13 ms·
WhenFS: Calendar Is Now a File System
- ChocolateGod 2y agoThe question beckons, who's going to bundle this into their initramfs and boot Linux from it.
- diggan 2y agoThat's all fun and games until Google bans and deletes your Google-account/initramfs-calendar because you liked the wrong comment on YouTube.
- Trekker666 2y agothis is so cool
- andrewflnr 2y agoAw, that's not what I hoped it would be. An actual file-based calendar UI is a neat idea, where you can (for instance) echo into a file to create a calendar event on the command line.
- dudus 2y agoSame here. I think that would be a terrific idea. $ cat /cal/2024/08/04/events
- ravetcofx 2y agoThis would be fantastic and very in line with Unix philosophy.
- filterfish 2y agoMore Plan9 but yeah, I was thinking the same thing.
- miki123211 2y agoNot this exactly, but I used to keep a calendar as a text file, where each day was a single line containing the date, week day and possibly some events. Something like: 4h sun: 1500 dentist's appointment, 1800 dinner with friends Where a=jan, b=feb, c=marc, ... l=dec. The initial file was autogenerated with a 10-line Python script. You can have variations on this, like allowing multiple rows per day, one row per event. I also used to keep an unstructured "journal.txt" file, where notes were separated by two blank lines, and you could reference topics (like #toRead) and dates (like #4h24) with #, like social media hashtags.
- dmos62 2y agoI was thinking about this and came to the conclusion that I'd want to define some events per date, like you illustrated (`"12:30 dentist" > /cal/2024/08/04`), but others I'd like to define per event, like `2024-08-23 12:30 > /cal/massage`, which seemed messy. I didn't really resolve this question for myself.
- dudus 2y agoWhy not enable both modes? It's a virtual filesystem after all. You don't need a single path per event.
- dmos62 2y agoI wasn't considering making it a virtual filesystem. My main goal was something that's editable with any text editor and syncable with SyncThing. I guess denormalization doesn't necessarily mean that these requirements are not met.
- thanatos519 2y agoGood tab expansion in a very virtual filesystem would work wonders: $ cat /cal/nexttues<TAB> $ cat /cal/2024/08/13/ $ cat /cal/nextweek<TAB> $ cat /cal/2024/w32/ I seem to recall that I had lunch with somebody last July: $ grep -ir somebody /cal/2023/07/ /cal/2023/07/12/events:13:00-14:00 Lunch with somebody
- fragmede 2y agothe most amazing feature of the Google calendar web UI that has since been dropped was a way to schedule events with a human message - "30 meeting with Bob next Tuesday at 10", rather than clicking a bunch of buttons in a UI.
- 9dev 2y agoTry Mac/iOS calendar - it has allowed to do just that for ages.
- thanatos519 2y agoI remember that! I think they have just collapsed to handling what most people try, evidently '[time] description'. A couple of weeks ago I was surprised and annoyed that adding an event with description "10:30-11:00 Pointless Meeting" no longer scheduled my Pointless Meeting. Tried again very carefully. Wasn't working. Worked again the next day. Did anyone else experience this? I can't wait for them to feed my description to an LLM to generate the event. "Schedule drinks at 7 at the bar behind the office next Tuesday. Invite my favourite colleagues and their teammates. Make them curious but not suspicious."
- mejutoco 2y agoTodoist as well. Plus every second tue of the month for 4 months, and queries like that.
- netsharc 2y agoWith Google Assistant you can still do this, but you need to speak it, with the prefix "Add calendar event..."(well, Google Assistant on the phone also accepts keyboard input). I find it much faster than the button clicking.
- adrianmonk 2y agoIf I gzip my meetings, will they get shorter? If so, I'm on board.
- filterfish 2y agoThis is going to be my new, and probably overused phrase: "Can we gzip this meeting, I've shit to do"!
- filterfish 2y agoSo the question begs: how hard would this be to write. Because I want it!
