Re: syncing my life (orgmode :)) to a mobile (android) device..cant find a holistic reliable way..how do you guys manage to do it?

[Matt Lundin <mdl@imapmail.org>]

Xebar Saram <zeltakc@gmail.com> writes:
>
> So my question is (sorry for the long intro :)) what do orgmode users
> (who also are heavy mobile users) do? do they give up on contacts and
> calendaring on the mobile? maintain 2 separate databases? what tools
> do people use to overcome this issue?

There are lots of way to sync calendars. See
http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-google-sync.html

I've found the easiest method is a "poor man's sync" involving a
read-only ics file (exported from org using the org-icalendar-*
functions) and a writable calendar for new entries. (Trying to map org
entries to ics entries gets messy.) The flow looks something like this:

writable calendar (remote calendar for adding new items from android)
----> org files (with new entries pull from remote calendar) ---->
read-only calendar (remote ics exported from org)

I use a radicale server[fn:1] for this. Radicale has the advantage of
using ics files as a backend (rather than a database), so I can pull new
entries into org with Eric's ical2org.awk.
    
If you use google calendar you could accomplish something similar with
the following workflow:

a) Export your org data to an ics file and put it in dropbox. In
dropbox, grab a secret link to share that file.

b) Point google calendar to the secret link. This will create a
read-only calendar in google calendar.

c) Script a tool like gcalcli[fn:2] to pull and delete new items from a
writable google calendar. Convert the data to org markup and add them to
an org file. (This is the part that will involve just a bit of basic
shell scripting.)

For syncing contacts from BBDB to google or carddav, asynk works
well.[fn:3]

> I once had a nokia n900 which ran basically Debian linux, and thus
> emacs could be run naively , these days it seems like all are android
> devices. I still haven't found a gui friendly way to run emacs there.

For fun (but not much profit) you can set up a chroot linux environment
on a rooted android device and install all your favorite software
(emacs, org, etc.). See https://github.com/guardianproject/lildebi for
instance.

By far the easiest way to access org mode is to set up some sort of ssh
access to a computer running emacs. There are several good ssh clients
for android. The hacker's keyboard app offers all the familiar modifier
keys (Ctrl, Alt, etc.)

Footnotes:

[fn:1] http://radicale.org/

[fn:2] https://github.com/insanum/gcalcli

[fn:3] http://asynk.io/