[Remind-Fans] Nokia phone calendar to Remind

[David]

I have a Nokia 6680 phone where I keep my main calendar and appointments,
and managed to get it synching automatically with Remind. Right now it's
_very_ crude, one-way sync from the phone to the computer, and it does not
include TODOs.

The Nokia 6680 runs Symbian (S60 2nd edition feature pack 2). The calendar
has 3 kinds of appointments: Meeting, Memo and Anniversary. SyncML synching
via OpenSync turns these appointments to vCal 1.0 files, with a few quirks.

The phone is paired and set up to accept Bluetooth connections from the
computer without asking. I use opensync 0.22 and msynctool in a script, run
from a cron job every day at 5:00, to grab the calendar from the phone via
Bluetooth. The OpenSync plugins used are 'syncml-obex-client' (reads the
calendar from the phone) and 'file-sync' (writes it to vCal 1.0 files on
disk).

Before calling msynctool, the cron script deletes all vCal files downloaded
in the previous sync, and all *.db files under ~/.opensync-0.22/group1/.
This ensures the calendar on the phone is never overwritten and the sync is
is one-way; otherwise events will be duplicated on the phone (opensync 0.22
is a bit unstable).

Then, the cron script calls a modified version of the ical2rem.rb Ruby
script by Patrick Hof. I pipe to it the vCal files one by one, converting
them to Remind format.

The ncal2rem.rb script:
-Handles vCal 1.0 recurrence RRULEs, using Remind's SATISFY
-Converts EXDATEs to local OMITs for recurrent events
-Adapts RRULE recurrence to match that on the phone (e.g. a monthly repeat
of January 31 should only match the 31st day of months with 31 days, but the
phone will make it match the last day of every month)
-If the event is set up in the phone as CLASS:PRIVATE, it will nest the
reminder inside 'IF defined("private") [...] ENDIF' clauses
-Converts all calendar events, but does nothing with their alarms (I want
calendar alarms to come only from the phone)
-Is ugly as sin (and I mean that... quick and dirty job, plus my first time
with Ruby/vPim)

I'm attaching the script here in case someone wants to play with it, but
keep in mind I altered it to suit my needs for my own personal use. All the
original TODO handling code is commented out since I didn't need it. Also,
newer Nokia phones may handle the calendar in a different way.

The end result: I still manage my calendar from my phone as I'm used to do,
but now I always have an up-to-date backup copy. I use the computer as an
alarm clock to wake me up in the morning, using a text-to-speech engine
(festival) to read aloud date, time, weather reports and news from the net,
and now, my appointments for the day as well.
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