Getting rid of waste: manipulating calendars with Python and the ics library

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In the city where I live, four different kinds of waste are collected regularly:

  • paper,
  • organic waste,
  • the "yellow bag" which is for all sorts of packaging, and
  • residual waste, which contains all the rest (except batteries, dangerous chemicals and a couple of other things, which people have to bring to collection facilities themselves).

At first sight, the days on which I have to take out the different bins and bags seem easy enough to remember: usually, everything is collected on the same day of the week. However, there are different schedules for the different kinds of waste (biweekly or every four weeks in my part of the city). Moreover, in weeks with bank holidays, the collection is often shifted to another weekday.

Fortunately, the city council provides iCalendar files (*.ical) with all waste collection dates for the current year at its website. The downloaded file can easily be imported into any calendar application. I found that the structure of the events in the file could be made more convenient though.

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New blog

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Today I am starting a new blog. 🙂

I used to have a Wordpress blog at https://freininghaus.wordpress.com/. I started it when I got involved more and more with KDE and especially its file manager Dolphin.

When I stopped working on KDE because of changes in my personal life, one of the main reasons for writing blog posts regularly was gone. So I quit blogging.

I have missed writing in public though, and I have accumulated quite a few posts in various stages of completion during the past few years. And I have ideas for even more!

However, I could never motivate myself to revive my old blog, among other things because static site generators look much more attractive than platforms like Wordpress to me now. Therefore, I have finally decided to start something new. After looking at a few of the many options available, I chose Nikola, mostly because of its native suppot for Jupyter notebooks, and because I felt that I can get a result that I am happy with without investing too much effort.

I will write about my adventures in software development and other topics that I care about. I hope that this will be fun and will also help myself to structure my thoughts better and preserve them for my future self. If that turns out to be interesting for a wider audience, then this is an appreciated side effect, but not the main goal.

If you want to be updated about future posts, feel free to subscibe to the RSS feed or follow me on Twitter.