Oliver Zheng

Syncing Google Calendar and Remind

Remind is kind of awesome. Here is a less awesome way to sync it with Google Calendar. I use this primarily to sync between my Android phone and the reminders on my local computer.

Remind to Google Calendar

  1. Have a publicly accessible server.
  2. Use the rem2ics script to generate an .ics file periodically in a cron job.
  3. Automatically upload the generated ics file to the server. I do this via scpy and authorized public keys.
  4. Subscribe to this publicly accessible .ics file from Google Calendar.

Google Calendar to Remind

  1. Make a calendar in Google Calendar. This is where you'll add your events to from your mobile phone. Make this calendar the default calendar.

  2. Use this prune_gcal.py, which grabs all the events in the default calendar in your Google account, deletes them, and outputs them in the reminders format.

  3. Setup a configuration file in ~/.prune_gcal, where the first line is the Google account username, and the second line is the password. E.g.:

    myemail@gmail.com
    mypassword
    
  4. Add this to a cron job:

    prune_gcal.py >> ~/.reminders 2>/dev/null
    

And that should let you use Remind as you normally would on your PC, and Google Calendar on your phone.

The only caveat here is that your schedule would be publicly accessible somewhere, but you can either have it under an HTTPS URL (note that Google requires you to have a valid certificate; a self-generated certificate would not work), and/or have an obscure URL.


Page last modified March 3, 2010.

© Oliver Zheng.