Offline Apps Part 1 - Offline Calendar for Linux

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2013-09-27

Technology is great at making our lives easier. It allows us to do so many things much faster and more easily than we did them before. But sometimes these improvements come at a cost. One of those costs, to some people, is the loss of privacy as all data storage goes to the cloud. Although I'm not interested and keeping all of my personal data off of other people's servers, there is some that I do want only to exist on my personal equipment. Here's the first part in a series on applications that don't send your data to someone else's servers.

I used Google Calendar for a long time, but I realized I had no need to see my calendar outside of my house. I might say that I can plan far enough ahead to not miss an appointment when I go out to the grocery store. Or maybe telecommuting really cuts down on me being away from my laptop. Either way, I no longer needed Google to siphon up my event calendar and keep it on their servers.

So I went looking for a calendar option for a GNU/Linux desktop. I found a very simple solution called Day Planner. While Day Planner can sync your events between machines, you have to explicitly turn the feature on via a plugin. I have left this option off and I am happily calendaring locally only. No one needs to know my schedule except those who I tell myself.