Rube Goldberg iCal Reminders Sync (Story)

Type: story

Category: Technology

Date: 2012-02-02

Author: Randal Schwartz

Rube Goldberg iCal Reminders Sync
Inspired by a feature on FLOSS Weekly episode 199 about the Remind utility, I wanted to use it with my Mac laptop to import my reminders into macOS iCal.
Because iCal did not allow subscribing directly to a local calendar file (requiring an HTTP link instead), I constructed a "Rube Goldberg" automation pipeline:
- Input files (*.rem) were stored in my ~/.reminders directory.
- The folder was watched by Mabel (commercial folder-watching software).
- When Mabel detected a change, it ran the command-line utility rem2ics (which I hacked slightly to unquote colons) to convert the reminders to an .ics file.
- The resulting reminders.ics file was deposited back in ~/.reminders/.
- I installed the nginx web server via MacPorts with the sole job of serving reminders.ics on localhost.
- I then successfully subscribed to the reminders via http://localhost:nnnnn/reminders.ics.

These facts are as Randal recalls them, but much time has passed for most of this. If you find a factual error, please email realmerlyn@gmail.com.