OUT OF THE BLUE

I was sitting at my desk earlier this afternoon, looking my list of upcoming events on meetup.com. I’m a member of five different meetup groups. Although I don’t go to every event, I do try to plan in advance for the ones I plan on attending. The groups I’m in tend to schedule a fair number of events, so that often means I have a lot of events to add to my calendar.

Meetup.com offers an “Export to a calendar” link on every meetup event, which I’ve been using to get events from meetup.com into Google Calendar. That process works, but it involves doing an export for each and every event that I want on my calendar. The process also requires some manual tweaking for each event once it’s in Google Calendar; I have to manually add the location, not all of the description text copies over, etc.

Events have been known to slip through the cracks, too– if I forget to export an event to Google, it never appears on my calendar. I decided that I’d like to be able to see all of the upcoming Meetup.com events in my Blackberry’s calendar (which is synced to Google Calendar– so from here on, they’re the same thing).

There is a feature on Meetup.com that will make this happen by way of a feed of events from your groups– it’s on the last row of the “Your Meetup Groups” section that you see once you’re logged in. It looks like this:

Feeds of your Meetup Groups: RSS · Atom · iCal · Outlook

Right click on iCal, and select “Copy link location”.

Now, open up Google Calendar in another tab and find the “Other calendars” section on the left. Click on “Add”. Then select “Add by URL”. Paste the link you copied from Meetup.com into the Public Calendar Address: field, and click Add. Google Calendar should give you a quick “Calendar imported successfully” message if all is well.

Click “Back to calendar”. All of your Meetup.com events are now listed in your main Google Calendar view– it’s the same list that you see when you log into Meetup.com. They include all of the specific information from Meetup.com, but they are read-only. To modify them, open the event (click on the title). You’ll see a “More actions” dropdown, which will give you the option to copy the event to any of your other calendars (within Google Calendar).

Notes:

I still have to manually RSVP for each event, on Meetup.com. If I’ve said “yes” to an event, I copy the event (as described above) to my “Social Life” calendar– this adds a green entry next to the red entry in my Google Calendar, which to me indicates that I’ve said “yes”.

I also still have to manually tweak the “Where:” field in Google Calendar if I want the exact address to be available for the (map) link to work right. This only matters if I’m going to want to link to a Google Maps view of the location of the event– if I’m going to rely on Gmaps to find the place, I test the link before I leave to make sure the map link works.

OK- since I’ve been doing more outdoors-type stuff, some of which involves being out in the boondocks (to clarify– of Wisconsin), I’ve been wanting a GPS unit more and more. Now, I have a Blackberry Pearl 8130 (US Cellular) that actually has GPS functionality built in– but it only kinda works, and then only sometimes.

For the first few months I had the 8130, GPS and BBMaps worked fine. It was able to find satellites most of the time within a minute and stay locked on, even in the car. Then, it worked less and less often– I was able to get a lock for most of the way from Madison to Chicago on the bus in June, but couldn’t get a lock standing outside my apartment. The rest of July and August, it never got a lock. Ever. I switched to Google Maps for Mobile, which worked better; that at least gets me a fix within 1800 or so meters, which is close enough to identify a freeway interchange.

Last weekend I was out hiking in Token Creek County Park, where it would have been really nice to have a GPS powered map on my phone (since I, um, didn’t bring a compass or paper map– oops). Again, couldn’t get a lock. So I gave up and did some googling, and found some answers here and here– seems I’m not the only one dealing with the Pearl’s GPS not working.

Long story short– as indicated in the forum threads linked above, you really want to download GPSed.

It doesn’t fix the connectivity problem completely. There are still some times where I can’t get a fix in the same spot I got 10 satellites less than two hours ago. I have to use GPSed’s “Reset GPS” function fairly often to get a lock (which does work, again, fairly often). Once GPSed has locked on, though, BBMaps and Google Maps also lock on, which makes the whole package a lot more useful. I was able to use Google Maps satellite view to verify where I was vs. where the Blackberry thought I was– standing in a parking space at work, Google Maps had my position dot right in the middle of that parking space.

So, okay, the Blackberry’s probably not as reliable as a standalone GPS unit. But GPS units don’t do email. (Although I haven’t tried it, the 8130 does have Bluetooth, so one could feasibly use an external GPS unit. I need more pockets.)