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Comment by VyseofArcadia | Hacker News Reader

I have a self hosted calendar solution. It was $15 at Staples, and it hangs in my kitchen. It wasn't a complete out of the box solution, though, I had to do a little work to customize it. I placed a pen cup with a few pens in it on the counter near the calendar to ensure it is always easy to modify.

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>As someone who travels a lot, it’s also one of those things where statistically speaking, the chances of me being on a plane whenever some newsworthy event happens is higher than for the average person. I want my wife, friends, coworkers to know what flights I’m on and what cities I’m in. I’ve survived one terror attack, nearly dodged two others and a mass shooting. It’s one of those things where I want to make sure people who care about me can check in easily to see where I am.

It seems like the author has very different needs than you.

My wife uses this solution. When I am at work and someone wants to know if I can do a team dinner, I have to call her if she's at home, or tell them I'll get back to them. I never know if I'm free and finding out is inefficient at best.

Nearly the same thing here. We're scheduling for our daughter who, as she's getting older, has increasingly more scheduled events, too. If we're out of the house and my wife hasn't brought the paper calendar with her we simply can't commit to any plans. It's excruciating.

The cobbler's children go barefoot, so I haven't come up with a good solution for us... >sigh< It almost makes me want to hitch my wagon to a hosted product/service. Almost.

I used to do this with my wife, and it drove me crazy. Now we use a shared Google calendar, which works way better than prior solutions. Our unspoken rule: if there is an open time slot available, the first to enter it in the shared calendar wins. We're both responsible for entering all family-related appointments in the calendar as soon as they come up. There have been conflicts when either of us forgets to enter something into the calendar, but we just resolve the conflicts as usual. This was a game-changer from my point of view.

How does it handle notifications? How do you access it remotely? How do you share it for common events with others?

Comparing a paper calendar to a digital one is like comparing a Nokia 3310 to a modern smartphone. Yes, technically both are "a phone" but that's roughly where the similarities end.

How do you access it remotely?

Set up a webcam stream of the calendar

How do you share it for common events with others?

Share the webcam link or ring them up on the telephone if we are (jokingly) going traditional.

Giving edit access is as easy as giving whoever your front door key!

> Share the webcam link or ring them up on the telephone if we are (jokingly) going traditional.

Why not make it more convenient for them and pipe the webcam stream through a script that OCRs it on change (or on timer) and makes it available as an .ical file that others can import via a link?

Also it's 2025, you can do it fast and robust by piping it through an LLM instead, with a prompt like "turn this calendar image into an .ical file pretty please".

/s, but only a little :). I've honestly thought of doing that for real, except with a feed of my laptop screen, to sync availability (busy/free) info from my work calendar to my family one, because it's way easier than trying to argue the point with corporate IT.

(I've changed jobs since then, and now I'm using a lazy hack on top of some random Fastmail-friendly cloud app.)

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