my Firefox. So I wanted to sync the two calendars together. But not just that: I wanted to synchronise my calendars with my work calendar, which uses Microsoft Entourage, of all things. Finally, I wanted my future wife (wife as of next Friday!) to be able to view my calendar, and make changes as she sees fit. Hmm, reading that back makes me realise just how crazy that sounds.

The next part of the task was to get some standard of contacts. My phone was full of people and numbers, with no email addresses or house addresses, and my thunderbird contacts were full of emails with no names. They were also totally seperate, and I often needed contacts that I had on a different system.

The last part of the task was sorting my email out. My phone has some pretty useful tools, one of them being wi-fi. For a while I used it to collect emails on the go from my jon@joncairns account, until I got annoyed with it downloading the same messages as I'd already downloaded on Thunderbird. I was using a POP server, and knew I needed an SMTP server. I would have had to pay more to my server to upgrade to SMTP, which of course was totally outrageous. If only there was some way of fixing all the problems above...

(By the way, if you're not interested in computery stuff you might want to skim read the next few paragraphs. I did make a rather lovely flow chart, so don't miss that.)

"Ladies and Gentlemen: Google"

I've had a Google email account for a while now, but purely for the sake of having a Google email account. I had a total of 3 messages in my inbox, two of them from Google and one from me. The main reason for this neglect is that the best address I could get isn't exactly snappy, containing my full name and middle initial. Besides, I like jon@joncairns. I pay for it.

But Google calendar tips the scales for me. With Google calendar you can create as many calendars as you want, and they overlap to show on one master calendar. You can also subscribe to general calendars and access friends' calendars at their discretion. Each calendar is given an XML, HTML and ICS link for distributing and embedding. You can also set users with different permissions, such as viewing, viewing and editing, or administration. This makes it perfect for what I want to do.

Synchronising the calendars

I downloaded the Lightning add-on for Thunderbird, which provides an excellent integrated calendar. I then got hold of Provider for Google Calendar, another add-on which allows for bidirectional access (i.e. I can add and edit entries on either calendar, and they both update). This works perfectly, and there was little to no hear-tearing in setting it up.

Then I wanted to sync my work calendar, Microsoft Entourage on Mac, with my Google Calendar and thus my Thunderbird calendar. Entourage is suprisingly picky about what it syncs with, but one of those things is Apple iCal. And I found some free software that syncs iCal with Google Calendars, Calgoo. I don't use iCal at all, so it's not exactly the most direct route to synchronisation. But it's free and gets the job done.

I then set up Mail for Exchange on my phone, using Google's instructions (if you do this, make sure you only ever try to sync contacts and calendar, nothing else, or it won't work at all). This then receives and sends calendar entries beautifully.

I realise that most people aren't as gifted as me, brain-wise. But that's fine, I still choose to include you. Therefore, I've created a helpful flow chart that describes the functionality of my current calendar system:

That should clear things up.

Synchronising the contacts

I found that mail for exchange synchronised my contacts very well too, so I established my Google account as a contact home. I then downloaded the cryptically titled "Google Contacts" add-on for Thunderbird, which adds a folder to my address book that automatically loads my Google contacts. Now I have a standard contact system.

Sorting out my email

Finally, I delved into the settings on my Google account to find that I could assimilate other email accounts, and receive all emails into my Google account. Not only that, but Google has both POP and SMTP servers. I then set up my Google mail SMTP accounts on Thunderbird and my phone, and set my outgoing identities to make it look as if emails are being sent from jon@joncairns (that's a whole other story). Now I can read emails on my phone or PC, and don't get duplicates. Best of all, I've created an automatic back up of all my emails, since I can look back on my original server.

Now all I need is a life

Naturally I began to get pretty excited about everything I'd achieved. Well, who wouldn't? But as my tinkering entered its 82nd hour I briefly thought to myself, "maybe I should spend more time getting things to put in my calendar than synchronising nothing". After all, it looks bad if you start scheduling in things like "sleep", "watch tv" and "synchronise calendars".

My life has gone through some fairly radical changes recently, as friends will know. And to them I say Birmingham is great, but I can't wait to get married and share it with my wife. It's not been too lonely so far, but I don't really want to do it on my own for much longer. And I haven't got swine flu yet!