Side-note on digital calendars: What I'd really like is a continuously scrolling calendar to help with long-ish term planning (3-4 months). Most apps are stuck in the single-month page view analogy to physical calendars, which for me keeps breaking my mental flow of stringing activities across the boundary/long distances. And I get why (standard behavior/components and user expectations) but it just seems like a missed opportunity. Not sure how many want this but I suspect more would do if they were exposed to it.
A few calendar apps allow a stretch of >4 weeks and there's this POC web version: https://madebyevan.com/calendar/app/ but all I can do for now is constantly switch from a Gantt app to my calendar app (Thunderbird or Google Calendar).
The one problem then is with that style of calendar compared to the traditional month view is I need to calculate for e.g. "what is the date of Thursday in 3 weeks?"
There's 12 rows, so I believe the top row of numbers is January, the second one is February, and so on. So the 4th of July is Monday.
This is different from the OP in that it only works for one specific year, it needs to be generated anew for every single year.
I do think that having to "count rows" is a bit too much minimalism and probably we could have spared 3 characters per line in order to put month names:
2022 M T W T F S S M T W T F S S M T W T F S S M T W T F S S M T W T F S S M T
Jan 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
Feb 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28
Mar 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
Apr 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
May 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
Jun 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
Jul 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
Aug 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
Sep 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
Oct 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
Nov 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 30 29
Dec 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
I remember, in School, our professor asked us to write "cal" command in C in early CS classes. I was a good exercise for us to build interest in programming.
Not being aware of ncal, but based on long experience of bash, I anticipated a fiendish and impenetrable 300 line monster full of arcana to crank this out from first principles. So this was a very elegant surprise :)
-M sets the first day of the week to Monday. If in your locale the weeks already begin on Monday you are not going to see much difference on the output.
Every year, I use `cal` to generate the calendar like this for the year, paste that into word and do some minor formatting (dim weekends and holidays, bold paydays) and print it and put it on my office wall. I reference it all the time just to re-orient myself to where I am in the month/year, etc.
Well, cal -3 shows the previous and next month, but I wanted this month and the next two months. I also wanted them arranged vertically and with week numbers. (And with weeks starting on Monday)
If you're interested, I can share my khal config with you. It also displays 3 months, and syncs (via vdirsyncer) with Nextcloud to show my personal and work calendar events, all right there in the terminal.
In general, I use vdirsync to sync my contacts and calendars locally, keeping the remote system's values to resolve conflicts as I intend to only read the values from the CLI. Vdirsync uses an application-agnostic format, so I could in theory read from any application that supports standard file formats:
At least german office culture knows of a quite popular 3-month format in a physical printed wall calendar, usually highlighting the current month and showing the preciding and following months with less contrast. They are distributed for free or very low cost as promotional product for any type of business.
From my understanding Bürokalender as in office calendar is often used synonymously for this format in Germany, which can be seen as an indicator to it's ubiquity.
The format seems not to be that popular, elsewhere but at least in the UK it's marketed as shipping calendar,
which was the use case for what it was invented for in 1937 by B. C. Heye & Co., now terminic GmbH
Fastmail’s calendar does exactly this - infinite continuous scroll - and I love it. I also find it constricting when I use another calendar (Google Calendar, for instance) that paginates by month.
I am a big fan of Dsri Seah's Compact Calendar with its "candy bar of time" layout. Should not be too hard to make a script for that format. https://davidseah.com/node/compact-calendar/
> What I'd really like is a continuously scrolling calendar to help with long-ish term planning (3-4 months).
The iOS calendar works this way (if I understand your use case properly).
At the top right is a back arrow, which, if you're in a more granular view (say, for a day or a week), will take you a view where you can scroll through all months, and if you go back one more time, scroll through all years. From one of these "zoomed out" views, you can dive back into any more detailed view.
Not a fan of the subscription model. Features that don't incur ongoing costs (e.g. server costs) to the developers should not be locked behind a subscription IMO.
Agreed, it's too bad that it's subscription only now. I bought Fantastical for Mac ages ago, and when they added the subscription model, I didn't lose any features.
Another vote here for Fantastical. I don't think I'm using it in any novel ways, or really pushing it's power, but wow is it a nice calendar. My only gripe, and probably something I can change in a setting, is sometimes when I have a drought of events, it can be confusing what's next, because it will show me something a month or so out but not in a clear way that the event it is showing me isn't tomorrow. Probably a "me" problem, but one of my few gripes about the app - the other being a desire for better Watch complications.
