How I (almost) permanently logged off the cloud - Part 2 - Calendar and Contacts
by Viktor Hansson on 04 February 2015, 15:38
Now we've come to the second part of this series, and this is actually a quite simple one. The topic is that of calendar and contacts.
Up until now I have used what most other people user, either google or icloud. This is mostly due to convenience, which is most often the deciding factor. Having all your contacts and calender appointments downloaded by just signing into one account is great, and is in fact the way it should work. But google and apple knowing who I contact and what I do (honestly its most probably possible to get this information anyway, I imagine both of those companies store the call logs and related data, but this at least makes it more difficult to systematically monitor ones habits) is not someting I like.
Unlike file syncing, both calendar and contacts can be synced over standard protocols, which work on all devices I use (iOS, Mac, Linux, Windows and Android) with minial effort. These protocols are called CalDAV and CardDAV.
So after a little bit of googling I found a program called Radical which is both a CalDav and CardDav server. A few hours and some testing on my test VM I concluded that it worked really well, it is both quite simple to setup, and works good with all clients I have tested it with (Thunderbird, iOS, Android).
As usual i have added the radicale config to my config gists.