Tag Archives: Google Calendar

Sync’ing with Microsoft Office Outlook and Android

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I use Microsoft Office Outlook for my e-mail because it has other tools like a calendar, task list and address book. I do not use Microsoft Exchange but I do use Outlook on a number of computers which all run the same version of Windows 7 Ultimate x64 and Microsoft Office 2010 Premium.

I also have a Samsung Galaxy Gio running Android which is currently the Cyanogenmod firmware. The best method to use contacts by far on this device is “in the cloud” on Google Contacts. The calendar is the same with Google Calendar. And so are notes with Notes in Google Docs.

I previously have had lots of problems sync’ing to Android. I first used Samsung Kies which seemed alright except it had a tendency to duplicate contacts and calendar events continually so that my phone’s memory eventually filled up. Cyanogenmod won’t actually support Samsung Kies, mainly because the USB device function seems to be broken on the Samsung Galaxy Gio port and Cyanogenmod also lacks the Samsung Apps framework.

I found GO Contact Sync Mod after trying several other methods of sync’ing. When run on a PC which uses Outlook, it essentially sync’s your Outlook Calendar & Notes with Google.

Google also have put out Google Calendar Sync which will sync your Outlook to Google Calendar.

So with those two apps, you have a total sync solution that doesn’t fuck out if you run it on two PCs – and it uses the Internet connection so no direct connection between the phone and PC is needed, just the Internet on both devices.

EPG in Google Calendar?

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I did some more work for the radio station today. I’ve implemented what I’d like to call EPG or Electronic Program Guide in their Internet stream.

Icecast supports metadata in MP3 & AAC+ streams so this metadata can be used to represent whats being sent to air such as the name of the program or the name of the track.

I needed a databased calendar for EPG. So I turned to Google Calendar because of its easy interface to modify the calendar data. It also has an API which can be used to both perform lookups of whats presently on so we can send that to Icecast, and we can use the API to pull the whole program guide and apply our own formatting on our website.

Today I made a script to pull the current entry from Google Calendar and to publish it to Icecast over HTTP. I had always thought this would be difficult to pull off, however it ended up to be much easier than I ever imagined. I wrote this script in PHP so that its modular with the same lookup functions I’ll later use on the web based player.

Now all that remains is to convince the web developer that the program guide should use the Google Calendar data so we’re not maintaining 2 different program guides. I’m still waiting for him to implement my web based player. And its been 2 months since I first requested admin privileges to his WordPress installation. So my hopes on having anything done any time soon aren’t high.