Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

I treat Google Calendar as a time-series database.

I have 14 calendars logging approx 500 events per month, and I have a UI for all of this... Google Calendar.

I also have API endpoints for all of this... Google Calendar. Which can be triggered by IFTTT for automatic stuff (i.e. did I Instagram something or Tweet?).

My email is linked to Gmail, so flights, itineraries, online shopping delivery, restaurant bookings can all flow in.

So the only thing I need to do manually are the few things it cannot automatically know, such as what film I just watched or what book I finished reading.

I only log public things, that is... data that exists in someone else's database somewhere. I do not log private things, i.e. Signal conversations or anything 100% offline that didn't involve a public database.

For me it's a simple thing... this data exists, can I make store it myself in a structure that I can do something interesting with it.

I have about a decade of this data.

Oh, and Google Calendar is really long in the tooth and is becoming both slow to use, hard to search, and clunky.

> Oh, and Google Calendar is really long in the tooth and is becoming both slow to use, hard to search, and clunky.

In your personnal case (because of the many events) or in general ?

I feel like calendar has been forgotten by Google (no material design for instance) and could be on the list of next things they chop off.

In general.

I don't think they'll chop it because it's critical to the GSuite business side of things.

But it's probably not receiving love as whilst Ai has seen things like Photos revamped and the emergence of Google Assistance, the applicability of this to the business stuff is more difficult for compliance reasons and politics, etc. It's easier to focus on consumer when innovating.

The weirdest bit of all of the Google offerings, is the ever-diverging difference between the capabilities of the consumer Gmail accounts and the GSuite accounts. Google's tagline of "One Account, All of Google" is long dead in reality, and with it there seems to be a very different focus, innovation happens to the consumer and not to the business side, and never the twain shall meet.

Consumer accounts cannot use Google Calendar's "Find a time", and business accounts cannot fully use a list of products so long that it's boring listing them.

Google Calendar is central to how I run my life... I even logged phonecalls with links to the audio files uploaded to Google Drive, as well as scans of post received (and categorised in Google Drive but linked from Google Calendar).

But the usefulness is being reduced, silo'd, splintered from the general usefulness of Android and the Google related family of products due to the split of Google into consumer-focused vs business-focused with less overlap.

I've not bought a Pixel phone for this reason either. What's the point when so much of it's selling point is software and that software doesn't work with GSuite accounts.

> I even logged … scans of post received (and categorised in Google Drive but linked from Google Calendar)

Oh, very nice idea. What's your workflow for doing this?

Imagine a 1990s batch flow system :)

I have a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500, I scan through that... it auto names my post based on timestamp and drops it into a folder.

I rename it how I want to file it within my "Files" folder in Google Drive but leaving the datestamp intact, i.e. "2016-05-03T07:13:01 Finance - HMRC - P60.pdf" and I move it into another folder.

A cron comes along, looks at everything in that folder, fires a little Go util that uploads it to Google Drive (splitting " - " into subfolders), and finishes off by adding it as a calendar ever.

This would be a lot easier on Windows or Mac as I think you have Google Drive clients that sync whereas on Linux this doesn't exist.

I thankfully don't receive a lot of post, but when I do it's only 30 seconds to scan something and a few seconds to rename and move into another folder.

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