Flying high on iCal files

I’m responsible for taking out the trash. Yes, this is a cliché, I admit it. But it is like it is.

The problem with that isn’t the trash itself, but rather that I’m really bad with remembering dates. But luckily, my home town’s disposal company offers an iCal download of the pickup dates on their website. Neat.

However, the resulting file wasn’t quite meeting my needs. Especially:

• All pickup dates were all day events
• The dates didn’t have an alarm set
• We are using a seasonal contract for one specific trashcan, so that it is only picked up between march and november

So, I manually changed the events in the file to match my needs. Moved the all day events to timed events, added alarms to all events and removed unneeded events.

But, you know me. Manually doing things over and over again isn’t just my style.

However, a tool, that could easily modify a bunch of events in an ICS file, is either non-existent or very hard to find. I didn’t find one, anyway. So I wrote my own.

Announcing icarus, an iCal batch processor. I’m not so into Java, but I only found iCal4j to be a very good ICS implementation. So, grab a JRE and have fun with it.

I’ve already put all features in it, I currently needed, but it’s very open to new processors (more on that in the README) and I’m happy to accept pull requests. So, go ahead!

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