Occasional Thoughts

KDE 4.4 comes with a great native editor for your blog: Blogilo. Out of the box it supports Blogger1.0, MetaWeblog, MovableType and Google GData. So Serendipity users may feel left out. However you can use Blogilo with Serendipity anyway since there is the XML-RPC plugin available. You just need to know how to configure it.

My mother wanted a simple laptop, which is sufficient for browsing the web, writing some emails and some letters. So I haven chosen a HP Compaq 615 since it has a very low price but does it's job. As I don't want to bother my mother with viruses and I wanted the flexibility to setup a system that just fits her needs, I installed Kubuntu. Therefore the next advantage of the HP Compaq 615 is that it has no Microsoft Tax - it's delivered with DR-DOS only.

Ubuntu is supported very well on this laptop. After some tweaks, I managed to get everything working but some function keys that are not really required.

Do you have a Notebook running Linux?

Do you frequently use it in different network environments with different proxy configurations?

Are you sick of frequently reconfiguring all the applications that have their own proxy settings like the web browser, the Java IDE, the desktop and the applications that uses its settings, the other desktop environment that uses other settings... and so on?

If your answer to these questions is yes, yes and yes then read on. The solution I present here allows you to configure proxy settings in any of your applications just once and will even change the proxy settings automatically as soon as you connect your laptop to a network.

There are already some documented methods on how to access your Google Calendar with KOrganizer.

In case you really want to have a (almost fully working) 2 way sync, you may check out the solution using the GCALDaemon that is described here. The GCalDaemon is a server that runs locally on your system that serves as a kind of proxy to Google Calendar. However it's major drawback is that it is written in Java. Thus you need to have a JVM running all the time just to be able to access the server. Well, I don't want to waste these resources on my Laptop.

Another possibility is to simply access the ICal address using a remote calendar directly. Well, this has the drawback that you can just access the calendar read-only. But for me a read-only access is OK. Google Calendar provides a nice web UI to enter events so I am fine with that restriction. I am more interested in getting Reminders for my events as I tend to forget the time while I am working.

But both solutions mentioned above have a major drawback: They only work while you are connected to the Internet. There are so many occassions, when I just wanted to check my calendar when I don't have an internet access like on the hallway when I just would like to see where the next meeting is located. So for me it's more important to have a calendar synchronization that syncs with offline data. But the solution is simple and may work not only with just KOrganizer, but with every application that works with ICS files. So here it is: