Feature Request: Manual Refresh of external calendar feeds
productforums.google.com
productforums.google.com
I bet you my e-mail server has caught this recently. Let's see:
# zgrep photos /var/log/exim4/rejectlog*
/var/log/exim4/rejectlog.17.gz:2016-07-24 04:34:41 H=mail-qk0-f201.google.com [209.85.220.201] F=<3y6eUVwYUADANRSTQeNRSTQe.kkPQeeM.ebMOQ@photos-server.bounces.google.com> rejected RCPT <ada-mp1-request@kylheku.com>: Too many components in domain name
[... snip, a number of hits going back to May ... ]
So that's how I'm catching this stuff now: my rule against too many components in the sender domain is taking care of it, currently, before anything more specific.
Here is one 2012-dated discussion about this:
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/bQd_kZl...
It goes back before that, though, to at least 2010.
This isn't like when Google actually broke the telephony in the Nexus 4 and then finally closed the issue with a middle finger: https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=82949
My calendar on my phone routinely forgets to remind me, even though clearly the entry says "remind me 1 hour before" and other events with the same reminders work fine.
Are there any good calendar hosting companies where I could pay a few $$ a month for decent features, bug fixes, and service?
Or maybe it's time to brush up on Kotlin and just write it myself.
Searching around only returned me smartphone apps that connect to Google Calendar, with a couple of actual alternatives (Zoho, which I'm using as a primary email provider and can't set the freaking timezone right, and Outlook calendar, where I absolutely despise its web design).
It's like nobody's even trying to implement this properly. I'm trying out Yahoo's calendar now.
A German privacy focused mail provider where you also get a calendar. I didn't use the calendar yet but their mail servers are faster than anything else I've seen. And you can encrypt your whole account on their server so that noone but you can read your mails.
Edit: their English website is https://posteo.de/en
While Google's calendar does have a "Birthdays" calendar, it only includes birthdays from your Google+ contacts, and there's absolutely no way of adding a custom birthday into it. So, you would have to have a Google+ account and add every single person you want to include birthdays in as your Google+ contact.
Outlook's calendar has an option of connecting to Facebook and collecting birthday info from your friend list if you wish to. I know that Russian Mail.ru calendar also has this option (+ optional email alerts for birthdays). Pretty handy if you keep your Facebook friend list nice and short. You don't have to add all of them manually.
It's an important distinction. The second rate calendar apps pushed out by the phone manufacturer are generally pretty buggy and hardly ever see proper updates for security or bugs.
Solution: Download Google Calendar from the Play Store here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
Open it up and give it access to your calendar, contacts, etc as requested. Then go and disable the calendar app that came with your phone.
My company pays quite a bit for Google services (including calendar), and I personally have had this problem bite me for meetings which don't show up in the feed until well after they've occurred.
Unfortunately this is not the case of Google
If you are paying for Google services and you aren't getting your money's worth, look elsewhere, IMO.
But, what's probably contributing the most to it is how Google incentivizes people internally. The promotion process is tied very heavily towards launching new features.
Maintaining existing products is (often) a bit of a career dead end for Googlers. It's safer to chase some new and shiny feature.
My naive assumption is that they prioritize by popularity?
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608016...
Apparently this case isn't special enough to make an exception, which is understandable since you can just use an addon to restore the old behaviour.
And it's really good for full keyboard navigation. What I'm trying to get at is that, power users have options.
To me, personally, backspace made sense but even as a power user of sorts I'd say I've used it accidentally more often than not.
Other browsers have already implemented the proper solution, which is to cache form inputs across history navigation, but they simply didn't care enough to actually improve the user experience.
Backspace isn't a navigation function. It's to delete the last character. We have navigation keys they're called cursors.
Glad to see the back of backspace.
However, it would have been nicer for the Chromium developers to allow users to remap key bindings instead of removing the binding and telling users to use an unpublished extension to add the functionality back.
Like, you know, the entire video game industry has managed to do for decades?
