unsigned long geek = random();

Over the years I’ve tried various approaches to try and synchronise calendars between the various electronic devices I use – laptop, home workstation, mobile phone and PDA. None of the approaches have been ideal because they’ve either required me to use applications I don’t want to (Outlook, for example) or they’ve required me to change the way I work.

The ideal solution would be for me to be able to maintain my appointments and tasks in whichever calendar is easiest to use at the time – typically my mobile phone’s calendar when I’m in meetings, Google Calendar when I’m at my desk and have access to the web and iCal when I’m at home. Anything I maintain in one calendar must be visible in the others.

Yesterday I finally got around to giving the combination of Google Calendar, iCal and Spanning Sync a try. My impressions so far? Definitely favourable. I’ve setup calendars in Google Calendar to match my iCal configuration, but I’ve also had to create iCal calendars for each of the public calendars I access in Google (see the screenshot below). Once that’s done, it’s a matter of synchronising Google Calendar and iCal using Spanning Sync and iCal and my mobile phone using iSync. Heck, if a Unix geek can do it, anyone can

Next step is to setup a calendar to share with my family so that we’re all aware of family events, school activities, etc. After that I’ll have to get them to actually use it…