- magicalhippo 2y agoThis is essentially just CalDAV[1], no? So a FUSE CalDAV client. Surely not that difficult in Go, Rust or something similar with ready libraries. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CalDAV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CalDAV
- filterfish 2y ago> This is essentially just CalDAV[1], no? I reckon, yeah. From this article[1] writing a FUSE filesystem doesn't look that hard. I might give it a go this weekend. Assuming I remember! [1] https://blog.trieoflogs.com/2021-05-25-fuse-filesystem-go/ https://blog.trieoflogs.com/2021-05-25-fuse-filesystem-go/
- andrewflnr 2y agoI think you mean $ ls /cal/2024/08/04 Or perhaps $ cat /cal/2024/08/04/* ;)
- amelius 2y agoWill all users on the system have to share the same calendar?
- Thaxll 2y agoI don't see where it's remotely useful, the idea sounds fun but it's not praticle. Explain how it is better vs having a simple cli that parse args and store that into SQLite.
- H8crilA 2y agoThe point of such fake filesystems (like /proc or /sys) is that everyone immediately understands them. Yes, you could have a syscall for /proc, but it is more complicated.
- Thaxll 2y agoUnderstand how? You still need to understand the path layout, something is still parsing that path so it needs to be valid.
- pfix 2y agodiscoverability - but then proc is not the best example for that - a lot of proc seems to be inpenetrable without documentation access - for discovery and poking around you won't need a dedicated tool, just `cat` or `less` or `vim`
- andrewflnr 2y agoExplain how it's worse than what's in OP. Look, sometimes you just want to see a fun idea turn into reality, right?
- Lammy 2y agoThere's a standard file type for this already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar It would be cool to see a filesystem layer present a tree of ICS files where editing one also updated your various API-based web calendars.
- samstave 2y agoThis is completely me talking out my but: Could one use the txtai python libe to be told to train on the temporal relationships between events that pass through it as an fastAPI endpoint to a calender... then as the events head to whatever is holding them in the calendar - txtai is training and indexing, first on temporal notes, then on context. so you ould easly as it to give you a "Show all the social events that happen on wednesdays with a dress code" (but it learns the nature of certain events, when they occur and social clues around what /who /wheres are typically occuring... "This venue typically holds events on W F S and the clientelle is typicalaly this, attendance that, rsvps x, cost ~$$"
- charles_f 2y agoThat's what I hoped this would be!
- usr1106 2y agoNot sure I hoped, but from the title I expected. I don't have more than 10 entries per week. Partly because I prefer real work over meetings, so I work at a place that does not have a lot of meetings. And once you don't have many, it's easier to remember other appointments, no need to use a calendar for everything. So even if this had been a useful mapping of calendar entries into a directory tree, I would not have felt an urge to use it.
- folmar 2y agoGet close by mounting your CalDAV server directory with the usual WebDAV tooling.
- mbreese 2y ago> Why Did You Do This? > I used this project as an opportunity to learn about Rust and FUSE file systems. I also think it's hilarious. > Visitors interested in the code should note that this is an irredeemably messy codebase—it's full of hacks, unidiomatic code, and wildly poor design decisions. > However, visitors should also note that that's okay. The best way to learn something new is to try it out for yourself—and creating a mess is a vital part of that process. I absolutely love this sentiment. Why do this? Because it’s fun. And messy. And sometimes, that’s okay. Not everything needs to be a product… sometimes it’s enough to do something because you can… or want to… or because $RANDOM reason. I’m very grateful to the author and whoever decided to submit it today.
- lvkv 2y agoAuthor here. Those are kind words! I’d like to add the last part of that quote: > The page you're on right now is my mess. Now go create yours!
- phamilton 2y agoAs a college student trying to figure out where I wanted to go next (industry vs academia) I had an epiphany that there was intrinsic value in doing things. Even things that were neither novel (academia), profitable (industry), nor impactful (nonprofits). While my career has found a balance between impact and financial sustainability, I have a special place in my heart for projects that are otherwise unnecessary but happen just because it brings the creator joy.
- xwolfi 2y agoBut there is no greater pleasure than to finish something, deliver it, get users in front of it, and get feedback you never expected from either grumpy or happy users. I think it's way more rewarding to try to work for profit, because while money is nice, profit also means it's so useful someone is ready to give you credit for future work (money) for what you did.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
- ecjhdnc2025 2y agoCalendar. (Not a mistake the github page makes)
- dang 2y agoOuch. Fixed belatedly. Thanks!
