Automatically adding your Jethro Roster/Rota assignments to your calendar

Do you find yourself coping your church roster assignments into your electronic calendar each month? Wouldn't it be handy if you could just subscribe to a feed for your roster assignments so that your calendar updated itself automatically?

This is a feature I have been working on in Jethro with Tom Barrett. Jethro can now publish your roster assignments as an iCal feed. Common electronic calendars can subscribe to this, so that your roster assignments update themselves in your calendar whenever the roster is updated.

This post will show you how to set it up. The latest version of Jethro supports this feature. If your church uses Jethro, you should check with your church administrator as to whether your church has this version. Easy Jethro now has this feature. CCIW uses Easy Jethro, and so I will use this as an example here.

Step 1. Log in to your Jethro member account.

For CCIW this is at https://cciw.easyjethro.com.au/members/

If your e-mail address is listed in Jethro (e.g. you get sent newsletters by e-mail) but have never used Jethro before, then you will need to create an account. Enter your e-mail address and click Create New Account. It will send you a link where you can set your password.

If Jethro doesn't know your e-mail address, maybe contact a staff member at your church to let them know so they can set it up for you.

Step 2. Check your Subscription settings

Once logged in you should see your roster assignments on the right, along with a new Subscribe link.

Click Subscribe to see your settings.

Step 3. Enable iCal

Clicking the Subscribe link will show whether you have this feature enabled, and if enabled, your unique URL for your roster assignments.

If you have not used this feature before it will be disabled. Click Enable iCal Feed to enable it. This will generate a unique URL you can use to subscribe to your roster assignments.

This URL is just for your roster assignments. Don't share it with anyone else.

Step 4. Subscribe your calendar to this URL

Did you just click the link to see what will happen? Possibly not what you expected (unless you tapped the link on your iPhone I think).

You need to check with your calendar software on the correct method to subscribe to an iCal calendar. Maybe Google this for the correct instructions. If you get stuck, leave a comment here and I can probably provide some tips. Some pointers:

• Android. Log in to Google Calendars on the web. Click the drop down to the right of Other Calendars. Choose Add by URL. Enter your iCal link from Jethro there. If you want to see this calendar on your device, go to Settings in Calendar on the device, tap this calendar, and enable Sync.
• iPhone/iPad. Probably just tap the iCal link in Safari on your iPhone or iPad. It will ask you if you want to subscribe.
• Outlook on your desktop. You need to go into account settings and add an internet calendar. Paste the URL from Jethro and click Subscribe. Note that if you click the iCal link on your PC, it will offer to open it in Outlook. This is not the same as subscribing, as if you do it this way, Outlook won't periodically check for updates to your roster.

Step 5. Oh no! I published my calendar URL on the internets by mistake!

If you want to disable this feature, or simply change the URL, go back to the Manage Roster iCal Feed page, and click either Generate New URL, or Disable iCal feed.

The time seems wrong for my band or gardening roster? If the roster is tied to a particular service, the iCal feed lists the start time as the start time of the service. If the roster is not tied to a service, the iCal feed will show a whole day event on the day you are rostered. Sorry if band practice is on the previous Thursday for Sunday's service.

But I'm not rostered on anything? Have you thought about helping out at your church?

But I don't go to a church? It's great to meet together with other people that God loves. Maybe drop in on your local church one day and ask about it?

More Geocaching

A nice sunny day for the August bank holiday! Today we wandered around Breakfast Point and found Village Green, Go Fish AGAIN!, and Cachefinders2's GZ. We looked hard, but didn't find Hunters Wharf.

Geocaching

I haven't been for a while, but with some time to kill in Wollstonecraft I went looking for (and found) Rainbow Raspberry.

I installed c:Geo on my Nexus 7. A great free app for Geocaching.

Replacing Subaru Forester tail lights

A quick series of photos on replacing tail lights on a Subaru Forester. (I told you this blog was random) This model is sold as MY02 in Australia, although it may be slightly different in other markets. The lights are probably the same as the MY04.

To change any of the tail lights you need to remove the tail light assembly. Open the boot (tail gate), and locate the 2 nuts securing the assembly.

Remove the nuts using a 10mm socket.

The light assembly clips in, so slowly pull it backwards until the clips release.

(OK - it's a bit dirty in there!)

With the assembly removed, you can remove the holder for the bulb you need to replace. Rotate the holder about a quarter turn anti-clockwise to remove it.

I'm replacing my brake light. The owners manual shows you which bulbs go where. The brake light is a dual 5W/21W bulb with a T20 wedge fitting.

Under Pressure - II

Code update complete, and my Arduino weather station is reporting barometric pressure.

In addition to this small update, it is now sending data to WOW (Weather Observations Website). WOW is an initiative by the UK Met Office, but the Australian BOM is participating.

View my weather data at:

• Ashfield, NSW (WOW)
• Ashfield, NSW (Weather Underground)

Under Pressure

Above is a shot of my "weather station" with a Bosh BMP180 barometric pressure sensor attached. The pressure sensor was a Christmas present from my Dad (thanks Dad!), and will allow me to report barometric pressure for my personal weather station page on Weather Underground.

The sensor itself is the small square in the middle of the red breakout board. It runs on 3.3V and uses an I2C or "1-Wire" protocol.

The recommended approach is to solder an IC header on, but I decided to just solder on some single core wires.

To test, I attached the wires to a breadboard. Sparkfun has a great tutorial on using the BMP180. I should have read this more closely, as I only really needed 4 wires, as my Arudino will supply 3.3V, and so the blue wire was superfluous.

Add in an EtherTen, the test code from SparkFun, and soon I was getting data.

Learning point for today: Barometric pressure is displayed on weather reports as at sea level. Of course the pressure changes with altitude, so you need to know your altitude. (About 40m above sea level here it seems.) The BMP180 library has a handy conversion utility to calculate the sea level pressure.

Once the correct altitude was entered, my sensor was reporting pressure readings very close to nearby weather stations, so I think we're good to go. (Interestingly, about 10% more than what our OS weather station tells us in the kitchen, so I think I need to read its instructions a bit more closely.)

Time to solder it on to the prototyping area that is available with my 433MHz receiver shield.

Not such a bad soldering job, given the board is already cracked.

OK, the antenna has been re-attached, and the shield re-attached to the EtherTen. My Weather Underground upload code will need a bit of work to add in the pressure. I'll let you know how it goes.