Months are laid out in clean no-nonsense way, and it's a very lightweight app. You can click on dates to mark them to get some bearings while planning things on a Calendar, kinda like pointing a pen at a date. Drag to mark multiple dates too!
No logins, no extra engagement features, and nothing much.
I'm using a aCalendar+ on Android and the monthly view has continuous scrolling, though given the constraints of a phone screen I only get 6 weeks displayed at once.
I wrote about something similar a few years ago! [1] I'd be interested in hacking something together one day. I imagine it would display your Google Calendar events, in a format reminiscent of Google Calendar, but where the smallest cell is a week.
FWIW the built-in calendar function on the Windows Taskbar for a while has this continuously scrolling functionality. Click the current time on the taskbar and it'll open a calendar view. Scroll on the calendar and it'll scroll by the week. Click on a day and if you've connected a calendar to your Windows account it'll show events on that day.
I tried to build this once but found myself basically rebuilding Google calendar for visual changes which iCal mostly did quite well. And front end is not my expertise so it was a grind.
I wanted both infinite scrolling with no month breaks, as well as the ability to fluidly zoom out to see multiple months worth.
Someday. I'd be willing to put the work in if a front end expert wants to help!
Yep, I want the next 6-8 weeks, with no month breaks, in a block. Calendar.app on the desktop in Big Sur is almost there, but there's no way to keep the current week on the top, as it defaults to the current month. On iOS, there'a a gap week.
I used to do these by hand when in school, because I didn't want assignments hiding on the next page.
I hate this as well, it's one of the reasons I am clinging on to using Outlook in Windows. It seems like they are going to remove this eventually as the Outlook client for Mac and web does not allow calendar scrolling. :(
It looks nice, the idea is appealing, but the result is awful. This thing is totally unusable. You need to remember to slide the frame every month. It doesn't even tell you that you did or not. Sliding the frame requires checking the number of days there are in the month. When you're in the last week, having the 31 always there is a pain in the ass. Knowing the next month is kind of useful.
My grandmother had a small desk paper weight sliding calendar from the 60s that she got as a promotional item from a bank. One side had the calendar and the slider and of course the bank name. The other side had a cheat sheet for year/month and what to set things to if you got lost. Think there were some plastic bits to clip over the days that were not in the month but those were lost to time. Think Matt Parker had a vid a few years ago on reusing calendars from previous years. 14 combinations I think was the total number of calendars you had to keep. But I could be remembering wrong.
Wall calendars often have a horizontal stripe with a small window highlighting the current date. That would help solve the problem of forgetting to update it. You'd still need to remember how many days there are in the current month and you need to know the current date and day of the week to set it up but at least it seems workable.
Except the wall calendar has the current month on it in big letters, so all you need to know is what month it is.
This thing does not tell you if it's showing you the days for Jun or Jul
also the entire point of a wall calendar is that you can make notes on specific days, isn't it?
It’s not nearly that complicated unless you just outright have no idea how many days are in a given month. Not sure how many adults don’t know that answer, but if you struggle to remember whether June has 30 or 31 days perhaps this calendar isn’t for you.
It’s not for me either as I see no value in a physical calendar, but I’d imagine the people who do see that value are the same type of people who are aware that June has … let me just pull out my phone real quick… 30 days.
> It’s not nearly that complicated unless you just outright have no idea how many days are in a given month. Not sure how many adults don’t know that answer
Please straight up ask ten people, even if your circles are on average highly educated, and see how many know an arbitrary month (not significant ones like February, or December where the 31st is new year's) without having to think about it or count knuckles. Asking about the current or an adjacent month might also be something they remember from recently seeing calendars that tell you this information.
I think it's very uncommon to have this memorized to the point where using a calendar that doesn't tell you is as easy as using one that does.
My child recently learned this in school, in first grade. I just assume everyone knows it.
There's an English jingle that I was taught (1970s), and my child also:
Thirty days hath September, April, June and November.
All the rest have thirty one, save February alone
Which has twenty eight days clear, and twenty nine each leap year.
(ok, the "hath" part was what I was taught, I think he learned "has" :-)
> without having to think about it or count knuckles.
Why is this constraint necessary? If you can even so much as think about it or count knuckles (let alone that you happen to have memorized the number of days per month), then this calendar is useful.
From my understanding the cal aligns day-of-week to day-of-month but there is no slider to adjust for 28 or 29 or 30 or 31 days.
