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About once a year, around this time of the year, in fact, I find myself wishfully thinking how nice it would be if all my computers and all my gadgets all shared the same calendars and contacts databases, so I could enter it into the nearest interface handy and not worry about it. Long ago, I came to the conclusion that no matter what interface I use, Google’s Calendar and Contacts were really the best solution all around as a back-end for PIM needs. And when Google added IMAP to Gmail, a party was in order.

My buddy Koh knows about this obsession of mine to keep things in sync – and I think she’s even blogged about my fun trying a while back. Since then a couple of things have happened:

1. I got rid of my Windows Mobile phone (boy was that an ugly piece of work!)
2. I stopped using Lotus Notes (whew!).
3. I moved over to Thunderbird on all my platforms (instead of Outlook, Entourage and Evolution, respectively on Windows, Mac OS and Linux).
4. I picked up a Nokia N800.
5. I’ve stopped trying to keep my older devices synced.

But in other terms, the situation is pretty much still the same. I’m trying, basically, to do the impossible: sync devices that were never meant to be synced. And I don’t mean “sync” as in “download the calendar from Google once a week”; I mean “download the calendar from Google, and upload my changes every two hours”. Two-way sync is nigh impossible.

Oh yes, also – it has to be free and preferably, FOSS.

I experimented with a handful of techniques, including a kludge using ScheduleWorld, Funambol, and others, but after trying to keep everything in sync for about two weeks and suffering uncountable crashes, sense was beaten into me.

So I stopped. Of course, that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to try again, right?

So here’s where I stand right now:

1. Computers (three – Windows Vista Ultimate, Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”, Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon”): if it runs Thunderbird, Thunderbird is installed, along with Lightning and Provider for Google Calendar. Lightning enables scheduling in Thunderbird, and PGC allows two-way syncing of Google Calendar and the local Thunderbird copy.
2. Nokia N80 – GooSync used to work, but it died a while back and so I manually sync the calendars every so often.
3. Nokia N800 – what PIM software?
4. No contacts sync at all.

Where I’d like to be:

1. Computers: Using PGC for calendar, and GCalDaemon for LDAP access to my contacts.

2. Nokia N80 – get something working, at least for my calendar. Maybe I’ll try GCalSync, if it installs, for a change. One kludge that might work is to sync my phone with my Windows desktop (where Nokia’s PC Suite handles the hard work of getting it onto the phone), but PC Suite doesn’t sync with Thunderbird (but it does with Windows Vista Calendar, which does with Google Calendar! ). See how quickly how complicated it becomes?

3. Nokia N800 – install GPE-Contacts and GPE-Calendar and get them working. One way sync (from Google to the device) would be acceptable on that, since I don’t really use the N800 as an input device.

I’ll be trying some experiments out this weekend (after making a suitably disposable calendar) and hoping for the best. Who knows? Maybe by the end of this month, I may actually be able to fire up the nearest device and know (within a couple of hours) what I’m supposed to be doing.

That’s what I said the last time, of course.