For starters, you don't expect to be able to sit down in a public library and have their freely-provided copy of Elite: Dangerous work the way it does at home.
Backspace was problematic because it was too easy to accidentally activate, plus you'd still need to know about ALT+RIGHT ARROW to go forward again which wasn't consistent.
They were right to remove it. Terrible hotkey.
Or, you know, use shift+backspace, just like you can use shift+space to scroll back up.
Incidentally, aren't there already Chrome extensions to change the behavior to what it was originally? [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/backspace-as-backf...]
I'm happy backspace is gone. It's non standard UX behaviour in comparison to other browsers like Safari & Firefox etc.
Better use alt+arrow keys (this works also in all other browsers).
It's easy to see how people would loose data by accidentally using backspace. I'm fine with Alt-Left and Right click -> Back.
The right click -> back method sounds clunky, but it's actually extremely convenient.
I dropped Chrome after Vivaldi came out, but there are plenty of other Chromium-based browsers to try....
http://www.computerhope.com/unix/ucalande.htm
Place a text file at ~/.calendar/calendar with one event per row, containing the date and the title separated by a tab. Type calendar and you'll get a list of what's coming up in the next few days. You're done.
Being a venerable UNIX utility there are of course a variety of options (switch to view X days in the future, support for including external calendars, support for recurrence, etc.). Weirdly, it lacks any concept of start and end time, but this is easy enough to simply include in your appointment's title. And no free/busy or special sharing mechanism (though you could certainly compose your calendar of several files and expose them on a web server easily enough).
It's not about to replace a full-blown calendar app for power users, but if you're the type of person who has a fairly light meeting schedule and spends a lot of time in a terminal... I was immediately done with all other calendar software and consequently all the problems of said software when I stumbled across this thing.
I have personal experience with this. Because of the lack of reliable iCal sync, a project I worked on had to spend over a week and a half of developer hours implementing, troubleshooting, and maintaining Google Calendar API integration for our users. It's the source of no shortage of pain for this app as it is a sideline feature, but has just enough demand that Google integration cannot be dropped.
Google doesn't want to support iCal because they want to have everyone use their API.
What does the Gmail API add over IMAP?
poor guy
To clarify: at the time of initially writing this comment, there were only two comments in this thread: the parent of this comment, which said it was 6 years ago; and another, which said it was 10 years ago. I don't know or care whether it was legitimate for either to come to the conclusion they did, I just thought it was funny, and that it was most likely due to the super-short date format inside the link. Can we move on please?
Peer into the madness, and quake in fear.
If the only way to interpret "1/5/10" as 2001 is to assume the formatting is hosed, then I guess one could also assume the character encoding was mangled and the bytes for "1" and "5" should perhaps be in a crazy encoding (think ebcdic on steroids) that maps them to "7" and "-2".
So I guess assuming the date "1/5/10" could refer to the year 2BC is about as logical as assuming it could refer to 2001?
And the 10th of May, 2001, wasn't 10 years ago anyway (not that it is relevant)...
During the first decade of the 21st Century, I regularly encountered dates, especially handwritten, with single digit years, because some people first reduce to a two-digit year when writing dates, but then -- as with any other number -- leave off leading zeros.
But even ignoring that, I've never ever seen a single person write a single-digit year. Not alone ("I graduated in 1" vs "I graduated in 2001"), not in dates ("August 7, 1" vs "August 7, 2001"), not anywhere.
> when I searched on the problem just now, I found complaints about the same problem going back to 2006.
This might seem like a flippant comment, but it explains a lot of the observations I've made of Google over the years.
The most plausible explanation I came up with (and what I tell my users) is that Calendar is maintained by a small team in Switzerland for which this isn't a priority. I don't blame anyone, if true. It might not be easy to fix with little resources.
The fact that some feeds sync faster than others (Facebook events) and syncs speed up as time passes, makes for a weird case.
Outlook.com or iCloud/iCal sync properly. One of those offer a way out for my users if critical.