Doing the knuckle dance every time you glance at it, to know whether to change the month already, seems annoying. (Yeah you'd memorize it for that month after a bit, but still you have to pay attention.)
I don't think there is any correlation with level of education. I truly don't understand how people don't know this. There are a total of 12 months and the days per month absolutely never change outside of the occasional leap year in February.
What's wrong with counting on knuckles? You adjust your calendar with this contraption once per month.
> I truly don't understand how people don't know this.
And yet it's true. It would take me a lot of thinking to answer how many days are in an arbitrary month. And I'd probably only be 80% confident. I truly don't understand how I don't know this either. But I've never made an effort to learn it, nor has it been a problem.
Is it just once a month though? From my understanding the cal aligns day-of-week to day-of-month but there is no slider to adjust for 28 or 29 or 30 or 31 days.
Doing the knuckle dance every time you glance at it, to know whether to change the month already, seems annoying. (Yeah you'd memorize it for that month after a bit, but still you have to pay attention.)
> It’s not nearly that complicated unless you just outright have no idea how many days are in a given month.
Unless you work closely with dates, asking somebody "how many days in April" will result in a calendar check, a song or a them doing something odd with their knuckles.
I honestly think most people know how many days in each month..
But yeah, the point still stands. Having a calendar actively has wrong number of days is very misleading and counterproductive even if one knows how many there are supposed to be. Not to mention it doesn't even have month shown.
I personally just remember the cutoff point (7/8), and before that odd months have 31, after it even months have 31 days. It eventually became "muscle" memory.
Thirty days hath September,
April, June and November;
All the rest have thirty-one,
Excepting February alone.
Which only has but twenty-eight days clear
And twenty-nine in each leap year.
I've always thought that this poem is useless as a mnemonic because a lot of the months have the same number of syllables and rhyme with each other. So remembering the poem is no easier than remembering the months directly.
to me the point of the poem is that it reminds you that there are 3 classes (30,31,feb) and the rhythm tells how many months are in each class. Remembering 4 booleans for which 4 are the 30 day months is easier than remembering 12 arbitrary integers (unrealistic worst case uncompressed memorisation technique)
I've never heard of it and it seems completely useless unless you're good at rote memorization (in which case you probably wouldn't need it): not only do some months have the same number of syllables and rhyme with each other, but also the order of the months in the poem seems completely arbitrary.
The knuckle mnemonic is how I learned it and while it doesn't help with remembering February, it's at least fairly foolproof because it still works if you get directions mixed up.
I can never remember it. I use the much less helpful method of knowing Julius and Augustus Caesar were megalomaniacs, so they have 31 days. February is special, and that just leaves 9 months of guessing.
Thanks. I feel like someone taught this to me when I originally learned the "Caesar must be best" method, but I lost the useful bit over time. Let's see how long it lasts this time!
Curious, in Spanish there's something similar. There are several variants, but the one I learned when I was a kid was
"Treinta días trae noviembre, con abril, junio y septiembre. Veintiocho, sólo uno, y los demás treintayuno".
It has the limitation that it doesn't tell you explicitly about February, but that one is easy to remember. Some people mock that mnemonic because they say that it seems harder to remember that the months themselves, but in my case, it has served me well.
Obviously there are similarities beyond chance, so I wonder which came first: the English version, the Spanish one, or maybe another from which both were inspired?
I learned it a bit differently, although the first part about February is a bit clunky:
Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November
All the rest have thirty-one, except February which has 28
Leap year comes one year in four, and February has one day more.
Ilya Birman's work is greatly underappreciated. His Moscow Metro map proposal[1] was pretty cool, and his commuter rail map[2] summarizes the routes much better than its predecessors.
Birman had kind of an ongoing ‘rivalry’ with the guy who made the Metro map at Art. Lebedev (which became the official one)—in that both maps were developed and updated at the same time, with public progress reports and resulting education of the hipster masses on transport map design. But to find meaningful differences between the two maps, you pretty much had to whip out a magnifying glass. The two dudes also constantly nodded at each other's designs, and you could really see the micro-decisions at play, down to line thicknesses and distances to the labels.
Frankly, personally I'm more captivated by the above-ground maps by both the Bureau and the Studio: the latter have at least the largest-format Metro map, with the city's points of interest, whereas Birman participated in stuff like this: https://ilyabirman.ru/ekaterinburg-metro/2016/
The root cause is that the Gregorian calendar is illogical and unsuited to today's needs. I wish the International Fixed Calendar [0] had gained traction.
