Goodbye Kiko Calendar, hello Google Calendar
An unresponsive giant web service provider is better than an unresponsive small one.
Posted on 2006-06-21 11:57 by Jørn Støylen [permalink]
As I started using Kiko again, I discovered that their email and SMS reminders didn’t work. SMS reminders that work in Norway was the main reason for choosing Kiko over any other web calendar. I sent them an email about it, but haven’t heard anything, which surprised me, as when I contacted them last time (about half a year ago) about getting SMS reminders to work with Netcom Norway, they responded promptly and cooperated with me to set it up right.
Looking at their blog and forums, it seems like not much have happened at all in at least a month. My guess is that when Google Calendar was launched, they thought “Oh, crap, we’re doomed!” and gave it up.
As I put in a reminder for something I need to do in the beginning of January, I felt a little uneasy about it. Kiko is free. It’s a small company. They don’t have any ads, so I don’t know where they get their income from, or if it’s a hobby project—an abandoned one at that. Will they be around in half a year to remind me of that important thing I need to do?
In Getting Things Done David Allen stresses that to get things off your mind, you have to put them into a system you can trust. Sorry, Kiko, as much as I would like you to succeed, and as much as I like your calendar application better, I just can’t trust you with my appointments. But I’m pretty sure Google and their calendar will stick around for quite a while.
It occurred to me that he way SMS reminders to Netcom Norway in Kiko works, I could almost as easily get that to work in Gmail too. See, you have to pay extra (10 NOK/month) for Netcom’s email-to-SMS service, and then any mail sent to PHONENUM@sms.netcom.no is received as an SMS at that phone number.
So I went to Gmail and set up a filter, forwarding any emails from calendar-notification@google.com to PHONENUM@sms.netcom.no and then deleting them from Gmail. And it works a charm!
The only thing I’d like now is to have reminders forwarded to both my regular email address and to SMS. I think that means I’ll have to forward them to a new alias on my server and setting up something in Procmail. So I guess it’s time to dive into Procmail. I’ve been putting it off for so long … Mostly because I haven’t been able to find some practical, hands-on guide that doesn’t read like a *nix manpage or looks like something out of MySpace. (The Infinite Ink one sucks so incredibly much in both those respects. It’s one huge, geeky, messy page, impossible to navigate or get any kind of overview of.) If someone has tips, please leave a comment!
UPDATE: I have now investigated and successfully set up Procmail filtering—as documented in this article: Setting up Procmail on TextDrive
The solution for the above problem looks like this:
:0 c
* ^From:.*calendar-notification@google.com
! 92438051@sms.netcom.no
The ‘c’ means the action below will make a copy of the email, and thus keep a copy on the server too, which is precisely what I want. The exclamation mark means “forward to”.
Comments closed
Commenting is closed for this article.