- issafram 2y agoI don't think it was mentioned in the repo readme, but this will most likely get your account banned. Be careful
- s3arch 2y agocan you help me understand more.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoIt stores file data as calendar events, sort of like that YouTube FS from a while back This is probably considered abuse under the ToS since you're using more storage than any typical user, and they can't use it for whatever they normally sell customer data for
- exe34 2y ago> they can't use it for whatever they normally sell customer data for Bottom line, you don't want to mess with their bottom line.
- darby_nine 2y agoI seriously doubt this kind of stuff has ever messed with their bottom line. I think they just really resent users trying to do more with their service than they intended.
- exe34 2y agothey would prefer that you pay them for storage rather than store white noise on YouTube from which they can't earn ad money.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoIf they didn't crack down, people would start pushing it harder, until some company relied on this for cloud storage
- silasdavis 2y agoWhenFFS feels like a missed opportunity here.
- zeckalpha 2y agoNow make a WebDAV and CalDAV wrapper around that!
- zcw100 2y ago…and an LLM agent.
- binwiederhier 2y agoThat reminds me of a just for fun plugin I wrote for my (long dead) Dropbox-like file sync solution Syncany that would store the shared files as PNG images on Flickr. At the time, Flickr and Google Picasa (now Photos) gave you like 1T of image storage for free, so I thought it'd be a dope backend. It worked really really well actually... And it was nice to see your data as images. Though since the files were packed and encrypted, it just looked like static. Here's the plugin if anyone's interested: https://github.com/syncany/syncany-plugin-flickr/tree/develop https://github.com/syncany/syncany-plugin-flickr/tree/develo... Wow. That's 10 years old. Time flies. Edit: This PNG encoder is the meat: https://github.com/syncany/syncany-plugin-flickr/blob/develop/src/main/java/org/syncany/plugins/flickr/PngEncoder.java https://github.com/syncany/syncany-plugin-flickr/blob/develo...
- gazby 2y agoAh Syncany. Good times <3
- kkfx 2y agoIn exploration terms I suggest considering typical serious desktop users file taxonomy, most after at certain amount of time choose a timeline taxonomy of some kind simply there is no much easy way with files and folder to collect and access data, even with {sym,hard}links. Essentially time passing is a common thing for anything, all of the rest quickly became dirty or at least have some dirty dump of information here and there. Long story short it's a nice potential continuation of the experiment start taking notes in timeline, storing files in timeline and figure out how to make "dynamic hierarchies" that works well in this model. I've done something myself with Emacs/org-mode/org-roam notes, with kind-of daily notes and file attachments, it's not perfect nor general but scale a bit. A filesystem approach it's uncharted but seems to be equally possible.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- robertlagrant 2y agoI appreciate that they made the calender system pluggable. Don't want to get locked into a single calendar vendor with something as important as your file system!
- archmaster 2y ago:)))
- quasarj 2y agoAnyone have a write-up for doing this with a Remarkable 2?
- slashink 2y agoThis is unhinged and I love every part of it! Apart from the repo having an attitude I often miss from the modern internet I also learnt something reading the code on how FUSE works!
- XiS 2y agoBut how does it handle (indefinite) recurring events :)
- daniel-grigg 2y agoFUSE is cool. Can’t believe it’s been a decade since I played with it here to make a ‘weather file system’ https://github.com/danielgrigg/city_weather_fs https://github.com/danielgrigg/city_weather_fs
- lou1306 2y agoSometimes I wish someone would write a FUSE driver for IMAP/Exchange (and yeah I know Exchange is especially unlikely to happen). All attempts I could find on the Web seem abandoned, unfinished, or both.
- ForOldHack 2y agoBut is it Turing complete?
- bionhoward 2y agolol I thought this was a calendar in the file system like files/folders for days/months, but it is in fact the opposite, thank you for the goofy surprise, you got me
- latentsea 2y agoReminds me of the "harder drive" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio&t=1s