Archive for July 22nd, 2008
Exporting All Google Calendar Data
I was looking for a way to backup all of my Google Calendar data, and it turns out to be trivially easy. First, login to Google Calendar. Then, simply visit this URL:
https://www.google.com/calendar/exporticalzip
Google Calendar will then pop up asking you to save a .zip file that contains Ical files with every event on every calendar you are the owner of.
Tags: Google Calendar
Serious Google Calendar Encryption with GnuPGP
IBM’s Nathan Harrington has written an article outlining how to use the GnuPGP Firefox extension to create encrypted events within Google Calendar. This isn’t just accessing Google Calendar securely, but rather encrypting event details locally before passing that text on to Google Calendar. Anyone who compromises your Google account then would know the time of events, but would only see encrypted text for the actual event detail as in the example below,
That is frackin’ awesome. Now if there were only a GnuPGP plugin for my Blackberry calendar so I could sync the events meaningfully.
Tags: Encryption, Firefox, GnuPGP, Google Calendar, IBM, Nathan Harrington, PGP, Privacy
Versionista.Com
Versionista recently showed up in the top results from del.icio.us, which made me laugh out loud. Versionista monitors web sites and not only alerts you when they change, but also shows you exactly how they changed. Sounds like I’ll switch to that, instead of Google Reader, for surfing Boing! Boing!
The Versionista home page highlights changes that the McCain and Obama campaigns have made to their respective websites, usually to hide embarassing material (well, technically McCain’s site is still up so they’re not hiding all the embarassing material).
I am, sadly, a version whore. When WordPress implemented versioning in 2.6, I was in heaven. Also, even though I know I don’t need to be so obsessive about it, I can’t help but generate and download a full site backup of this server every night . . . which in my case is a 12gb .tar file at the moment.
Anyway, I could not find any pricing on the Versionista web page, and didn’t feel like setting up an account. From other articles on the service, it is free to monitor two pages for changes. Anything beyond that involves monthly fees in the $16-$500/month rate. It would probably be as cheap to hire a college kid to write up a CURL-based tool to do the regular downloads and feed those into any number of diff products like HTML diff.
Tags: Boing! Boing!, Diff, Versionista.Com