Eh, if you're going to break with previous calendars, you can do much better.
1. Round off the year to 360 days.
2. This lets us get an even 12 months of 30 days.
3. Drop the week from 7 days to 6, for a 4-day workweek and 5 weeks per month.
It wouldn't take long before this calendar was inconsistent. The Earth rotates about 365 times before it returns to its previous spot in its orbit around the sun. If you adopted a 360 day calendar (assuming you by "day" in this calendar system you mean "a 24-hour period"), then after just a decade of this calendar, summer would happen 50 days earlier than it does today.
Locking the calendar to the seasons is really valuable if you work on a farm or do other seasonal work. However, anyone who doesn't need to track the seasons may prefer the 6/5/30/12 simplified model.
There would be some adjustment, like "winter" holidays occurring in the summer. Although anyone who lives in different climates or moves between the northern and southern hemispheres will already experience something similar.
A good question may be how often would you need to calculate or look up something that the other calendar would make obvious. The better calendar (for you) is the one that reduces those occurrences.
How is seasonal data important for modern farming operations? Farms want even more precise weather data which they can augment to their own calendars. Most people care far more about weekly weather variations and will not experience difficulty in determining when summer is coming.
Also, given the variation that people experience across geography, my per-month weather is quite different from yours. A global synchrony is not fit for farming operations. How much of the world even experiences a beautiful alignment of the seasons to their calendar?
Further, the kinds of adjustments people are proposing is not going to knock anyone off their ability to schedule around entire seasons. People are proposing tiny roundoffs to eliminate calendar idiosyncrasies (excluding the offhand 360 suggestion, which while "small" is going to lead to more idiosyncrasy).
I think you're understating these adjustments. Christmas happening in the summer? School "summer break" happening during winter? These are massive changes
I don't think either of those adjustment would occur.
I know my highschool didn't have AC, so the summer break needed to happen in the summer. I expect the school year would continue to follow the seasons (unless, maybe, we had really cheap AC?). It would be strange to have the school year start in different months, but you'd get used to it. I know I already need to look up when the school year starts; it shifts a little already due to holidays and the days of the week.
Personally, I grew up with cold winters and liked Christmas as a snowy winter holiday. But when I moved and had warmer winters and less defined seasons, Christmas came and it didn't really feel like winter. A summer Christmas wouldn't be noticeably different here.
I like the idea of a major winter holiday for anyone struggling through a cold winter. For many people, that's currently Christmas, and I suspect the US and similar climates would benefit from keeping it seasonal.
But what's the actual value proposition of having a simple regular calendar if all of the important dates that people care about move around on it all the time? Sure, maybe you always know what date it is, but now you don't know what's happening on that date. The end result is the same level of complexity, it's just that now the date numbers are useless.
> all of the important dates that people care about move around
What dates do you care about?
I know my calendar is full of one-off events, and the recurring events follow the calendar, not the seasons. For these, a 6 day week/30 day month would be easier. That weekly Monday meeting? Always on the 1st, 7th, 13th, 19th, or 25th. The next federal holiday? We can make those always fall on a Monday if we wanted.
I can see that the start/end of the school year is important, but that already moves around enough that you need to look it up. If you are looking for best dates to take a beach vacation, yes, you'd need to look at the seasons.
Actually <pedant> it rotates 366 times, because each noon-to-noon it rotates 361 degrees. Just returning one face to the sun adds about one degree because of the earth's motion around the sun, and so adds exactly one rotation each year (each complete revolution around the sun) </pedant>
<edited degrees>
Close, but I think you confused the 360 degrees of a circle with the ~365 days in a year. The extra nearly-one degree of rotation in a solar day brings us to a hair under 361 degrees ;)
I would've taken that bonus week to be a given; it's rather odd to me that other commenters seemingly ain't doing so and are instead discussing this as if the year actually would get disconnected from Earth's rotation.
Basically make "Mid-summer" or "New Years" days that are outside of months (we could have something similar if Feb 29 wasn't part of Feb or March) - Tolkien's version had the extra days also not be part of the week, so you'd have Monday - Yule - Tuesday for example so that a given day of the month would be the same weekday each year.
Downside - if your birthday fell on a weekday, it would always fall on a weekday, forever.
Because if you don't, the seasons and the months will drift out of sync with each other. And you don't even get the benefits of a lunar calendar as a tradeoff, because your weeks are shorter than 1/4 of a lunar month, and your months are two days longer than a lunar month.
