=2026-09-12 Saturday =

I've been reading a few of the Gopher[0] and Gemini[1] posts by
Rev Richard on the subject of text files, small computing etc.
                                                               
I agree with much that he has to say, and I've been pulling away
from "big tech" over the last few years myself, too.           
                                                                
I've already de-googled and have no Facebook or other social
media accounts.
                                                                
His comments about using a plain-text calendar.txt file made me
look at the idea myself...[2] which led down a rabbit hole of
investigating sync-ing files between phone and laptop....

I had been using my /e/os Murena account to sync photos, notes
and other files but the syncing is quite sluggish - it can take
24 hours before photos on the phone get synced to the cloud.
Notes are a little quicker, but that requires using their notes
app. I wanted something that I could control more directly, and
choose more carefully what gets sync'd and where it gets sync'd
to.

I found "syncthing" and have it working on 3 devices: 

1) my phone (a Fairphone 6 running the de-googled /e/os android)
2) my laptop 
3) my little Raspberry Pi "NAS".

Syncthing is almost instant, syncing between the 3 devices. Yes,
there's no 3rd party cloud storage as additinal backup, but I
figure I can manage without. As long as I have 3 copies of my
important files I don't need to have any additional cloud
storage.
                                                                
/E/OS Murena has a calendar (and lots of other things I never
use) as well as an email account. I'll keep using these, but I no
longer need the payed-for "premium 20GB" upgrade. The free 1GB
account will be enough from now on - so I'll let the 20GB upgrade
lapse when it's due for renewal in October, and switch back to
the free 1GB account.
                                                                
And I'll look more carefully at using a plain text calendar, too,
now I've sorted syncthing. Using the Murena calendar is ok, but
it needs a GUI and Web browser... and I'm moving rapidly away
from relying on the WWW, and more and more to using plain-text,
terminal clients and gopher.... do I even need a Web Calendar at
all? I like the idea of a platform-independant calendar file that
can be read/searched/edited anywhere at any time on any device.
Even off line.
                                                                
Of course I still use real paper and pen for my actual daily
diary/journal.

And, yes an online calendar to keep track of work tasks and other
appointments is handy, true, but is a text file plenty good
enough?

Can I jettison the fancy GUI-browser-WWW calendar completely?



[0]: gopher://sdf.org/1/users/revrichard/phlog
[1]: gemini://kunulo.smol.pub:1965/
[2]: https://terokarvinen.com/2021/calendar-txt/