Archive for January, 2014

Creating an iCalendar from online timetables

Sunday, January 19th, 2014

I’m a member of my local swimming pool, Fleming Park. I’m trying to swim a lot at the moment (as it’s a big help for my back).

I don’t have a regular schedule, I just try and squeeze in time for a swim any time I can spare. This means I’ve not learned the pool’s schedule and frequently have to check their website to find when the pool is available.

I’m checking it so frequently that it’s one of my Most Visited thumbnails in Chrome.

This isn’t efficient, particularly as it’s normally on my phone making me switch between the browser and Calendar apps. It’d be quicker and easier if I had the timetable in my calendar alongside my appointments, so I could easily see when I’m free and the pool is open.

The leisure centre doesn’t provide a feed so I can subscribe and add their schedule to my calendar.

So I made my own.

dalelane.co.uk/…/swimflemingpark.ics

If you use the Fleming Park pool, import this in your Calendar app (or subscribe to it from Google Calendar) and the next week’s pool timetable will be kept up to date in your calendar.

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A scheduler for Remember The Milk

Saturday, January 4th, 2014

A quick tool I made for setting due dates of tasks in Remember The Milk by dragging them onto a calendar

I’ve mentioned Remember The Milk (RTM) before – the online to-do list manager. I’ve been using it for years.

My workflow has settled into:

  1. Capture
    Any time I think of something that I’ll probably need to do, it gets thrown into RTM. Then I relax knowing it won’t get forgotten.
  2. Plan
    Periodically review everything in RTM, working out what needs to be done soon, what can wait, and so on.

The RTM web application interface doesn’t suit my approach to scheduling tasks. I need a different view for planning and triaging.

So I made one.

Remember The Milk scheduler

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