> Because if you don't, the seasons and the months will drift out of sync with each other.
And?
> And you don't even get the benefits of a lunar calendar as a tradeoff
What are the benefits of a lunar calendar? And it's not like our 7-day week actually stays in sync with the moon, it's just approximately the same length.
The length of a year is determined by the earth's orbit around the sun. Sure, you can make a calendar that isn't actually a year long, and then correct the errors that accumulate every once in a while, either by inserting a few months every few hundred years, or by adding a leap day every 4 years, but why would you intentionally make a calendar that isn't a year long? Leap days are unavoidable, but seasons drifting out-of-sync are not.
My mother has a pen with this feature (printed eternal calendar inside a rotatable sleeve) in the 1960s. It lasted many years. Good to know someone has finally invented it.
We had a giant plastic wall hanging perpetual calendar in the 1980s.
"Ring-A-Date Perpetual Calendar" I guess as a kid I got used to the grid of days not always starting in the same place.
Yep, that was the pen (minus the corporate logo). I guarantee it was endless minutes of fascination to a child fascinated by things that do thought work. Don't get me started on her slide rule.
Yep, my key insight was "oh, you don't worry about next month". So you just need to separately know when the current month ends (whether a leap year, etc), so it's a pure series of seven day weeks starting from an arbitrary offset. Really elegant, if a little daunting that my entire life will be described by that rectangular frame twitching backwards and forwards across a field of indistinguishable dates :-)
It presumes you know both what the current month is and how many days it has. I'm pretty solid on the former and for the second it's either "thirty days hath September" or counting across my knuckles. I also know it's Wednesday but don't ask me whether it's 28 or 29. That's where I'd be checking a calendar.
But it is something of an exercise in minimalism, sitting between functional and fun. So not for everyone, but scratches my itch, as does my wall clock with just an hour hand smoothly gliding through the day (it has 12 marks per hour so at a glance one sees the time to a resolution of a few minutes, which is more than good enough for almost anything in daily life)
I had a physical version of this a couple of decades ago as a kid. I can find similar products searching for "perpetual calendar". The one I had included a slider to select the month. It also had the day of the week at the top and a small circular peg to place over each day.
Add secondary sliders on the primary slider to indicate current date/month/days in month then I can rest in peace. Oh wait, then it would be less elegant
You can just use the common mnemonics [1], although I reckon the leap-year form is annoyingly long and complicated - much better to rely on the shorter version, like we do in Italy, and think a bit more on even years.
Worst case, you could have a "three-day-long" magnet to cover the last few items as necessary.
Alternatively, we could switch do Decimal Time to have the same calendar every year (except for some adjustment for the last day of the year) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time
Neat, but I find it odd that this was the top item on HN for me at the time of clicking. It's not an innovative type of calendar, these have been around on keychains and other form-factors for a long time.
I really only want two things out of a wall calendar: the ability to write on it, and a fresh picture every month.
I'm sure someone has a non-overlapping set of needs for a wall calendar, involving displaying some numbers that let you synchronize the weekday and month day, with a bit of squinting. They'll love this!
This sort of reminds me of this neat day-looker-upper: https://imgur.com/KKipvmV . To find the day of the week of Month-Date, just find their intersection in the table. Afaik this is the most compact representation of a year's calendar possible.
You do need a new one each year, but there are only fourteen distinct possibilities (7 days that Jan 1 can be, times 2 choices of leap year or not). Figuring out the equivalence classes of years is a fun problem.
The hard part would be all the cloud based backend stuff so people wouldn’t have to remember to slide the frame at the end of the month and remember how many days are in each month. And vendor lock-in so people don’t attempt to use non-Julian calendars or any equally distasteful things. Calendar as a Service it would be called.
Seeing forebruary makes me realize what else I want from a calendar, which makes me realize I just want a room with a big ol' "calendar wall" of the entire year, which I will have to re-create once a year, but serves the purpose of being accessible, absolutely massive, easy to write on, and extremely informative and good for planning.
That's nice and simple but I depend also on the additional info that a traditional printed calendar provides: week numbers (it's a thing in my country), national holidays (time off work) and celebrations (waffle day, etc.).
I also enjoy seeing the phases of the moon, solstices and equinoxes.
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A few calendar apps allow a stretch of >4 weeks and there's this POC web version: https://madebyevan.com/calendar/app/ but all I can do for now is constantly switch from a Gantt app to my calendar app (Thunderbird or Google Calendar).