Byron Bay Bluesfest 2011 – Google Calendar

Because I’m a gigantic nerd, instead of actually getting ready to go to the Bluesfest this morning, I spent my time making a google calendar so I can subscribe to it on my phone and see who’s playing where and when!

It’s a pretty complex document. Five stages across five remaining days, so the best way to consume it is to subscribe to the calendar on your phone.

Update 12:45pm, Sunday: twitter user @NickFromSydney sent an easier method for subscribing on iPhone:

“I went to Settings->Mail/Contacts/Calendars->Add Account->Other->Add Subscribed Calendar and put the ics url in there. Worked for me.”

There you go, iPhone users. The ICS URL is:

http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/jaymis.com_ug81qtuus3sgsm278ehlol7e38%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

Most phones (Android, others I’m sure) will understand and open this iCal link, and there’s also an XML version if that’s the way you roll.

If you’re on an iPhone, you need to subscribe to the calendar on iTunes first (here’s some instructions: http://iboughtamac.com/2008/04/23/syncing-a-google-calendar-to-your-iphone/). If you don’t have a laptop with you, use the HTML version below.

You can also view it as a plain old HTML page, which should work on just about anything with a web browser.

Previous Update, 4:10pm, Friday: Turns out subscribing to calendars while mobile is way harder than it needs to be! I’ve tried on iPhone & Nokia E71, and neither will just open the iCal link natively. Turns out the easiest way to go is for me to invite people to the google calendar. So if you have gCal already setup on your phone, email me at “phone [at] jaymis [dot] com” with your gmail account, and I’ll invite you to the calendar.

iPhone in AU on Virgin Mobile

I’ve been on Virgin Mobile AU for over a year now. I got in when they were doing their hugely cool 1GB for $10/month data plan, which they subsequently knocked down to 300MB when they realised that people were actually going to use up that data.

Virgin’s mobile internet service around AU is pretty damn good. I used it for my year of touring, and could get coverage in some surprisingly remote towns. I had to do a little bit of geeking to get the phone working as a bluetooth modem with my Macs, but once setup it’s all extremely smooth. The only problem I’ve found is that sometimes the computer connection will crash, and then be unable to connect until I restart the machine. Despite the dire predictions about $15000/GB for over usage, I never even got close to my 1GB cap, and Virgin now have a usage monitoring page on their site, so that’s not much of a worry anymore.

Now, the iPhone is out in AU, early adopters have bought ridiculously expensive ones, even though 99% of them don’t really understand what the thing does. I’ve been thinking of picking one up eventually and probably having to jailbreak it to get working on Virgin. Turns out that’s not the case.

$70/month for 24 months. 1GB data. Usual Virgin awesomeness with free Virgin to Virgin calls etc. and you can upgrade to 5GB/month for an extra $30. Fantastic stuff. I haven’t been on a mobile contract for quite a while now… This almost looks like something which could take me back into the fold.

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